skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Earlier today I received a phone call from a number in Mountain View CA. It was Google letting me know in advance that Google Checkout was to be shut down (and asking to keep the call quiet). This was, to say the least, very surprising considering I have very little correspondence with Google Checkout and was actually thinking there was a huge problem with my account. Thankfully not but this is still bad news for myself and I presume the industry at large.

Google Checkout was very good with their fraud protection to the point that I did not have to think about it. In fact, over the years I have been growing my business Google have been my rock---never a real issue with them.

PayPal was a similar story but it also seemed to attract the sort of customer that would open a dispute at almost any issue (or just threaten it). You can also count me in one of their horror stories that indirectly cost me £5k and even got to the point where they just flat out refused refunds for my customers who wanted them.

I have a Stripe and GoCardless account as well and I've been trying to make it work but their fraud protection is just not up to scratch compared to Google and PayPal, which is a real shame. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to see enough data to get quite the same fraud protection. Stripe do look fun though.

Another perspective from a merchant: roll on Bitcoin. With exchanges offering guaranteed payouts in another currency (for me, GBP) I take on zero risk by accepting it and it solves so many problems. There's no wonder more and more websites are starting to accept it.
I don't imagine they care about anonymity even a little bit.
A little off topic, but it is the reason I excitedly clicked the link.... Anyone know the best way to ship money from a US account to an Australian account? Working in the US at the moment but need to get some cash back home to pay off a cc, really don't want to get screwed with fees.
So 1 TB is free, but an extra 1 TB is $500/yr?! I'm not sure I understand that.

On another note, I (surprisingly) like how the disemvoweling is becoming synonymous with the Yahoo brand (with Tumblr now as well). What seemed stale is starting to seem fresh again. Playful, almost, like a wink to Web 2.0 -- though I imagine it could be perceived as being out of touch too, if they don't play it right.
EasyPost Foreign Language Support
pooch, your post is appearing as [dead] to me so your account may be hellbanned, which you may want to get fixed since you've made an informative post that many users won't be able to see.
For kicks, re-read the article as something written 4+ years ago substituting "Apple" for "Tesla" and any other cellphone manufacturer for "Audi."

“Tesla has to show it can be consistently profitable with a single product that is priced so high that most buyers can’t afford it,”

Indeed.
I did not find it strange.

You get 1TB extra i.e total 2 TB + no ads.

Some interesting observations -- the cost of Free account for Yahoo is -- 450$ per free-user/year.

So, lets be prepared to get ads all around. :)
Congratulations, Marco! Well done!
And thanks for sharing the story. Very inspiring, at least for me, at the moment I'm living now.
Actually I didn't even say anything about private charity. I am talking about taxation, which is not charity. Taxation is the payment you make in return for the rest of the money you get to keep. It funds the system that allows you to earn that money.

Donating a chunk of that money, potentially up to 100% minus expenses is an extremely moral thing to do. The best option for that money is generally the state.

There's nothing wrong with charitable giving on top of taxation. It can't replace it though.
they actually did say it. there was a whole article, including a clearly labeled graph, underneath that headline. They didn't say it in the headline, but that's the reason articles exists instead of just headlines - sometimes they have stuff in them.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/13/autos/tesla-sales-bmw-merced...
Unknown Mathematician Proves Elusive Property of Prime Numbers
I think Google is just refining their products, which I think is great thing for them. I think I got an email about G+ being integrated into ALL of Google's products...but who didn't see that coming.
Does anybody find the ad free account attractive?
I don't.
I'm not convinced. When I had to do anything more serious than basic maintenance, the answer has frequently been "we'll order a replacement part, it should arrive in x days."
Updating Crowdhoster: building accessible, open-source crowdfunding
I commented the other day that I hadn't renewed my sub for the first time in 6 or so years.

I'm now VERY annoyed I didn't; I'd have had 2 more years of "pro", and with it the one feature I enjoyed looking at which is my stats page with referrer info etc.

