skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About to launch a Saas here as well and have been struggling in regards to the free trial thing.

I think it depends on the market and the business tastes of the founders/owners.

I've ran a couple of businesses, and I tend to agree with Derick that I'd prefer to get my money now, rather than at some point in the future.

This can be off-putting for some potential customers, but then again this depends on the market.

If I'm creating a vertically integration Saas in a very niche market, I think it's appropriate.

If I'm doing a social app, then you basically have to give it away to increase user acquisition, and book the cost of the new user as part of the user acquisition cost equation.
I've found the learning go[0] book to be an awesome concise introduction to Golang.

[0] - http://archive.miek.nl/projects/learninggo/index.html
I feel less guilty about buying something simple like this (when I could make it myself) when there's a reasonable one-time payment. I bought the optional features at http://invoiceable.co/ for about $150 for PayPal invoicing. Note that I'm not totally happy with them though because they have mixed content on their SSL invoice page for clients and use non-SSL links in default emails.

Also for the price of Quaderno you could just buy http://xero.com and get a lot more features. They too do Stripe invoicing.
Are you sure that the requests are still made?
I've been using HTTPSB since the last time you answered a few questions for me on HN (about a week ago?) and I must say: stunning work!

A quick question: is there a keyboard shortcut I'm missing to enable/disable the request blocking? For the time being I do Cmd+L, Cmd+C, Cmd+Shift+N, Cmd+V to copy the URL into a private browsing window, but it'd be nice to just temporarily enable full functionality on the page, and then disable when I'm done.

Also, for those using the extension: there's a built-in set of rules to enable browsing Google sites: search, gmail, etc. that you can enable by clicking the puzzle piece in the HTTPSB menu. Very helpful.
Consider how important air travel is and the wide range of situations people use to book or change travel plans. It's completely unsurprising that someone would be reluctant to say that no device or system in use anywhere in the world would have a problem with this.
I posted a text description but just found out that you can't post both in a submission.

This is still in the very alpha stages but here are the main ideas of the project:

1) Simple, no-frill dashboard for managing posts (files). Once you're happy with a file you can publish it to your blog.

2) Key bindings (right now the only main ones are ctrl-c for code formatting and ctrl-l for linking). Eventually these will be completely user configurable.

3) Relational (not in the db sense): you can tag your files with labels and fast link text in your files to other files.

Sorry about the confusion! You can find the source here
https://github.com/keera/matrix
The big cable companies have had the technical capability to deliver video over internet subscription services for years. They haven't released them widely because if they did, it would melt the Internet. Netflix doesn't care about such things because they don't own the infrastructure and aren't responsible if their service overloads the last-mile.
> The Lumia 520 costs $70 in the USA without a carrier subsidy and without a contract. I know this because I own one and because I just checked a few online retailers to see if they had increased the price.

Prepaid carriers often still discount phones to prices that would not be workable without the expectation of the phone being used on their network. Similar things have happened with the Moto G, which retailed for ~180 in the US, but is readily available from prepaid carriers for ~100.

Time will tell, but I expect that some will retail the Moto E for <80 once it goes on sale here.
I get what you're saying, thanks. I wouldn't ever do that personally, so I guess it's moot.
Firefox with ABP is why my laptop now has 8GB instead of 4GB.
After Facebook acquired Instagram they were really clear that they wanted them to stay independent. I wonder how "independently" they made this decision to switch to Facebook Places instead of Foursquare. Instagram ads are most likely just Facebook's new ad platform. Facebook just removed their Camera app from the app store (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457866,00.asp) because Instagram IS their Camera app.
Interesting. For example, with temporal data, like stock market data, some models might be "elders" in the sense that they are trained on longer spans of data, whereas, other models might be estimated just from the last few weeks.
Its about the latency silly! The vim example allocates 2 GB which takes a few seconds, which we know makes users leave our sites. Going through those GBs slows everything down!
Their support page makes it sound like they can just de-register iMessage with your account.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts5185

A few comments here seem to suggest that this is a carrier or cellular infrastructure issue. It isn't! iMessage doesn't route over SMS-- that's the whole point. It routes to Apple's servers, which should be capable of doing a lookup to see if the number still has an associated iCloud or iMessage account.
It definitely serves Facebook's location directory of Places the most.
This is a good compromise -- certainly better than the take-your-credit-card free trial that surprises you with a charge. 'Money back guarantee' has worked for a long time, particularly in pre-internet days.
George R. R. Martin writes with a DOS word processor
Serializing and deserializing heavily structured data in order to fit over a unix pipe takes a lot of effort - I'm often doing things where the reading and writing data takes up more code and processing time than the actual processing, which is simple once the data is in a sane data structure, not in a stream.

