skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We get IP ownership, but we don’t bill for our time at all. Instead they become our first customer to use the new tool for a lower yearly fee (including maintenance).

You're taking on market and execution risk here, for which you are not receiving compensation. (Presumably you set your consulting rates high enough such that engagements are a win for you. The SaaSification option is at a discount to your rate, which you only make up if you sell it to other people. "Selling it to other people" is often much, much more difficult than writing working software.)

Any consultants in the room who happen to have an engagement which would create usable IP could consider the following alternative: "You pay our normal rates, and you pay for hosting/maintenance, and we own all the IP." This is actually very common, because most customers of software do not want to get into the software business and hence they don't give a fig nutton about commercial exploitation of this system they want to buy from you. No purchasing manager at the US federal government is going to nail his promotion to GSWhatever if he preserves the government's call option on starting a SaaS starttup.
Your metric uses the arbitrary unit of 1 million dollars/company. The h-metric uses the imperfect but substantially less arbitrary unit of a citation/paper.
Ok, I did think that would be part of it but the only reference I could find in the documentation was at http://golang.org/doc/faq#overloading which suggested that names are the only thing considered. (The other document I looked at before was http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html which didn't help)

Fair enough, I did say I was only speculating and I've learned something.
v0.1 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812
Well there a lot of tax advantages to leasing compared to buying out right
You're making the mistake of assuming everyone has the same problem as you do.

Pre-SaaS most companies would have paid upfront for a piece of software (before knowing if it works for them) and then upgraded ever few years in any case. For multi-user software they would have needed to pay for servers, ops staff, etc. on an on-going basis in any case.

When companies are evaluating a SaaS solution versus a boxed solution price is not typically a major deciding factor.
i think the pitch here could be made more enticing. With SaaS you are not only paying for the current product but also for the implied updates and improvements that will follow. So a comparable model would be how much would a box software cost and what would its upgrades cost (as well as how often are they upgraded).

If the saas cost is being imagined for n years than they should also take into account the inevitable upgrades they would have to pay for with boxed software to keep the software productive.

for example we could take adobe creative suite and its upgrades together for a comparable saas offer.
Yeah, if there is one thing, us 'IT people' don't like, it's uncertainty. Unlike regular people, who love it!

I get what he is saying, but the wording is a bit off. Furthermore, if IT departments are complaining about faster release cycles for Windows, then they are missing the point; because it's a good thing.

Making smaller, but more often upgrades, will ensure that programs can more easily be maintained during each version, so you don't end up with a situation where you are unable to upgrade Windows XP or Internet Explorer 6, because of programs that over time have become too tied into these programs.

Because more upgrades (albeit smaller) will hopefully make designers think differently, 'in a year, there will be a new version of Windows, so let's not make it too specific to this one'.
git-imerge
200 KB for a 1600x1078 photo sounds quite reasonable to me. The 300 KB PNG wrist photo on the other hand...
Cool. Colour code based on countries?
The incorrect and intellectually insufficient narrative is:

The goal, she said, is to ensure the safety of visitors to the province.

That's not the primary goal, or I would say even the secondary goal. The primary goal is obviously taxes, and the secondary goal is satisfying lobbying pressure from those that don't like the competition.

But let's not pretend that there are no problems with it, and that there are no legitimate reasons to object to it.

Let's not pretend that these regulators are actually honest in their arguments.
A strong interactive link between sensory discrimination and intelligence
the problem is that while dropping from n^2 to n log n is a big deal, dropping from (n log n) to n won't help much if you end up increasing the constant costs at the same time.
About global state: yes global state can be avoided most of the time, but the fact that there is still some pressure to use it show it is not that obvious, or, said otherwise, that no other solution is able to cover all use cases.

For example, GOTO is bad and has gone for good and I have never heard of some coders missing it (except for the fun), so it is a solved problem. But if you need to dynamically set a value and use it in a very remote part of the code, the need for some global state arise and is hard to avoid.

About ORM: sure, but these still exists and are widespread, so the solution must be not that obvious.

About complexity: yes also, but I think a really efficient way to properly "dissolve" complexity (and not push it somewhere lese) is to have good data structures.
> For anything like US democracy, laws, police, secular government, freedom of religion, etc., just f'get about it.

Clearly you haven't read much history about Islam and can only see the world from what the US media feeds you. Somehow you've been led to think that US 'democracy' is the epitome of a civil world and if a nation is unlike it- then it is some dystopian society.

Islam had all of those things during its founding and up until the Mongols came- during its reign the most controversial land were once governed by peace and had all Christians/Jews/Muslims living side by side. To not cut too much from your time watching Fox News, here's a primer on history;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpcbfxtdoI8
While this certainly happens, there are companies that do not want their codified knowledge to leak to competitors. So they lock down the IP not because they want to sell it, but just in case code happens to contain trade secrets.
I like the $3 pricing. I'm more inclined to try it now. But the price jump to $39 is a little dramatic. Maybe $19 instead?

