skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: When to get customers' billing info?
I'm working on the billing system of a new startup, and I'm trying to think through the plusses and minuses of when to get the credit card info from the customers.

I know that some shops (37signals) get the credit card up front, but say "we'll give you 30 days to cancel, and we won't charge you until the end of that time." This method actually bothers me, as it seems to spin "counting on you not remembering to cancel" as "doing you a favor, so you don't have to get out your credit card to actually sign up down the road." But maybe I'm being overly sensitive on that?

Have you tried multiple approaches? Has anyone done A/B testing on signup flows? I'd love anything you have ... anecdotes, data, whatever.

If it matters, the startup I'm working on at the moment has a freemium model, with a free (but feature-limited) version, and a paid (or multiple tiers of paid) version. The market is freelancers, self-employed people, and, to some extent, small businesses.
If you owe the IRS 25k wouldn't you have had to make like 90k+ in that tax year?

If that's the case what did you do with all that cash. It just sounds like a stupid idea to me. If you can pull down that sum in "a summer" aka 4 months, why not just pay the IRS their money and then work 4 more months and then start your business.
A better question is how to make this an experience versus just another of the hundred million freebies. Everything online is free, so it's no differentiator any more and the few bands who could get a bit of press from it have gotten it now. But how can we actually connect with listeners online?

Services like thesixtyone.com are a good start. For those artists who want to put that effort in (and figure out how), they can connect with listeners as peers in a system. And that's a start.

The iTunes LP is another attempt at the online experience but we'll see whether that proves to actually provide a real experience people want. I'm hopeful myself.

So, what else? Virtual concerts? extras? ideas? :)
> Intel squeezed AMD very hard with a lot of "Merced" hype, and look what happened.

Intel started taking market share back from AMD when they returned to delivering CPUs with better $/performance, and $/watt/performance, in 2007. While AMD was building better mousetraps, they steadily took market share; nobody outside of HPC was taking IA-64 seriously beyond about 2004 anyway.
I found this quite good for constructing tidy javascript code, http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

I haven't had time to look into this but there's also a project called Doloto to help optimise your javascript, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/doloto/
Apple cannot make Code Signing "do anything to your freedom" without breaking the majority of applications available for the platform. Right now, the only applications which are signed are ones which specifically benefit from being signed -- most often, ones which store passwords in the Keychain. (Signing such an application makes the Keychain treat it as still the "same application" after an upgrade, rather than requiring it to be reauthorized.) So, if Apple suddenly started requiring desktop apps to be signed, everything unsigned on the market (probably 90% of applications available) would stop working. This would be an incredibly stupid decision.

Moreover, almost all existing signed applications are signed with a key that isn't in any chain of trust (and there's no currently available system for setting up specially trusted keys), and there's no scheme for encrypting signed applications. So there's nothing keeping users from either removing a signature from an application or replacing it with a copy signed with their own key.

Conclusion? Code signing is not a sinister plot to take away your freedom. It does exactly what the documentation says. Here's the docs. (These links were buried deep in the article, but they're worth reading.)

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2007/tn22...

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Securit...
Sorry. I'm sure you're right.
My mom was on a shaken-baby jury a few years ago, and the defendent (the father) was crying on the stand swearing he didn't know he could hurt the baby by shaking it. She was sympathetic. She teachers high school, he was seventeen, and she knows her students have no awareness of a lot of stuff they see regularly on TV. It just passes them by. It's like when you watch an old black-and-white movie that you saw all the time on TNT as a kid and realize, holy cow, this movie is full of sex and racism, and that character's an antisemitic Jewish stereotype. As a kid, you missed it all.

Ten years from now, they'll watch one of those "Never never never shake a baby" PSAs and realize, "Hey, that's about not shaking a baby! I thought it was just pictures of cute babies." I kid you not. A lot of kids sit through two weeks of sex ed for five straight years and then are totally shocked when their girlfriend gets pregnant after unprotected sex. And then they're seventeen years old with a seventeen-year-old's impulse control, and they're taking care of a baby, and ....
Sadly, using generators as coroutines falls apart badly as soon as you try to perform a subroutine call. There's no easy way (at least, not that I've come up with) to call a coroutine sub from a coroutine without copious glue.
It is for monitors with a higher DPI
Also Flotr - http://solutoire.com/flotr/ which is like Flot but using Prototype instead of jQuery. As such can be used in a Rails project more easily.
Image and global coverage.

Finding out specific information about immigration, school system, job opportunities, or unemployment rate of a certain city in different country is very difficult.

The land of opportunities image (plus global brand of top universities) have served the US well in bringing in immigrants, skilled or not. This kind of marketing gives partial and imperfect information but better than none.