That no longer seems to be an option at all.
Yeah, as far as I can tell they removed the 300 MB limit from the limits page less than an hour ago; I'm sure they're still cleaning up the old limits as we speak.
I disagree somewhat because lots of people I know have a broad range of experience and deep knowledge but the market for it is shrinking. They do get calls when things go wrong but other than that, there's not much going on. Some made the jump to app development but the market's just not there anymore.
That may sound strange to those living in the valley but that's just the way it is.
Some are now teaching others and that seems to be profitable.
I am surprised that they will no longer offer processing. The whole reason I even used them was to prevent the need to deal with a payment processor (my current store options for customers are google and paypal).

I checked out amazon's offer again and will likely add them as a replacement. They have a lot of existing customers, the charge is reasonable, and I will be able to integrate it in a fairly painless manner.
Silicon valley now rivals Hollywood at creating entitled, pampered douchebags. Thank you that anonymous blogger on tumbler at so skillfully capturing that in one brilliant work of deconstruction.
Seems like a free lunch though - isn't Yahoo buying them presumably because they foresee a way to monetize Tumblr, possibly in contradiction to David's desired direction of the product?
Someone suggested Bitcoin today, as a merchant, what would you recommend to start accepting it? a third party service?
Folium: Python Data. Leaflet.js Maps.
Google is making the same mistakes Microsoft made. Trying to enter into every industry it can thinking it can use it's monopoly power to take over the world. Reality: Doing 20 things mediocrely is not as profitable of doing 2 things very very well.

Result:

1) Constant experiments and dropped products (just like Microsoft).

2) Consumers no longer trust your services to stick around and no longer even invest in your platforms (*see most of Microsoft's offerings).

3) The services you do have aren't the highest quality and your brand takes a hit as being "giant mediocre corporation" like Microsoft instead of "high quality company" like Apple.

The more things change the more they stay the same.
I think this is a lot of perception and to be perfectly blunt, complete bullshit.

People who think that just because tasks have become easier for experts in that field that they are easier for everyone are just plain wrong. I know this through personal experience. If you are just making static websites for small businesses and trying to compete with 1&1, then sure, you're going to have a hard time getting rich. But that's always been the case.

You will never make a lot of money selling services to people or businesses that are highly price-sensitive or just don't need (or see a need) for a more sophisticated product. I wasted a lot of time selling services to these types of customers and I can tell you it's a mistake. Choose your customers wisely and go for one's that have money to spend. That type do not want to spend any time splitting hairs to get a shitty product. They want something that is great and will pay handsomely for it. The challenge in that is proving your worth, but as I said before that's always been the case and there's nothing new about that.

EDIT: I realize that is a little vague, so let me add some hard numbers. On my first large web dev contract I built a custom website (not incredibly complex) for a guy who had a $250k budget. I met him through the local Chamber of Commerce. I went back-and-forth about how much to charge him for the specs we discussed and in the end went to him with a quote of $15k (quite a lot of money for a single project for me at the time) and his response was something along the lines of "Okay, that sounds great!"

Fuck me for not realizing that I could have charged more. Moral of the story is one that is becoming trite at this point: people who know how to code and sell are rare but for some reason seem to undervalue themselves a great deal. That's a huge advantage for those that do not.
If power users = pro users, and pro users = paid users, yeah, you should take notice with the people left generating revenue.

Disclaimer: Flickr Pro user since 2005. More than $25/year? Off to Dropbox.
Ask HN: When will cloud services give unlimited space?
Dropbox offers 5GB, Flickr is now offering 1TB. When is the time going to come when storage space is assumed to be unlimited?
I've been a paid Flickr user for years and I'm excited about the new UX.

BUT PLEASE PLEASE fix the iPhone app which, after their new update earlier this year, no longer lets you upload video!
I've been a Flickr Pro user since 2007. Flickr has been a huge part of my photography hobby. I don't know if I'm a "power user", but I can tell you all about different prime lenses, aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop.