Also, it looks and reads as a little too corporate. Add a dash of mailchimp-esque cuteness in there to lighten it up. Go nice casual, not formal.
Co-CEO’s: The Bubonic Plague of the Board Room
I usually hate people that say this but... why has this been upvoted?

Usually these stack overflow posts have interesting answers, but this one is literally "use application/json"

Is there something I'm missing?
Let visitors test it out now. Signing up or 'private beta' has too much friction.

That's the reason you post it here anyway.
Big Data Needs a Big Theory to Go with It
It'd be interesting to see if anyone could look at this from a more "business" point of view, basically investing money up front for a better quality diet for less cost over the long term. For instance, buying seeds and growing veg, herbs, etc. Even buying 2-3 chickens and keeping them in your garden for eggs and perhaps meat. It'd be interesting to see what kind of investment would be needed, what the running cost would be and how long before you got a 100% ROI back.
Learn Backbone.js completely
Here's an easy fix... charge them a yearly or longer fixed duration license fee. Like say 1, 3, or 5 years. Make it expensive enough that monthly pricing makes some sense.

Also, charge for support separately on a deal like this as you are unable to calculate their support needs on a longer time horizon.
Those images are really annoying, who is this presentation for, 14 year olds?

I mean every 3rd slide reminded me of my facebook feed, full of people sharing crap from 9gag.
Hmm ... you cannot compare media and software. Very little of the media produced is worth experiencing second time. So rental is natural there.

Software is meant to be used continuously forever and ever. I have some exchanges that I programmed that are 15 years old now - still working peacefully ( the benefit of using PICs - they last forever). The company is no longer in business but with a soldering gun they manage to keep them operational.

So the real question is not only why should I pay you, but what happens when your company goes the way of a cockroach treated with raid. And don't tell me you are market leader - we see them raise and fall 5 times in a decade.
The Story about Ping
well...depends on how much growth your org has seen in 3 years. If your people are still using Windows XP with IE 7...sure what you say makes sense. But if your org has seen major growth, lots of new employees requiring all kinds of new platforms and form factors then its a slightly different story.
"<Anyone> who wants to switch from <anything to anything> is either going to be charging me less or charging me more."

This is just an argument against change.
I'm wondering exactly the same....
Another aspect is the utterly strange way internal accounting is done at large companies. When you have lots of department heads trying to optimize for their departments local optima without incentive to consider the companies global optima, you often get seemingly irrational behavior.

Sometimes it simply makes sense for a department to spend a whole lot of money right now as opposed to a little each month, since when money is spent affects which budget it ends up on, which in turn affects things like bonuses and raises.
A pure-JavaScript SQL formatter/pretty printer
I know this is not really about games and Im not sure this is actually related, but I'll offer it up in case.

Last night I went looking for info on the game Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. I ended up on several forums and discovered something I found interesting. Turns out that the official legal version is plagued with various problems. But oddly, it seems that people who downloaded the leaked version are having no reported problems. I had a look at comments on various download sites, and yes there were some problems, but not many and they were normally about getting the cracked version to run, and these problems were quickly solved.

Now, while I accept that there would be an obvious difference between feedback from downloaders and customers, I do wonder if this happens a lot. And if the "pirates" are actually releasing versions of games, that actually work, while the likes of UbiSoft and Steam are angering paying customers with reportedly terrible support and poor product, why would any one in their right mind pay up? On top of that, it would seem that people who used "illegal" copies actually got quicker support that solved the problem from the users on the download site its self. Again, I can see the arguments and flaws there, but on the face of it, its madness.

What completely amazed me was the number of people saying they bought the game, it didn't work, they got no useful support, so they downloaded and played the pirate version.

If paying customers end up having problems, (say the root kit fails to install because for example it doesn't like your NIC, so you cant play the disk,) using other media, TV, Movies, etc, then they too would surely end up having to get their media in other ways. Then, experience would teach them to continue with other sources.