When I was 14, had I knew that Swedish universities do not charge tuition or Canada offers universal healthcare, my college choices would have been different.
did you happen to do that at a university... and was it the same university that 'DannoHung' wen to?
This has been the most frustrating bug. I have missed several big client calls because of this update. How could test not find this... epic Fail for Apple. I really am ready to switch over to the Android. Please someone give me a reason not to leave.
While it mentions pop-sci health, I think this is not a pop-sci health article.

(I would support a hypothetical ban on those too, FWIW)
If 4) is true, it's not equally true for every company. Meritocracy varies from one organization to another. And the more meritocratic organizations will tend to be more successful. So choice four is just choices one through three, delayed.
Why would network neutrality and transparency laws bring us closer to censorship laws?

The FCC is an agency with censorship in its DNA: it fines broadcasters for indecency, of course, but also uses its discretion over media ownership and broadcast licenses to favor some operators and expression at the expense of more critical views.

Interpretation of neutrality rules will give the FCC -- constructed always of three loyalists from the President's party, and two loyalists from the other party -- another bit of leverage on private interests.

The next generation of righteous busybodies could easily decide packets aren't truly neutral unless they advance neutrality, equality, and justice for all people. Packets which contain hate speech, pornography, anonymous speech, content inaccessible to the handicapped, political campaigning beyond the spending limits of the FEC, or an insufficient proportion of 'underrepresented' viewpoints all twist the net against the public interest. Why shouldn't fair-minded regulators issue more rules to protect us? Demand more proof of compliance and 'good faith' from operators to stay in business? Once an agency is reviewing business practices for compliance with political ideals, where does it stop?

We need no federal 'neutrality' rules for newspapers, magazines, or books; we shouldn't need them for electronic communications, either. Inviting the FCC to regulate this medium makes it more like our tamer broadcasting outlets, and less like our vigorous independent publishing. Is that the direction we want to move?

I think it's pretty clear that keeping the FCC out of it wasn't working either

How? The supposed biased-network trangressions have been tiny and temporary. Open networks have defeated closed without needing the FCC's help. Even lagging other nations, broadband internet is cheaper, faster, and available over more wires/wavelengths in the USA each year. And if there were major harms, there'd be an opportunity for upstarts and competitors to advertise "the whole internet" as a marketing theme.

If the problem is lack of local competition, adopt pro-competitive reforms -- don't dictate with federal rules what voluntarily-contracted network services are legal or illegal. Such rules always wind up benefiting the big incumbents who can show up in DC (even if those incumbents initially seem to gripe).
I guess you can't do the normal phone troubleshoot and remove battery for 30 seconds.

Idk about apple and phones anymore after the last year I am pretty glad I never bought an iphone because at least java based phones are pretty versatile without imposed restrictions.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting it was. I thought it was a good post.
* Comment with JSDoc style

* Auto-build docs and script for development and production environemnts (easy to concatenate and then pipe this to YUI Compressor)

* Use an MVC project organization or something like-minded. You can't just throw files representing widgets around.

* Write unit tests. JSUnit and SrewUnit (I prefer the latter) work well for this.

* Format your code nicely (this goes for any code but I find a ton of terribly formatted JS)

* Use one common library for any core object prototype changes (on Element, Array, Function, etc.) and don't modify them further.

* JSLint code you're unsure about.

* The best way to dynamically load code is just to write script tags to the document.

A few style-concerned ones...

* Don't use the module pattern. It's rarely appropriate, hiding methods does nobody good, just use a closure.

* Only create elements when absolutely necessary and destroy ones that you will no longer use. There's no garbage collector in that regard.

* Use a routing system to manipulate and read document.location.hash (and the browser history) so that pages have real URLs and navigate like webpages.

* Callbacks and delegates are great, they should be used all over the place.

* Use events and listeners to connect the parts of your app.
I've been to NYTM and while Nate is doing a great job, I think it's still too big and represents more of the 'business entrepreneur' community than the 'engineer' community.

The Hackers & Founders meetup that Dave (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daveambrose) runs is a lot more interesting but smaller and does not have demo's.

Maybe I'm just out of it but the NY tech community feels a lot more fragmented than the one out on the west coast.
good thing I still run 3.0.1 - I'll skip 3.1, thanks for the article post
Obfuscate variable and function names with junk words. On Windows, Jasob was easily the best http://www.jasob.com/ for it (I tried using many others including online offerings). You need to do this if worried about others seeing and using your code, especially competitors.

edit: am I stupid? But when you obfuscate, you also radically shorten the length of a JS file, thus making it quicker to download:
EG:

function c(g){var m=0;while(m<g.length){var r=g[m];r.l=d(r.n,r.o);if(r.j==true){
r.k=e(r.n,r.o,r.l);}else{r.k=0;}r.t=f(r.l+r.k);m++;}}
I would love to see a discussion around this quote.