If your data structure is "a line of text, repeated x times" or "a blob representing an image", then unix pipes are very effective. For most everything else, they're not.
This entropy loss is standard. Try calling the country's leading 401K provider or other banks, they'll ask for your password over the phone keypad.

Because of this, most people cannot have punctuation in the password (not on phone keypad), and aB2CaCb becomes 1111111. So much for 104 keys on the keyboard.
A New Story Told at Ground Zero
I'm serving files from Amazon S3. This gives me the benefit of world class storage and streaming, without having to own / run the servers myself. Bandwidth from them is "cheap" at $0.12/GB... but with an average podcast of 30 minutes being 25meg file, an episode with 1,000 downloads is 2.5GB of bandwidth.

i have a customer that averages 20,000 downloads per episode, and a bunch of others with close to 1,000 downloads per episode. it adds up fast.
If you are using xbmc or plex on your mac/pc there's a plugin to scrobble to trakt, not really a feature to set them apart.
>That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment

Yes, I know, and I don't like it.

It makes it more complicated and unreliable to use the web to view text and images.
If I remember correctly, somebody who knew me from the Business of Software forums mentioned my business here, I saw it in my logs, and started reading. I had no idea any of this startup stuff existed prior. I had heard of pg but only knew him as the Plan for Spam (Bayesian spam filtering article) author, and thought he was actually the same person as John Graham-Cumming (who is also an HN user, also has a cognate for Gram in his name, and also wrote Popfile, a Bayesian spam filter).

My early impressions of HN were "Oh wow, a place where developers talk about topics like AdWords? This is relevant to my interests."

That was about ~2,000 days ago.
You can disable javascript or anything else in browsers, but you won't have a good experience on the web.
That's BS. First off, AT&T already has a business model! And they're making billions from it, too. It's like Facebook charging you $50 a month, then starting to collect all of your data, too, and then saying "if you want us to stop doing it, then you'd better give us an extra $50 a month".

> I'd happily pay $62/month for spyware-free Facebook.

You'd pay $744 per year to use Facebook? You don't say.
SaaS business is not based on some random failed example, but A/B testing, marketing, product development, and more. Any business come with risk and SaaS is the same.
This site isn't new, is it? I just finished writing a book on Go and feel like I encountered this site a few times while researching - though not as a complete anthology.

If so, I've found this site helpful but "Introduction" is the proper term, it doesn't go particularly deep into anything.
Actually, there are a few things in which Rust has recently gone back to old behaviour (though “oscillation” would be a bit strong as a description of it). Nested block comments is one that was removed a year or two back as unnecessary and reinstated a few months ago. I can’t think of any of the bigger ones off the top of my head; calling them oscillations could also be a bit strong too, as they tend to end up subtly different when they come back—different and superior.
George R. R. Martin Still Uses A DOS Word Processor
Define "modern BS".
The one thing I miss from Chrome is the Adblock extension. It has a feature that allows ads on all sites except the ones you explicitly block--a reverse adblock filter, so to speak. I'm ok with seeing ads, but if there's a site I often visit that bothers me (I'm looking at you, weather.com), then I'll block it.

Unfortunately the Firefox version doesn't have this, and neither do the alternative adblock addons I could find.
JSON WHOIS, Screenshot and Social API
Friends Follow a Dream, Launch 'Intelligent Doorbell'
I think the big caveat here is that the space you're in makes it particularly dangerous to offer a free trial.

In other words, there are spaces where those costs are far more negligible, such that you could certainly afford 500+ abandoned free trials to convert 1 paid customer.
One of the best ad-blockers is actually called FlashBlock (not sure this is the name today)

It will remove around 90% of obnoxiousness...
Why do we have to choose one or the other? Its ridiculous to stack these test methodologies against each other. You need both for different reasons. Unit tests verify the function of a unit. System-level tests verify the integration of units with other units. Instead of writing an exhaustive list of both, you learn over time the kinds of tests you need for each scenario.
I care about the layers below, because they affect people, and they affect me. If the layers below are broken, SDL does not fix it.
How can AT&T target ads, if they don't run ads? Are going to be intercepting our pages and feeding their crap into my HTML?
No-one ever said that integration tests and unit tests are mutually exclusive.

Integration test the happy paths, small integration suite that proves everything works together.