If this becomes any sort of trend, such businesses don't deserve to survive.
If you reduce the oil to a reasonable amount, you are putting the vitamin E deficiency back. If you don't come anywhere close to approaching 100% RDI of half of the known essential nutrients, then you are proposing a poor alternative to something that covers 100% of all of them. Especially when you require 20% more calories to still be massively deficient. The fact that an all twinky diet would be worse does not make your option a "potentially healthier" alternative to soylent.
First submission of a barely 2 weeks old account with no other submissions or comments takes 14 points to get to the frontpage. Definitely seems like some algorithm isn't performing properly.
Of course, AdWords can be quite difficult. But if you are doing it right you can see positive ROI. I have been managing a few account which had trouble doing that. But it really depends on your strategy. Want to play safe? 1. Forget that broad match even exists. 2. Focus on long tail keywords only, this will drive enough conversions while costing you less money.
It's 7am PST on a USA national holiday (Memorial Day)

The up/downvoters have not yet arrived?
The 2D projection of a spherical shell isn't a uniform disc – it does indeed look more or less like a ring. (Consider the rough analogy of a swinging pendulum – it spends most of its time near the edges of its swing.)
I really want to see some meat on that menu. I hope they do a 1.5£ or 2£ version.
The Perl 5 compatibility is good. Here's a list of the differences: http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?topic=pcrecompat
Is there a way of watching this offline afterwards? I think it could be interesting but I won't be able to participate live.
> I've personally questioned why anyone would want SaaS when:

> 1. The company already pays for and supports infrastructure.

> 2. The company already has a development/IT department that can support an installed product.

Because adopting a SaaS offering instead means the company can greatly reduce the need for (or entirely get rid of) the infrastructure and staff which both cost exponentially more.
>About global state: yes global state can be avoided most of the time, but the fact that there is still some pressure to use it show it is not that obvious, or, said otherwise, that no other solution is able to cover all use cases.

Right, but my point is that this is not a computer science problem anymore; it's really a matter of discipline and habits (or languages which enforce good habits).

>But if you need to dynamically set a value and use it in a very remote part of the code, the need for some global state arise and is hard to avoid.

There are still very principled ways to do this. A problem can still be solved even if some people are ignorant of the solution.

>About ORM: sure, but these still exists and are widespread, so the solution must be not that obvious.

These still exist largely due to inertia; same reason a lot of bad ideas still exist.

>About complexity: ... good data structures.

Yes. Good data structures and good habits: layered stack of languages, data abstraction, composition over inheritance, bottom up design, DRY, static typing (why is this still controversial?).
Use Gambling Strategies to Make Your Apps Super Addictive.
Show HN: Git(lab), Jenkins, Redmine and IRC on our wall
I've always dreamed about a project like that when looking at status boards at other companies. We finally had the time to do our own. Here are some photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robert_olejnik/sets/72157633736087905/

The stack: Django, mustache.js, Chart.js, Bootstrap and custom Supybot plugin.

Maybe will be inspiration for someone else ;-)

Do you guys have similar status boards?

Cheers, Robert.
1. What a huge saving — 0,002¢ per repo copy. Don't spend it all in one place.

2. Bookmarks is core feature since March 2011. This basically means those who pushed "move to Git" decision, haven't checked if anything was updated in Mercurial (and with bookmarks in particular) since then at least. This is pretty understandable — it is known that only software gets updated is one you're paying attention to, others don't.

3. As ezquerra mentioned, those extensions Mike is probably referring to, are shipped with Mercurial, and are enabled with only single line added to .hgrc. Not mentioning those extensions do not _emulate_ Git features, they _reproduce_ it.

4. Only reason makes sense.
I recently recieved a lot of messages from you. http://i.imgur.com/6kpLIHl.png

91 emails in the course of 13 days is not acceptable, and it just suddenly started. I figured out how to disable it, but you might want to look into it.
It's progress without a real purpose.

There is so much tech suffering from this affliction.
and bunch of other things. Not worth watching 1 hour worth of video just to see one guy saying something.

Try this:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-politics-religion/5...

https://www.google.pl/search?q=afghanistan+in+1970+for+women...

Or just google for "Afghanistan in 1970".

The wars caused regular people to support Islam Radicals as they were the ones defending country from outside agression. Also Iran was a country where girls in 1970s wore mini skirts and had equal rights in access to education. Exactly like in the West. The revolution there changed it all.

The more we try influence them the more it is recognized as a foreign occupational forces killing your compatriots. Obviously during the war/occupation people flock to their natives even when they don't agree with them.

Example: Let's say the US was attacked by China and Ku Klux Klan would be defending the country. Taking care of the weak, running hospitals. Organizing attacks on foreign military forces.

Would you be surprised if they gained more influence? And the more foreign occupation forces would try to destroy them, the more support they would have got. Extremism grows and feeds on war.

Another example (this time a historical one, not a fictional): underground Polish army officers were involved in terrorist attacks on Berlin subway system during the WW2. German could have been calling them 'terrorists' (as they did!) all day and night long. Polish citizenry supported them anyway. That's a war. For a war you want the most crazy, delusional, brutal elements to fight it for you - not a liberal democrat concerned about sexual minority rights. I'm talking about occupation here.
Equally for both you open the door for this one thing, it's hard not to open it for everything else.
I want to elaborate on "values" since I've been thinking about them all morning. They're just a simplification of all of programming.