Okay. You can't blame these guys for being enthusiastic about the program that accepted them. But this line is bogus.

First, it's anonymous and stated without any evidence, which is not surprising since the evidence refutes it. (1) Have TechStars so far produced a single company on the scale of Justin.tv, Reddit, Loopt, Scribd, etc.? (2) What statements by PG or any YC founder manifest the bias alleged by the quote? (One could easily find hundreds the other way.) What part of "Make something people want" doesn't Anonymous understand?

Second, it's a not-particularly-subtle putdown that is tantamount to saying "YC don't know what they're doing". Investing in startups that can become big businesses is the whole game. To prioritize anything over that would be incompetence.

Third, it's a not-particularly-subtle attempt to claim mental territory of the sort readily familiar to any reader of http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Overcrowded-Marketp....

TechStars copied YC and want to distinguish themselves as something other than second-in-class. One can appreciate the difficulty, but insulting people's intelligence is probably not the most effective way to go about it -- especially in this business, where those you most need to convince will least appreciate it.
Internet meltdown threat: Conficker worm refuses to turn
> socialist countries restrict the rewards to the extremely talented, whereas America does no such thing (at a cost to the bottom half of its bell curve).

This is just not the common case. Generally speaking, the US does give disproportionate rewards to the 'high-end' of the curve so to speak. However this often comes at a cost to everyone else(or the following generation) whether they realize it or not. It's simply harder to notice this happening when it's spread over a generation or two. Examples being health care, the economic pyramid schemes, 'education', care of veterans etc.

Top tier American schools are highly-overrated and highly overpriced these days. They are a much bigger and slower bubble to burst over here.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el...

I believe the key phrase in this article is "entitled mediocrity". The author also spent at least 25 years as a scholar and then Professor at Yale and Columbia.

With all that being said, America is still a great place. It just might be better not to look for the rewards in all the popular places and using the popular methods.
Snopes economic analysis of cash-for-clunkers
In 2009, the federal government's Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), commonly known as "Cash for Clunkers," provided consumers with $3,500 or $4,500 discounts for trading in older model automobiles and purchasing new, more fuel-efficient vehicles. The analysis presented above maintains that the CARS program essentially spent $3 billion in federal (i.e., taxpayer) funds in order to save $350 million in (foreign) oil purchases, an inefficient economic trade-off. However, the analysis is flawed in key aspects.
How is this different than typical multi-variable regressions with control variables?

The problem with social science is that it tries to be a science but in reality its closest relative is product management. Using even the best statistical methods still runs into the keys/lamp post problem. There are too many variables, the variables are not well defined, the variables may have strange interactions, there may be too much noise in the data, etc. In almost all social science situations, you cannot find truth solely through regressions.

For instance, recently I was studying the issue of whether the crash in the stock market caused the fall in consumer spending, or the slow down in consumer spending caused the fall in the stock market. If you run a straight regression you'll have a lot of problems because a) even if the stock market falls first, it could have been because of expectations of future consumption b) the data on expenditures is not collected frequently enough, and c) there are other potentially confounding variables.

But if you take the product management approach you can listen to what people say. And when you listen, you find that people say stuff like, "After the stock market fell, I had to cut back my plans to travel." or "Since the fall in our endowment, we have had to suspend spending on all new projects." By simply asking people you can figure out the causality.

Note that this is how every company in the world makes most of its decisions ( except perhaps Google, because they actually enough controlled data to meaningfully do regressions). When we're trying to figure out what features to build, we do customer interviews, follow-me-homes, surveys, feature requests, talk to customer support, etc. We make very modest use of statistics, because we do not have large amounts of controlled data. Did the customer not use this part of the app because it was not useful, or because we got the label wrong, or because of something else? We could do a bunch of statistics, but what's the point? It won't answer those questions. Asking people may be subjective, but it's the only way (keys/lamppost).

The problem is that social scientists do not get promoted for making accurate judgments and being right. A product manager does. A social scientist/academic can only be judged by his methods. Thus there is the preference within the professions for methods that can be objectively evaluated, and methods that only a select elite can perform.
Being right is not part of the selection process for being an academic.
I finished 3rd grade reading 5th grade books. In the 4th and 5th grade I was outside playing basketball while the rest of class had to complete their reading assignments.

I commend your accomplishments. Still, it seems there was an opportunity lost here. Instead of allowing you to continue to advance, you were held back (in a way) until the rest of the kids caught up to you.

Similar experiences in my own earlier education soured my taste for school, though in my case I remember being given explicit directions to stop working ahead and wait for the class to catch up, on multiple occasions.
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth

tl;dr: for truth to make any sense you have to postulate how "X being true" would cause a different sensory experience vs it being false.
That's true, I forgot about Android. Are there any other Google Linux distributions that I missed?