Unit test the individual units of functionality or behavior, whichever you're more comfortable with. Unit tests aren't supposed to tell you that the whole system works. Unit tests exist for two main reasons: Confidence that you can refactor your code without breaking functionality, and proving that your components are doing what they're supposed to do. Yes you technically can accomplish this with just an integration test suite but you will find refactoring bugs much harder to track down because the test failures aren't telling you exactly what went wrong.

You can never have full confidence in a system with just one suite of tests. You really need multiple suites. And when you TDD it all the way down (Integration test first, then work through the stack TDD-ing each part, when done Integration test and all unit tests should pass, and feature is done!) it's not a chore but actually quite enjoyable.
In all fairness, we have no evidence to prove or disprove that Snowden didn't also (along with talking to reporters) deliver intelligence to handlers.
I think this is a good point. F.E.A.R did this amazingly well in the first instalment, and the way that the enemies worked with cohesive group strategies was pretty ground breaking for the time.

I think this title could benefit from something similar. It's a fine line to walk though, they have to be different enough to not just be a rehash.
UI / UX Design Interviews – Jakub Antalík
> Now if we could just convince SalesForce to be more like Airbus and not fly a complete plane (or 50,000 planes) to test everything every-time they make a change...

I agree with the overall thrust of the article. Unit testing is indispensable, especially for me as a rubyist where there is basically nothing checked before runtime. But I find this conclusion that SalesForce is "doing it wrong" to be just as arrogant and presumptuous as DHH's blustery approach.

Now I don't know anything about SalesForce's architecture, but one thing I do know is that no system of that size exhibits the same ideals that can be maintained by a small team of brilliant developers working on the bleeding edge of some greenfield project with a set of stakeholders that fits in a single room. That's not to say that SalesForce couldn't use unit tests, but just that it's the height of arrogance for us as outsiders to presume one way or the other.

Scaling software development isn't solved by strict adherence to the dogma of idealistic methodologies any more than scaling traffic is solved by plugging in a "web-scale" nosql database into your Heroku. The reality is that scaling is done by removing bottlenecks over and over until the system that remains is an organic result reached through evolution rather than any architect's brilliant grand design.
On the other hand AdBlock (edge of course, not the co-opted plus), saves quite a bit of network traffic. Nice if you're on metered (or slow) internet.
If people use it every day and aren't interested in upgrading, I'd look at it and say you offered too much to the free option.

You don't want something completely limiting, but you need a carrot there, and if you offer "enough" to a free user they'll lack an impetus to upgrade.

I don't think there's a lot of risk in changing the freemium terms down the road if that's the case.
If you want Dillo and/or w3m, they're still available!
Simple Growth Hacker Dashboard using Google Spreadsheet for Small Startups
I wish I knew if lower is better or higher is better on the first page (y axis is not described on the graphs).
NetSurf does a pretty good job. It does well at HTML and CSS on most sites and has only very basic JS support.

Another is Dillo, although it doesn't have as good of CSS last I tried (version 3 isn't horrible though).
I once used a SaaS—or whatever you call the abstraction on top of that—and ended up paying $80 for a “sample” EC2 instance of theirs that was just idling, after I had activated it a month earlier.

Soured me on trying out new platform services pretty damn hard.
I'm also seeing the weird text encoding stuff in OS X Chrome. For example:

"of information â€“ everything"
What is really funny is when you think about it, we all buy things without trying them every single day. We make assumptions that a product will work or that it can be replaced/refunded when it doesn't.

Surprisingly, in the online world we think everything is different and that nobody buys things without a free trial of some kind, but over and over again I see products and services that sell without a free trial.

I think it's doing early stage products a disservice to assume you have to have a free trial to make money. When you are proving out if a product will sell, you need to know if people will pay you money for it, not if they are casually interested in trying it.

If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.
The point is the star button is not in a convenient location in FF 29... I find have to search for the star button now when need to bookmark something. I guess it made to much sense to have right in the address bar so they moved it... The Classic Theme Restorer may be in my near future.

UPDATE: I used the Customize feature to move the star button just to the right of the address bar and that is good enough for me.
I find it strange that anyone would opt to move entirely away from one type of testing at all.

The benefits between unit tests and e2e system tests are varied and surely that's the main benefit?
Or you could pay an additional $5/month for a decent VPN. In fact, I have a number of close contacts who work in the industry who tell me that this type of practice is of heavy interest and routine on the wireless end of things. Companies are tracking not just your browsing habits but your location data based on cell tower triangulation.

This is why we need to decentralize the ISPs and move to local mesh networks.
Just a guess, but maybe that it always gives the user a full calendar Mon-Fri to check it out?
In my experience, Firefox uses less memory on systems with less RAM. My laptop only has 2Gb, and Firefox runs fine, even if on my work laptop it can reach 2.5Gb.