Everyone remembers the first time that they learned how messy IEEE Floating Point math actually is. You were probably trying to treat Floats like R and then the abstraction leaked all over you. The same thing happens with int32/64 types when they roll over on you or (worse) throw exceptions. There's a mismatch between your mental model of these objects and their actual behavior. Anyone who's ever used BigInts has probably noticed the sigh of relief you get when you make that tradeoff: "these might be arbitrarily slow, but I also know that my computations will work exactly how I expect pretty much forever".

(Yes, you can flat out overflow your memory if you want, but even if it has to swap to your disk for 30 years, the value is intact.)

That sigh of relief is the thing we should be buying with our massive CPUs.

That's also exactly the premise of immutable values. They get computed and then they stay computed allowing you to have an extremely low-impact mental model of their behavior. They work platonically—once you compute them they just exist to be inspected.

Better than that, values you compute can often be finite or efficiently infinite structures so that you don't even truly worry about arbitrary slowdowns. It's relatively easy to play within the "easily computable" playground.

Nobody—not even the purest Haskeller—thinks that everything ought to have value semantics. Instead, they just form a significantly simpler underlying language. This just leaves less room for the semantics of your language to be complicated. They only get complicated when you legitimately want them to—so if you want mutable skiplists then you can have them by creating an environment where values has mutable properties. And then that environment, ST, is itself a value that you can pass around. (That's half the point of Monads.)
For every one of these "declining profitability" stories, there is an equal and opposite story. It's a cyclical story, too.

Either way, Google wins.
> SaaS is often a really crummy deal for the customer and we all know it.

Which is why no company will make very much money with the SaaS model...since we all know it is a crummy deal, we'd never support companies doing SaaS (or PaaS or IaaS). I remember a small startup Sales-something trying to do a CRM as SaaS a few years ago. I'm sure they are gone by now.
Have you heard of William MacNaghten? Alexander Burnes? Do you remember the massacre of the British garrison from Kabul, or the awful retribution that followed?

Yes, WWII was the direct precipitating event for the breakup of the British Empire, but the seeds of its destruction were sown long ago in that great Central Asian imperial struggle with Russia.
Next time you are asked Why should I pay for your SaaS every month. Consider what they are thinking, how they’ve multiplied your monthly cost to arrive at the total cost. And what they are comparing your offering against.

You may just find the pitch that works for both you and your customers.

Better yet, make sure that before you try pitching a SaaS model that you're actually planning to deliver $20/month in value to the customer.
Show HN: A chrome extension for listening to the text of any website
In addition to design, it'll be interesting to see if Apple catches up (widgets, etc) and finally breaks out of the grid of icons we've all been rocking since the original Palm Pilot and Windows 3.0.
It will eventually. Practical problems are pretty much solved.
Came here to say this--and yes it is. No two ways about it. The 6th amendment was meant to prevent exactly this situation.
Namecheap did $1 transfers for Black Friday, which is as good as a renewal if you're already with someone else. Exploiting these offers can save you big if you're like me and have dozens of domains.

That said, I wouldn't transfer my most important domains away from NearlyFreeSpeech.net to save a lowsy $6-7.
Increase Landing Page Social Sign-up Conversion Rates
That's strangely intriguing.
Does anyone have experience with finding good Ruby freelancers for smaller tasks within these sites?
I've been on several projects maintaining code by people who were ignorant to regex or otherwise refused to use them. Their code is littered with indexOf operations and charAt and all sorts of things like that. And they build those calls up one after the other creating all sorts of intermediate variables. It's a gigantic mess and I can usually remove 50-80% of that code (my guess) with regex. I think regex is far more maintainable and easier to read.

As far as no comments or not being able to debug, you can place each regex in a clearly named variable. And for debugging, there are a wealth of external tools out there, and in Java you certainly can step through them in a debugger (if you like pain). Like code, there are ways to write regex that are more readable and maintainable than others. We should make our regexes clear and used in conjunction with well thought out code. Then the software is a joy to work with, after spending 2 days studying regular-expressions.info.
I'm going to bicker about language, but that sounds more like a software engineering mindset. Most of the most fundamental problems in computer science have exactly that kind of mathematical nature.

Works well enough gets a paycheck, but doesn't impact the field.
You were subscribed to new project notifications. We did fix a bug where only a fraction of new projects were being sent out to freelancers- we had a lot of complaints that we weren't notifying freelancers of all matching opportunities. We're working on both some settings to adjust how many you receive and smarter targeting.
Because simple code has a high top speed but lower acceleration.
But what happens if there is a person with a great idea, no programming skills and not enough money to invest in developing the product? How should a young person approach this?
Skype spying on you in Russia, China and who knows where else
But thanks for the feedback!