skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, please!

Even with recurring annual charges (e.g., DropBox), I like getting notification that I'm about to be charged. With new charges after a trial, it's even nicer because it's a reminder that this thing is about to start costing me money. Sometimes I sign up, try it, and then forgot about it (usually something I need occasionally like proXPN).
How marketing automation boosted quadrupled sales
> I can't see stickers as a workable revenue model outside of Asia.

Asia is a HUGE market.
This is super simple. If you're ok with taking people's money who wouldn't pay for your service otherwise, go ahead and don't send a reminder. If you prefer to only take money from customers who are satisfied enough with your service to pay for it, send a reminder. Only you can decide which type of business you want to run.
Has there been an overrated social site that has generated revenue?
Sorry to hear about your trouble. All of these agencies have a process for changing your name. It can be frustrating, but changing a name is a routine procedure, so it shouldn't be too hard to undo the damage (though of course would have been easier if you did it as soon as MassDOT forced you).
This is why I always enter email address into my calendar events as chris@example NOT chris@example.com
Look, I still write my software with MFC, I'm no longer a fanboy of 'compiles one day, not the next' api chasing with many OS libraries, but you have to admit that the points he raises are valid. VB to VB.Net? XAML? ADO/DAO and all that? These things are serious frustrations, and I probably would have ran from the platform too if I was heavily exposed to them.
Show HN: BitLegal, explore the evolving regulatory landscape of Bitcoin.
There's been a lot of talk recently about a Nokia Android phone. Apparently it's called "Project Normandy". https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/10/5197746/nokia-android-ph...
Maybe create it instead of him, it might stop him in his tracks.
This was the most awesome thing in the world when I was growing up. Unfortunately, for some reason this plus my 32x destroyed the pins in my Genesis, probably too much weight pulling on them.
Most of these "coincidences" hint at a connection between Snowden and Wikileaks --- which is public knowledge anyway. I've seen no evidence that they're a Russian conspiracy.

The only tie to Russia directly is the claim that he chose to go there, which is false; he was connecting there to a flight out, and was trapped there when the U.S. government revoked his passport.

Snowden's own argument in this interview (and others) that Russia and China treat their spies better, if that's what he was, is a lot more persuasive than hand-waving like this.
Take an example with Squarespace. No CC details just for the trial and if CC details then just end the trial without going directly into the subscription model.
The little boys are also a gift from God to the priest to fuck.
If a small percentage of your users end up feeling tricked into having their card charged, it's going to be bad PR. It seems much better to lose some conversions, but keep your integrity.

If it motivates you at all, anyone who cancels after receiving this notification was not likely to be a long-term customer anyway. So all you will be losing is a month's paid service from the people who don't really want to pay for your service. That's not good money to try and hold onto.

I prefer the suggestion by another person that recommends simply disabling the free trial until the person chooses to have their card charged the first time. That seems the most honest way.
Warn them and give them a link to unsubscribe easily, but don't miss out on the opportunity to collect a single data point on why they are unsubscribing (checkboxes or buttons for 'Didnt use it', 'Didnt find it useful', 'Too expensive', 'Buggy', etc...)
According to a Pew survey, a majority of Americans disapprove of both Snowden and the NSA.
I'm thinking the go-bag contained things that helped him flee (money, fake id etc.), not just a clean pair of underwear and some band-aids.

I'm only speculating here of course.
I'm thinking less about Zynga-like in-browser games, and more like Candy Crush (solo game but it's arguably more fun with others, and def faster/cheaper) and Quiz Up (obv a two person game). For the same user, they'll have different friends lists on SnapChat vs Facebook, and may want to play games more with former vs the latter.

Agree about sticker, but other virtual goods are open. Farmville was rumored to be making $1m a day, and I believe it. Who knows what other iterations we'll see.
But is it really an Android phone if it doesn't come with Play Store apps?

Also, I think what people mean by wanting a Lumia with Android, is not a low-end phone with Android, but a more high-end one.
Google Cloud Platform Blog: Large Akka Cluster on Google Compute Engine
What? You thought a lame duck president was going to up and dismantle a trillion dollar defense measure? Come on...
So you book two one-way tickets? AFAICT, that's usually not cheaper.
I, on the other hand, agree with the article, apart from the quote above. More of my reasons here: [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7108133
The US and its opinions are not the whole world, and are not where American tech companies get most of their revenue, which (vide IBM) has taken a big hit. The US has done wrong, and is being punished by having the US tech industry become provincial. Our remaining markets will be among customers in the Five Eyes nations, because nobody believes our products are not penetrated by spy agencies.

That's a real crime, and it will affect American people in the coming years in highly visible ways. It is a real and present crime against the industry many people here work in. It will affect how, at least, governments and industries who have an interest in not being spied on operate, and perhaps ordinary people, too.