Note that Amazon also distributes a custom embedded Linux system on the Kindle.

Replace Yahoo (oops!) with some other web site operator. It doesn't matter which, since not one of them contributes as much as Google. :)
i like raphaeljs. i'm right now hacking on some graphs and wondering if i should merge some of the demo's from raphaeljs's homepage into a graphing library or not...

i'm on iteration 2 after static google code api charts, so a little library building could be ok. normally i'd shoot to reuse a js library, eg flot, for an iteration 2 hack, but some of this work may be useful for my startup...

i found this jquery+raphael simple graphing library: http://github.com/benaskins/simplegraph

it's definitely simple and...not pretty, though that might be easily tweakable. could be a good starting place.

Prototype+Raphaeljs
http://github.com/alexyoung/ico
has some nice screenshots

Prototype+raphaeljs library under "heavy pre-alpha" development, help desirable:
http://github.com/savetheclocktower/krang
3 years ago, I started a blog about javascript called Javascript Kata at http://www.javascriptkata.com . I will try to write more and more about best practices and new ways of doing things.
Performing defragmentation in windows 7 & vista
I agree with your comments on asking for credit card info upfront.
As a user, if I were to try out a 30-day trial offer, I'd prefer to provide my credit card info after the trial ...and only if I decided to purchase the product.

I recently purchased HttpScoop which uses this model (great product for the Mac and they let me try the product for 15 days before asking for my credit-card info)
---
As a developer, this is the model that I'd use for any of my products that have a trial offer.
That's the same guy? Damn, any productivity I've gotten thanks to PuTTY has totally been cancelled out by those puzzles.
The real problem with the economy is that it doesn't need you anymore
Wandering progressively off-topic...

I wouldn't call it "copious", necessarily. It's easily reusable, at least. My aforementioned cooperative multitasking hackery involved inheriting from a base "coroutine-able" class that, among other things, kept a per-instance execution stack that would be updated by the dispatching loop depending on the value yielded by the generator. The end result would look something like this:

def foo(self):
spam = 1
while True:
yield self.call(self.spam_and_eggs, spam)
spam += 1

def spam_and_eggs(self, spam):
print ("spam, " * spam) + "and eggs"
if spam >= 20:
yield self.halt()
else:
yield self.wait(2)
yield self.ret()

Which would print another item off the menu every other cycle of the dispatcher loop, until 20 "spams" at which point the "thread" would stop.

Other actions included a goto (clear the stack and jump to a new generator method), conditional waits (keep running the thread unless, say, 2 miliseconds have elapsed since it started this cycle), and "message passing" between threads (push something onto another instance's stack). The main downside was that stack traces from exceptions inside a faux-thread were singularly useless, though I was working on some debugging tools for code using it.

The guts of it amounted to maybe a few hundred lines of code, most of which is the dispatch loop and bookkeeping for message queues. One of these days I ought to clean it up and post the code on the web somewhere, but unfortunately I'm currently in a somewhat sticky spot and looking for work (and I fear that spending more time on things like building cooperative multitasking in Python than things to further my humdrum day-job career has not been a great help thus far).
Personally, I would like to see the authors sales before and after appearing on Scribd. Personally, I often search for reviews and/or excerpt from books before I actually go out and purchase them, much like I do with music and albums. Scribd has been an awesome resource for this practice. Otherwise, I would probably not purchase anything without reviewing bits of it beforehand. IMO, she may also profit from this exposure. Again, this could not be determined until we see before/after sales. (if she had any at all seeing the age and nature of the book, its likely to be outdated.)
I think we'd also agree that they are still destroying wealth.

Compared to what? Compared to a system of city-states? Compared to total anarchy? Or anarcho-capitalism?
The problem with many popular health science articles is not just that the media claims causation from a correlational study, but that the scientists they interview do it also!
I'm curious how it would work if you gave a free month, then billed at the end of every month.

Let's say they sign up on January 1. On February 1st, they receive an email or notice mentioning that their free trial is over, and they'll be billed at the end of the month. If they're not completely satisfied, they can close their account and have February's bill completely refunded. At the end of February, they get prompted for payment information.

Some people will use your service free for two months and then close their account, effectively getting a two month trial period. It's unlikely these people were going to purchase your service anyhow.

The people who were going to pay will pay like normal.

The folks who are on the fence about paying might decide to signup because they've now had a month of knowing that they're 'paying' for this service. Once you're already expecting the bill it doesn't seem like a big deal to pay it.

If you implemented a payment scheme like that, you might make it a policy to never charge people for the month they cancel either. I know it loses a month worth of income, but it feels like you'd be giving departing customers a more positive experience.