I love the new UI and the new app.
I'm alone hate new design? Why? Too much dark colors (especially menu) and frustrated navigation, probably because I have habits about old design, now everything looks too much different.

Than next image button (when you'r not zoomed in) looks like it's ajax, but it's not.

I loved Flickr for easy to use light design, I don't care about 1TB, too much because I don't want to share so much on the Internet. So new Flick is lost me as a customer.
Sometimes people aren't allowed to vote to prevent gaming the system. There's nothing you can do about it.
Yes, but it seems to me like they are trying to correct those issues quickly.
My problem is that I do not know who the hell is Warner Chilcott neither Actavis. Probably that's the case for a lot of us.
Planet Money did a great podcast on the history and political power of the dealer system, and why buying a car sucks so much - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buyi...
Don't forget the redundancy, too. Bit awkward having to explain to your users why you randomly lose a couple of percent of their data every year.
That's because people tend to bitch about things online when they have a really horrible experience.

Most people don't go out of their way to tell everyone things are "just working".
I wonder if that "expertise" could be more negative than positive. As with software there is certainly a good deal of benefit to having a fresh company, without legacy baggage.
If you can't haggle for a better priced car, have fun trying to close real deals / acquisitions...
48 hours indeed. I've done a lot of small side-projects so I have built up a good amount of reusable components that I can pop in on both the front and back end to push this type of thing even faster.
Hello young man. I assume you are young because you know nothing of the past. Previously the Google Toolbar was actually a big deal. Today it is irrelevant but that was not always the case. And when blogs were considered a cool thing by the tech press (long before TechCrunch) the BlogThis! button on the tool bar was a considerable feature.

I also note on your blog (which 10 years ago you probably would have used the BlogThis! button on your Google Toolbar to write) you feature prominently a technology pioneered by Dave Winer.
That makes sense, if there's a market for it. It depends on where you live.
How to draw portraits of real people four times a week?
Where would the average person find some place with higher bandwidth than their residential cable connection?
I'm not sure how we're currently not in a golden age of self-published content. The idea that we're only there when we have some sort of meta-distributed protocol is a pretty big implicit value judgment.
> FWD.us supported some more traditionally conservative causes through two subsidiaries...

Traditionally conservative? Try corruption-mongering and off-message. If someone supports immigration reform, why should that money be used to fund support of an Oil pipeline?

There's no way this looks good for FWD.us. It's not a warning shot, FWD.us shot itself in the foot, and is currently bleeding to death.
Well, but then there is also IMS Health buying 360Vantage. Still software, but in life sciences.

There is a lot going on outside the HN bubble, but this is ok, some markets are simply more closed off to outsiders. Life sciences software is not particularly open, a lot of vertical players in there now and "verticalness" is increasing.

HNers will likely completely miss that boat, but again, this doesn't mean anything there are enough other things happening and bigger fish to fry.
Google Checkout will be retired
The market did though. Ignore the raw values and consider the amounts taken into consideration by the economic actors, expected returns, which have a probability component. As the chance of payoff for startups is low, a high payoff may actually be required to accurately price the market to draw the requisite amount of labor.
I'm going with FeedBurner. Although you could argue it's already 90% dead.
Wow....I must say, I never thought I would be able to say this....but I am getting excited about Yahoo again.

Marissa Mayer is doing a fabulous job.

Putting products first, like she should.

Wow....just wow!
> Most of my mobile photos are horrid quality

Here's a few photos I've taken with my phone:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/8607495076/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/8539300849/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/8526482251/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/8479530691/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/8479526973/

Phone cameras have gotten a hell of a lot better in the past couple of years.
The reason I would want to sign up a photo sharing service is to be able to display them online and also have them backed up at the same time. I am notorious at the backing up part. Guarantee me these 2 things and I'll be your paying customer.