And I'm not shy about using tabs either, I often have many dozens open.
I enjoyed reading the post, and was relieved to see the caveat at the end, but when you shout things like:

> "Beware The Free Trial ... SaaS builders! BEWARE!"

I don't think it's just a lack of emphasis... It's the presence of jumping to conclusions and offering that as a general lesson.
Well I'm not an android guy per se, but I'll take a crack at it. In the iOS side of things, there is ONE distribution that has versions. You may be at an older or newer version than another iPhone user, but it's always in the same upgrade path.

With Android there is an OS, and like Linux distributions there have risen up a number of distributions of android. Each device maker is able to use android for free to build a distribution for their phones, but it's up to the phone companies to maintain support and bring updates to their distribution. Because of this, different android phones at the same version in different distributions could be considered different OSes, and different android phones in the same distribution with different version numbers could be the same OS.

That's my understanding of it, and also why non-Google android phones often lag in support. It's all a numbers game and the phone companies make sure the best sellers get the fastest updates and get around to supporting the phones that aren't selling anymore when they have a chance
Learn To Code In 90 Days Then What? Here Are Five Goals For Your First Year.
I tend to agree - but if I could redraw that triangle it would be more like a trapezium. Not enough emphasis is given to system tests - and it shows in the tooling and the community mentality.

On my current project no one would dream of adding a new feature without unit tests - but everyone turns a blind eye to integration and system tests because "they're hard".
Mendeley does not give you access to paywalled papers. You have to download them yourself.
Heterosexual dating is inherently hypocritical. You're not a woman, yet you demand to date women, what is the matter with you? Where do you get off with this kind of entitlement? More seriously though (that first sentence was just 70% serious), just consider if you are looking for a partner that is masculine (holds equally for gay or straight relationships). Suppose that you yourself are feminine. But isn't that hypocrisy? How can you demand to only date people that are not like you, in some way? Or you are an extroverted person that wants to date introverted people. Or that you are impulsive, and want to date someone more calculating and planning. Hypocrisy? Or is looking for someone who is different from you in some way, okay?

If you say; but being fat is unhealthy. OK, but is it purely a character flaw? I think not; some people have a harder time keeping the weight off, though they might be equally healthy to someone who is relatively thin. Louise CK might not be a good example of this, though. And, if it is some "flaw", then that fat person might tolerate other flaws than being fat. Do people have to match up symmetrically when it comes flaws and virtues? Besides, people are fat for different reasons; some people eat a lot because they use it to fill a void in their life. Other people may have totally different reasons. So it doesn't even make sense to take two people and say "they are both fat, and thus they both have the same 'issues'". One issue might manifest as sex addiction in one person, alcohol addiction in another, and food addiction in yet another.
The internet just got a little more distracted
I saw it referenced on Reddit. It was probably /r/programming but I don't recall fully.
Reported speech get's a downvote?

Single tear...
Infographic Kills Software Testing Illiteracy
Paying someone extra to not do something you don't like is commonly called paying protection money.
What's strange about that is they don't (at least the few methods that I looked at) define the behavior they're using for "combined" callbacks. Should you check for a non-nil NSError? Is an NSData parameter going to be nil on error?
In other words, you need to understand your acquisition costs and your conversion funnel. Then you can decide what form of a trial--if any--makes sense for you.
I love you. I was thinking how awesome it would be to use tmux on my windows machine so I tried pact install tmux and it worked.

Thank you so much, that's pretty awesome.
Yes. There have been cases where ISPs were caught injecting/replacing ads in the HTML stream.
Comparison Between Chess And Go
Fun because I do not remember exactly, but I remember I was reading the weekly mail newsletter before the actual site.
yeap, that's where i found out about it! There are a lot of awesome books around there ... if only i would have the time to read them all!
> Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s [..]

It still is for many of us who complain about browser (and web content) bloat. We are on the web for text and pictures, primarily. The things we do online hasn't changed much since the 90s. Having sophisticated multimedia capabilities is irrelevant when we're in it for the content that matters.
I can't stand FPSs normally but when the original prototype of Superhot made the rounds I loved it. Whether they can stretch it to a full sized game remains to be seen; they certainly seem to have a bunch of ideas on how to do it.

Just moving around in the prototype is a lot of fun, and that can go a long way for me.
shrug I've probably done more rpn. A huge component of "readable" is "how similar is it to stuff I am used to reading".

I do have to read it backward and build the stack, but that's basically intuitive at this point.
As ridiculous as that pitch might sound, it makes the implied security-money tradeoff directly visible to management and causes them to make a formal decision.