You have stated the position for putting our fingers in our ears and relying on the public's apathy. I'm pretty sure the big enterprise customers in BRIC/MINT markets are not apathetic.
Amazing how many times I dream of code and solve it in my dreams, but that only happens during crunch mode...
LinkedIn Takes New Step in Slow Road to China
The good old build tools war! Was interesting to see the massive drop in Ant/Ivy as part of the modern Java build set. I wonder if Maven will be able to hold on - it's polyglot POM version needs to come out quickly methinks.
Libtins, a fast C++ packet sniffing and crafting library, v2.0 released
Switzerland is now part of the Schengen Area, which allows free circulation of people
I believe "3" comes from "3 hours ago", which was displayed next to your username at the time when user jarrett mentioned you. So I presume it's just a slight copy-paste typo.
This just reblogs the original article from TorrentFreak:

http://torrentfreak.com/judge-ip-address-does-not-prove-copy...
I don't have many options there :) And the iBookstore retains 30%.
I think porting my app to WP would be quite fun. I like C#/.NET, I like VS. What I don't like is Windows 8. I'm not willing to install Windows 8 just so that I can develop an app for a small number of users.

Surely MS would help themselves by letting Windows 7 users develop for WP? Their ecosystem is small but their development platform is, in my eyes, the nicest of the bunch. The bulk of the various mobile app stores are filled with apps developed as a hobby, and requiring Windows 8 is a huge hurdle for a hobbyist.
South Korea Plans to Unveil 5G By 2020
In the age where we still cherish 3G network the South Korean government, Ministry of communication and technology has revealed plans to build a 5G network that can enable its citizens download an 800MB file in less than a minute! Amazing right.
You know what, reading all your desperate posts is very disturbing. Even Google Now knows to ask before auto-doing shit, but you sit here with some stupid surgeon-like "I can do no wrong" attitude.

Generally, I thought Google hired smarter people than you seem to be, so possibly you're some sort of false-flag bullshit.
Disagree with stickers. Everyone I know uses them constantly. A friend of mine has the cat with birthday hat as a tattoo.
Definitely worth checking out! Some fascinating code and math to create animated ASCII art.
Why on earth would the US reveal to the world that Snowden's actions have hurt the country, or an American in some way? Not the sort of thing you announce to your potential adversaries if you want to be taken seriously or be feared in any way. It's also the same reason why we don't hear of the effectiveness of the NSA's spying efforts, it's just something they're not going to ever publicly talk about as it relates directly to national security.
Not exactly remote execution, but the parsing and construction of key/value dictionaries can be and has been exploited [1].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/12/huge-portions-of-web...
Poles are not a race though. It's only nationality.
I get your humor (as I pull another PBR out of my personal cooler on my porch)
I don't know about playing the original Elite with a 3D HMD, but if you don't mind a more modern sort of game, you would appear to have several options. For one, there's an open source Elite remake, somewhat infelicitously called Oolite [1], which could probably be extended to support the Oculus Rift.

There's also something called "Elite: Dangerous", which is a massively multiplayer Elite-style game-to-be, and which appears already to offer Oculus Rift support in its current combat alpha [2].

And, of course, there's Star Citizen [3], helmed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame; in essence, he came to the Internet two years ago and said "Here's what I always wanted to build. How much is it worth to you to play it?" The answer to that question has turned out to be "thirty-eight million dollars and counting", and the full alpha release is projected for late this year, with increasingly large bits of functionality releasing between now and then; I don't know specifically when Oculus Rift support is planned for addition, but I'd be astonished if they weren't looking into adding it.

[1] http://www.oolite.org/

[2] http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/12/23/not-so-massively-eli...

[3] https://robertsspaceindustries.com/about-the-game

(PS: As an old space sim player who's been displeased by the decade-and-more drought of new titles in the genre, I'm delighted to see such a profusion of new titles. Perhaps space railroading time has come around again.)
Even if that $1 Billion number was actually a revenue number and not just a "valuation", Stripe wouldn't even register in the top 300 private companies in the US:

http://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/#page:1...:

Large private companies are nothing new. Cargill has $136 Billion in annual revenue. What does Stripe have?
I'll certainly give lighttable.el a try when somebody decides to write it :)
And, how many times have you moved without telling anybody your address or filled out a change of address form? As a German that has lived in both countries, I find it amusing that Americans would complain about it. Thinking that it's really that much different. But everybody pretty much fills out a change of address form.

In the end it's known where you live. Only if you're a tinfoil hat kind of guy and want to live as a hermit in a shack in Montana.
You can run 2 dropbox instances at the same time, both hooked into a different account.

This isn't the same way I did it, but here is an article on it.

http://lifehacker.com/5971204/run-multiple-dropbox-accounts-...
Is it a likely scenario that Russia intelligence could recruit, contact and provide help to an NSA employee without NSA knowing about it?

