skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem may be that your pricing comparison page makes no sense. Users (rightly) expect that aligned items in a comparison will relate to each other. When I first started looking at the page, I sat there for at least a minute trying to figure out how "Wedding Jojo Domain" was related to "Unlimited Bandwidth." Line up the things that are related, and explain how they differ. A premium account gives unlimited bandwidth... how much does a regular account give? A regular site has "no privacy options" (let's skip the issue of "no privacy" being close to the worst possible combination of words you could put on your website), what does a premium site have? What are these privacy options? I've read the entire page and I don't think I could tell you a single meaningful difference between the two types of accounts.

On a pricing note, it doesn't make any sense to me to pay for something like this monthly. You aren't going to get married on a monthly basis. Weddings happen once. Payment for the anouncement should happen once. Consider something like a one time $100 payment to unlock all the features.

On explaining features, show, don't tell. There's not a single screenshot (of anything but themes), screencast or introductory video on the site. How can I know if I want a feature if I have no clue what it does? Show me. Make me want it.

UPDATE

Actually, I think I need to go back to the issue of words you should never put together anywhere on your site, because it happens more than once here:

"no privacy" - Enough said. Context doesn't matter. I can't think of any combination of words I would be less likely to put on a website.

"no support" - You can at least offer a knowledge base type of support

"password protection" as a feature - Does this mean anyone can screw with my page if I don't have it?
If by "people" you mean "people like you", then you MIGHT be right. If you did $25/head usability testing with normal people, I'd wager less than 5% would do this-- or even know that it COULD be done.
Indeed it is. I checked in new submissions an hour or so after submitting and when I didn't see it, I resubmitted. Turns out it went through ok, it just was buried under all the submissions and could not be seen on the first page.
Is CouchDB not based on Erlang?
US Senate: United States has more oil and gas than any other country (page 23)
I totally agree. I think the big missing piece of the puzzle, though, is full-text searching. I attended a webinar on MongoDB the other day hosted by Dwight Merriman (10gen) and Ian White (Business Insider). Ian mentioned this as a sore spot for his usage of MongoDB and that he'd be coming up with a Lucene solution. It'd be interesting to see the solution he comes up with.
Three benefits of VoFi
"Dont Make Me Think" by Steve Krug is a legendary book and You need this book too-

Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? (Paperback)
~ Susan M. Weinschenk (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Neuro-Web-Design-Makes-Click/dp/032160...
This is focused on Michigan? I would make that obvious and give people a quick way to move to their school. I was a bit lost when I went to the site and wanted a menu with school names.

Ditto to answering "what's in it for me" for the users in terms of contribution. Warm fuzzies? Recognition? Cash? I would try paid first though, given the time vs cash balance of most college kids.

In terms of delivering a value prop right off the bat, check out britekite's header graphic/animation - I've seen few sales pitches that get the job done as well.

You should add in Calvin, btw, we had the distinction of sending more grad students to UM than UM undergrad did.
The article even linked to it: http://mr09.fileave.com/
Subtract 1 karma from yourself each time up-vote or down-vote is used; this effectively turns karma into "money" that can be spent on maintaining good discussion and high quality submissions.

This would make people think twice before down-voting. It would also reduce "knee-jerk" up-votes, as people would be more likely to reserve up-votes for things that truly deserve it.

It would also mean that long-time users will naturally do more of the moderation, as they have lots of points and may not be as afraid to use them.
I wonder if this wouldn't work better for voting:

Subtract 1 karma from yourself each time up-vote or down-vote is used; this effectively turns karma into "money" that can be spent on maintaining good discussion and high quality submissions.

This would make people think twice before down-voting. It would also reduce "knee-jerk" up-votes, as people would be more likely to reserve up-votes for things that truly deserve it.

It would also mean that long-time users will naturally do more of the moderation, as they have lots of points and may not be as afraid to use them.
The oddness in the UK is that train operating companies (TOCs) aren't allowed to own track. Instead there is a separate entity called the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) that owns and maintains the infrastructure. Joe TOC can't really say "London to Edinburgh is our strategic route so we'll happily pay to upgrade it" because Jane Rival TOC running on the same SRA track has zero incentive to contribute. So it's a mess.

At the time, however, this was deemed to be better than allowing Joe TOC a monopoly on route A and Jane TOC a monopoly on route B.