Edit: Right now I don't find the Ad Free account attractive, just saying. If anyone can have the same storage, what is flickr selling?
Visualisation of the London Blitz (WW2)
You know what can replace you. Your clients do not. Most of your clients don't even know what they need. What solutions are available or what problems they have or will have.
Marco makes a lot of Steve Jobs comparisons in the write up, genuinely curious, did he work with Steve Jobs?
EX RARE ILLUMINATI JOHN LENNON INTERVEIW.mpg
Unable to downvote. This post is dumb. Tumblr is far from sluggish. Tumblr likely will really operate fairly independently. There won't be any cost-cutting..probably the opposite.
I sold my side project
It makes sense, but $499 per year is expensive for an additional 1TB, when the first TB is free.
I'm not American.

I will say that civil society is far, far more varied than the either/or choice of the individual acting alone or the entire nation acting together through the government. Local communities, associations, congregations, and yes, even businesses have important roles to play and can respond far more effectively to local conditions than an administrative state.

I can't speak to your experiences with the NHS, since I've got limited experience with England. I hope that it treats you better than my grandparents have been treated by the analogous system in Canada.
The page was using all the new account type names, and seemed like it was otherwise all up to date. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting about it. Seemed like a plausible "catch" to the generous storage limit.
I think the idea is that if the manufacturer was the only one selling, that they could inflate their prices higher than what the middleman overhead would be since they're the only one offering that product.

Why he thinks competition between brands isn't enough to counteract this I have no idea.
Except they seem to be doing a great job jumping into new products and services?

Google Wallet looks like a big improvement over their old system.
Assuming you have an Apple Store nearby, the dead battery issue is dropping off your laptop at the store, going to lunch, and then picking up the repaired product.

Dealerships are more like Geek Squad.
roughly, very roughly - 90%+ of the people on the 1 TB plan will likely use < 20 Gigabytes (at least over the next couple years), and probably 99% will use less than 100 gigabytes, whereas close to 100% of the people on the doublr plan will be using at least 1 Terabyte.
Of course, the Instagram vs. Kodak comparison leaves out the actual network-connected cameras built into smartphones that Instagram leverages.

Untold thousands of people are employed designing smartphone chips and the phones themselves, building smartphone operating systems and app platforms, manufacturing the smartphones, selling the phones and service, and maintaining the cellular network not to mention the rest of the internet, many also at middle class wages though not all in the US. Of course, in the heyday of film, many cameras were made in Japan or elsewhere. The few Instagram employees are just a small part of the puzzle that allows Instagram to be a successful company.
Hm, that's from 2011. Should be marked as such. I wonder if it's true today?
This seems to be a mistake that a ton of startups make as well. It's a result of indecisive (read:poor) management and inevitably leads to doing nothing particularly well.

One company that I've seen not fall into this trap is Dropbox. Dropbox offers one amazing service and pours all it's efforts into that, and from what I hear they have some insanely smart people working there doing that. As a result they can afford to decline a $6 billion offer from Google and then go on to compete against Google's inferior offering.
Flickr's Community Guidelines say that you're supposed to upload your own work (http://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines/):

> Don’t upload anything that isn't yours. This includes other people's photos, video, and/or stuff you've copied or collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be deleted at any time.
No, he did not. If you listen to his podcasts Marco's career is an open book. Basically, college -> unremarkable first job -> Tumblr employee nbr 2 -> Instapaper -> The Magazine.
A blogging platform seems like a perfect example of a commoditized software product. Buying these "audiences" never seem to work very well...
I've heard good things about https://bitpay.com
It's probably the new Galaxy S4 Nexus edition.