Yes? Very yes? But stop assuming you know what I think about Snowden. I find the idea that Snowden was literally an FSB mole to be far-fetched. I think he did what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do (I think he was probably wrong about a lot of what he did, though).

Basically, my problem is with the narrative fallacy. I find that most people's thinking about stories like these latches immediately to whatever makes the most sense as a story. "Snowden is a hero who was driven to leak exactly the right information by a system that was utterly disinterested in abuse reports and who will now lead the charge to abolish the NSA". Fiction. "Snowden is an agent of the shadow Soviet government who was charged with infiltrating the US government so he could help sabotage the world's last remaining superpower." Fiction.

Reality is almost always messy and incomprehensible. The Snowden situation has all the hallmarks of not being a clean good-versus-evil narrative.
Myspace generated revenue, but not enough to be worth what News Corp paid for it.

Twitter is generating some revenue, but I'd still define it as overrated. Likewise Tumblr actually.

Is that what you were asking?
... or it's just the statistical certainty of having a disagreement over a feature implementation in a multi-featured app which in turn is a part of larger app suite, which is a part of a even bigger software infrastructure.
He knows because he claims he acted alone not that he acted with the help of some personal friends but not a nation.

Unless you have evidence to contradict this, but I am pretty sure you don't.
Mentoring Software Engineers
POWER are used in cars, iirc? I also was looking at a neat little POWER chip the other day to play with. Cool architecture.
I was seriously considering getting a Lumia 1020 purely because of the camera, which gets rave reviews everywhere.

I was even willing to abandon Android and put up with the Windows OS. But unfortunately, to buy it unlocked would cost $600, and the only carrier that was subsidizing it was AT&T, which I have sworn off.

In the end, I got a Samsung S4 Zoom. Its camera is second only to the Lumia, it's got a great xenon flash, I get to stick with Android, it cost only about $350 unlocked, and it works on a GSM network MVNO, so my cellphone bill ends up being $40/mo., instead of $85/mo. on AT&T.
>Might be a good way to keep some customers that might have canceled.

Pretty much by definition, if they weren't aware they were going to be charged and would have canceled had they known, they're not 'customers.'
> Additionally, users of South (a popular third-party package for schema migrations) should note that South is not compatible with the 1.7 alpha.

Is this because of the new migrations built-in module? [0]

[0]https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/migrations/
Thanks for the response, you basically confirmed what my hypothesis is regarding the onboarding process. I like the idea of some kind of visual indicator on the page to remind users that they will at some point have to start paying for the app. Unfortunately for me there is no way to continue using the service in any way after your trial period expires, so it's a hard stop for the user at that moment. However if they are actually using the thing that shouldn't be a problem.
The Joke-Publication of the Paxos Algorithm
When I collected cards upfront for Planscope, I sent out an email 3 days before their 14 day trial ended. The next email they'd get would be an invoice email when their trial expired, and they'd continue to get these emails each month when they were billed.

When Gmail rolled out tabs, I started getting a lot of people who were unexpectedly billed. My "trial expired emails" were usually lumped into the Promotions tab, which doesn't have as much urgency attached, and thus there was definitely a spike in cancelations after that first invoice (people always see those invoice emails; they sometimes miss the "trial expiring and your card will be billed" emails :-)

When you take cards upfront:

* You'll get much higher trial to paid conversion rates. Mine was about 45%

* You'll get a lot of cancellations after that first bill goes through. If you calculate churn based off of "paid accounts who cancel", it will be artificially inflated. Try tracking it against customers who have paid you at least 2x.

* If you want to make your life a bit easier, automatically refund people who cancel within a given window after their first bill.

* Please don't bill people without sending them an email invoice. It's just wrong.

* Don't stake your business on one-off customers. If someone wants their money back, give it back (within reason, obviously. I'll by default refund the last month.) I've had people come back when they really needed Planscope, refer others, etc. And plus, chargebacks are messy.

I'm no longer collecting cards upfront, and I've finally got MRR growth back on track. I made the mistake of simply changing the signup form / billing code without making heavy modifications to the marketing site and onboarding flow, which caused a huge drop in growth after that change.
> Cue the sardonic "don't be evil" scare-quotes that inevitably appear.

Those aren't scare quotes. That is quoting an actual full heading from one of their founding documents [1]:

"Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."

as well as their internal code of conduct [2].

[1] http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-lette...

[2] http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html
And to think in the olden days, Frozen Bubble was sufficient to DDOS the DDs ...
"any decent programmer will tackle any chance for some research and exploration"

Doesn't that depend on your definition of "decent"?

I'd question whether putting research and exploration over a known, workable solution with the end result that you miss an otherwise reasonable deadline, isn't necessarily "decent" behavior.

Learning, investigation and curiosity are good and vital but if the job you're paid to do is to deliver software on time the trade off between that and delivery should be consciously weighed and communicated, not just assumed that the fun thing wins.