In practice these are State companies still to all intents and purposes. The staff are all members of featherbedded unions and the government will be crucified by the voters if the TOCs screw up too badly, and everyone knows it.
There's more information here: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing

The way I understand it, is that they use AGPL to prevent people from running their own customized mongodb daemons without publishing the patches. This solves the "problem" of web services customizing code and not publishing patches because they're technically not distributing any code.

Note that this doesn't apply to the client drivers, so you can still safely link the drivers into your code and/or modify these drivers.
I agree the monthly fee is not where you want to upsell. I would break it down by feature. A bare bones site is $15/flat. If you want a premium theme, another $15 if you want to tweak colors, $5 customized emails $5/1000. More of a virtual goods approach rather than the hosted solution route.

Also might be some interesting alternate monetization routes. You could set up an Amazon affiliate link so YOU get the bonus for anyone who buys. Have people pay a fee to turn off Adwords on their page (ala Ning) Set up an invitation designer tool and actually help people get their cards printed. That takes time to set up but could be very lucrative.
Ask HN: NaNoWriMo?
I'm curious what Hacker News thinks of this. A total waste of time? A valuable exercise in creativity?

Just for the record, I did it a few years ago, and I'm participating this year as well. And it does take away from the time I spend on this site...
Maybe people like us -- I don't think most people know about tabs.
SugarSync Sweetens File Syncing For Small Businesses
Thanks for the Inc. love, guys. Is there anything you'd like to see us do more of?

--Mike Hofman, Inc.com
I think the big missing piece of the puzzle, though, is full-text searching.

True, but you can emulate it somewhat by indexing on all keywords of the text. MongoDB can index on keys deeply nested in the structure, so you could have a field that's an array of each word in the text and then index on those.
Thx for the suggestion, which I also heard from several beta testers. I think this is a great idea, but we wanted to release something sooner than later.
yeah sorry you're probably right. Seems most people don't really mind clicking back if they clicked on the wrong result.
Ghostery blocks the display of zero-click search results.
I just checked the dictionary and Wikipedia. While both allow for "that guy teaching the class" to be considered a professor, that doesn't seem to be the standard custom. Both stressed the formality of the title, which is the custom I'm familiar with.
Oy, we got the picture.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912777

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919070

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=918211

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911949
There should be a lot of things that make trains more efficient. Here are some of my guesses:

Hard tracks and wheels = less rolling friction?

Less air resistance since one leading car breaks the air for 100+ other cars?

Engine can run at a constant speed

Less changes in speed

Less starts and stops

Slower acceleration
I believe Class B wasn't introduced for that reason, if I remember correctly it had something to do with people with Class A needing to divide stock to leave it in their will or as gifts.
Yeah, I know. It just irritates me how the media eats that shit up and regurgitates it to young wannabe entrepreneurs who aren't as cynical as me.
For those who, like me, have no idea what's going on here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/ - National Novel Writing Month.
Someone did...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Name
accidentally upvoted... I don't see much about A3 given this link
Indeed, and that's how Business Insider is currently handling search. I'm not sure if this is necessarily a "good" solution though. Thoughts?
IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life
Schneier on Zero Tolerance Policies
I don't see the chicken & egg problem. This article pretty clearly showed that he was able to learn about user's needs with only time, persistence, and money
Bah. You're right. I meant ptr == 0 was changed to !ptr.
It's a general purpose search engine, designed to be a drop-in replacement for the majors. However, it does have features that should appeal in particular to schools, homes, and people doing a lot of what is x searches.

Traffic has grown steadily over the past year. While there isn't strictly a need for a new search engine, some decent % of people who try it out like its unique features.
Hmm, they look like a Wholesale Internet reseller.
How to keep your programming partner motivated?
Working on a project with a programmer where we are splitting potential revenue. It has become very hard to move the programmer along and get to a shippable app. He has a full-time job which I understand but if we want our project to be successful we have to get the app to a shippable state. He refuses to set timeline goals.