I mean, it's photoshoped, but that's what they were aiming for.
Coinbase! I'm not with YCombinator, who is invested in Coinbase, but I checked out Coinbases API and they KEY WORDING: as a merchant accepting it, you're not subjected to the volatility of Bitcoin's exchange rate, if your batch at the end of the day is $1k you can expect that.
Just download the Vinny app and know what wholesale price is http://myvinny.com/
Can anyone see a way to make the 1TB serve as the main storage space of all your photos? (and not just publicly displaying them).

I'm tied into iPhoto on a very full SSD and am longing for a way out.
> You appear to have internalized the meme that Tea Party is a synonym for Country Club Republican.

What does "Country Club Republican" mean to you? To me it means one who goes against their core values for the sake of a rich special interest at the expense of the masses. Here[0] every single House Tea Party member votes to protect oil subsidies despite this contradicting their core beliefs[1] in: "Protecting Free Markets", "Eliminating Excessive Taxes" and "Eliminating the Deficit Spending". In this case using taxes and/or debt to fund a non-free market.

[0] http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/01/147597/house-go...

[1] http://www.teaparty-platform.com/
I saw that, but I could do better. :-) Heroku's Postgres-only option is the product to beat. It makes it really easy and has some great replication features. But a dedicated company could offer more.
The problem with your reasoning is that people already know that the pharma industry has a complex industrial structure, and that mergers happen from time to time. Furthermore, prices change constantly for a variety of reasons. None of this imply that this merger is particularly interesting as news.

By your logic, people should be constantly bombarded with "important" stuff like price indices for medical services, world food prices, aggregate steel production, measures of industry concentration in the wholesale corn market etc.
If you could stuff a download URL signed for S3's PUT in a custom header (in order to do a bucket to bucket copy), this would make a great large file uploader for SaaS services that store user files on S3 too. User would send the file to something like upload@thesaasservice.com and some kind of mechanism to validate identity.

Then get resuming working as well as Dropbox of course :)
Thanks, but what you and hkolek are saying sounds contradictory. Are case-sensitive key chords critical, and losing them borks its workflow?

Bascially I want to give Emacs a shot, but using Evil-mode b/c I love Vim's modal edititing, but I also like working in terminals (I do a lot of remoting to cloud servers).

I guess I should just give it a shot and see how it goes.
In before Yahr/Yahoor.
Backups are interesting, and something I had considered as a primary feature of the site. However this site is (currently) just me, and I don't feel that I could wholeheartedly say that a backup system relying on a single person is a good idea :) (unless that person is cperciva, in which case it's a-ok!)

Obviously I'm not expecting photos uploaded to the site to disappear at any moment (they're all on S3 anyway), but I'm not confident enough in the system yet to be able to offer anything like that, unfortunately.
I remember we were talking about this last week, and I've submitted this particular link for the usual reason I submit a link: that I'm interested in the HN comment thread it may spawn.

In this case I find it rather bizarre that the Wired article has framed it in this way ("Unknown Mathematician") and then instantly (first paragraph) gives us this:

"a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang"

So...a university lecturer...? Is "Unknown" really appropriate here? He's hardly Ramanujan!

The piece is a fairly nice write up for the layman, in the usual style of such things (sometimes I feel Simon Singh invented that style - of course he didn't, but you know what I mean), it's just the angle they've gone for seems curious. I guess it's original (?).
The effort of managing two accounts seems like a low barrier for the cheap
"Liberal", "good", and "Democrat" are not necessarily synonyms.
Hope not - it's easy to spoof the from address.

BCC'ing a secret stripe address would be OK, until you accidentally put it in CC instead.

Edit: That said, finding a secure way of achieving this kind of convenience would be pretty great. Really, the only way to rival Google's new attach money to emails in Gmail feature.
I figured this was going to happen when they announced Wallet, :/. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714531
Are you being cute about limits, or did you make a math error?

A dial up modem can do gigabytes per month...
I know what you mean but this sounds like something off CSI
This looks very similar to Kickstarter.
1. Sign up for 2 accounts.
2. Adblock
3. ????
4. Profit