(Incidentally, I'm not agreeing that this is the only reason that deadlines are missed - it's one reason but the list elsewhere in this thread contains a lot of truth too, particularly the bit about imposed deadlines which is 100% the case on the project I'm on now).
Live Q&A in 5 hours:

http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden/
VMWares Acquires AirWatch. What it Means and What it Doesn’t
Hey, I'm using relative-number:
https://github.com/terhechte/emacs.d/blob/master/plugins/rel...

It mostly works as well as in Vim, except if you're using Code folding, which confuses it a bit.
Not really. By "around 7 years" I meant rough numbers with a very broad standard deviation. Facebook might be actually 10 years old from first run, but from general social awareness thereof to now is closer to 7, with a tipping point clearly having been reached between young users increasingly heading elsewhere and a growing sense by participants of "I don't want to be here but I have to". Yes, Facebook may have more staying power just because it has hit a billion users and is getting integrated into other devices, but I still see it matching the standard (if a bit elongated) pattern of social media site lifecycle. Those billion users are finding it's hard to be meaningfully social when lumped in with a billion others. Those FB-integrating devices can and will jettison FB on a moment's notice.

In 46 years I've seen a lot of "but this one is different" claims in a lot of subjects. No, it isn't in most cases. Google, yes, is different (but even they need be very careful). Facebook isn't; users are finding they can go elsewhere.
It's how they manage the ecosystem that matters, and they've never understood really what they're doing. That's my opinion of course, though all we can do see is watch to see what happens to FB.
Google's Vic Gundotra said something similar back then: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/09/googles-vic-gundotra-on-n...
Oh, HN, don't you ever change.
I'm sympathetic, but my view is that nothing I do online or electronically (text messages, email, etc.) is really private. The temptations for companies like Google, Facebook, etc. to abuse their trust are just too great to think it won't happen. If there's something I don't want anyone to know, I don't reveal it. I don't use G+, LinkedIn, or Facebook. I don't put deeply private things in email or text messages. Even here, I would not post anything private because if HN or any authority ever decided they wanted to find out who I am, it would almost certainly be possible.
> I did not say...

Never said you did. So... what's your point?

As for the property owners incentive: we've already established that they allow people to point cameras at the screen, and that it's not a policy of the company.

So... it's not a federal law, and not a policy of the company.

So, again, what point are you trying to make?
(S)he has spelt VMware wrong. Not sure how well they know the company.
So...I know that. And I shouldn't have said "have no connection to", that was absolutely false and just the frustration speaking. Mohandas was a name for my family and my dearest friends. As I got older, I got bolder about sharing it with many more people, but it remained something only the closest people in the world called me. My best man calls me "MoTowne" (first & last mashed up), my family at reunions occasionally say it. It makes me so happy when those people can identify me by what is an important part of my identity, but so separate from my daily life.

It is bitter to me that what my father once described as a name that was "Just for us" is now on "YOU'RE PRE-APPROVED" mailings from credit companies. It is bitter to me that I'm seriously considering changing my name as I do care. And it is bitter to me that it has changed my plans for my own children. I so loved having a private, meaningful identity to those closest to me that I wanted to pass the same thing on to my children. I've had the names selected for years, yet now I feel like I'd just be subjecting them to the same sort of trouble down the line.

I know it's a weirdly singular issue to have, and it's far from the end of the world, but, again quoting my father, "There's nothing wrong with having a little ambiguity about your identity." In fact...he may have even said "good to have." And I tend to agree with him.

All of that said, I very much appreciate your response.
I send the reminder on day 7 of 14. I've tried other schedules, but settled on 7 days as the last automatic mail. By that point in time, everyone's fallen into one of three groups:

1) Those that signed up, set up their accounts and are already getting value out of the service. They don't need the reminder, sending it is just good-will with this group.

2) Those that signed up, decided it wasn't right for them for whatever reason within the first 10 minutes, but didn't take the time to cancel. When they get the reminder and remember they're going to be charged, they cancel at this point. You've avoided the "I forgot to cancel and can't believe you charged me" problems here.

3) Those that signed up, then decided to put off actually using the account they created until later, but do intend to use it. You've reminded them to get to it sooner than later, and they still have a week to try out the service before paying for it.

And always refund customers who cancel right after the first bill. Whether you have the legal right to bill them or not is irrelevant, it's not worth the ill will. Happy ex-customers can become happy customers again in the future.
This is it, thanks. Beautiful, but too bad there is no easy way to deactivate it.
I picture you going "downstairs", your wooden steps creaking as you go down, past the various two-decade old metal cans of cleaning/household lubricating products on a shelf, into your computer room, with the wood paneling on the walls, the small basement window with the hand-crank, the slight smell of mildew and dryer sheets...