Anyone have any ideas on how to motivate a programmer to get something done when you are not paying him?
Windows 7’s Early Market Share: Almost 3 Percent
I don't know Dutch law, but this SK might be getting a lesson about playing with the bull....
Explaining UX to Clients
Social Media is Not a Strategy
Use OpenId
Very interesting to note how a top value investor differs from VCs.
When Buffet goes all-in for future of American economy, he goes for a company/industry which has been around for a century or more with stable cash flows. In effect though, future of American economy wont matter much to him unless the economy goes into a severe long depression - which he is betting against.
When VCs go all-in for future of something - they go for companies/industries with no history of profits. That is why they have to use crutches of hype and ipos using the hype. I think the hype machinery is working right now to create value - out of thin air - in clean/green energy tech.
I am not questioning the utility of VC - just questioning its characterization as investment. I think it is just speculation. Calculated at best, done by the smartest people. But still speculation. Just like most of Wall Street.
Using Wireframes to Bring Your Site Together
Just to touch base on why we went with the monthly fee. A majority of other wedding sites offer both a flat fee and monthly. The monthly is nice because that way people don't feel committed. You also have to keep in mind that average engagement lasts 8 months and some brides might choose to keep their sites up after the wedding.

There are tons of other monetization ways - but right now we are trying to focus on the main revenue model.

Another question I wanted to bring up: What are options for ways to construct a SaaS business model?

1) 37 signals approach - which is a very limited hidden free plan and then numerous other paid options.

2) Squarespace approach - 15 day free trial, with no credit card required. If you don't upgrade then your account is canceled

3) Carbonmade approach - funnel everyone into the site via a free plan and then once registered try to get them to upgrade

4) And then another pretty common one is - credit card down on sign up with a 15 day free trial, which rolls into a paid plan if you don't cancel.

Can you guys think of other options?
It seems to me that a VC would want to increase the number of connections one could possibly make, and not limit it...
Input Validation using the OWASP ESAPI
"The only thing i miss now is vertical splits , i think tmux solves that problem as well."

Ctrl-A+S or Ctrl-A+| ?
A fellow is going to a concert. Realizing he is lost, he stops a passing musician. "How do you get to Carnagie Hall?" he asks. The musician answers quickly: "Practice, practice, practice."

Keep writing. Be mindful of the feedback you receive, but there is very little need to squeeze even more feedback from each post. Just keep writing.
> megadollars

actually, gigadollars...
I'm trying to develop http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html around the idea of shared hierarchical white lists.

this avoids narrowness because you can set the tree depth deep enough to put lots of people on your whitelist.

Scobleizer complains about the other people inviting other people into your life. Outer Circle suffers from this problem, but you do get to control who gets to invite other people into your life.
An App so You'll Never Forget
CNN's New Website Deconstructed
Whenever I need to think about ways to motivate users, I head over Yahoo and their social patterns area. They've got a decent set of user recognition patterns and, more importantly, descriptions and reasons why to apply them to your site. Check out:
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/people/reputatio...
I didn't offer my opinion one way or the other. I was summarizing Jacob's point for the person I replied to that subtly missed it.
I'm one of the developers from Chargify. Are you in our private beta? Can I help you with anything?
"It seems like this should be pretty easy, and indeed Google does provide tools to calculate ROI, but apparently not to optimize it. What they do provide is a tool to optimize your cost-per-action. Does anyone know why this is?"

I think you're wrong. Google does not and cannot optimize your cost-per-action -- you need to figure your CPA out because that is dependent on your business execution and flow. How can Google optmize your CPA if they don't even know your operational costs?

With google's conversion optimizer, you are optimizing your ROI if you find the right CPA figure for each ad. IMO they did a great job with the conversion optimizer, by turning the complex problem of adwords ROI optimization into a much simpler problem of calculating your CPA.
And at least still show search results for 'computer' like the user asked for. Otherwise the page is completely useless.
NaNoWriMo is like running linux on your PC.

It's great if you have enough time to dedicate to the project and you'll certainly get a lot out of it.

But if you don't have a good amount of free time, it's best to avoid.
Well, I don't have a blog, and I don't want to get into too much detail, but I can give a quick overview of our main usage.

Basically, the core problem we needed to solve was to have a reliable datastore which is able to detect race conditions when multiple webservers are handling the same data (in essense, multiple webservers handling a request from the same visitor). To do this, we use a simple compare-and-swap trick: each object has a version number which is transmitted when an object is read, and this version number is transmitted back when the object is updated: only when the "old" version numbers match, an update is performed, otherwise an error is thrown, and the webserver re-processes the entire request from the start. I believe a similar trick is used in memcached for CAS operations, and it works great in situations where the chance of a race condition occurring is relatively small.

Now, for all this to work, we need to have a datastore that lets us atomically compare and swap these objects: this is where, for us, projects based on Amazon Dynamo start to become suboptimal. I believe it's theoretically possible to detect race conditions with such projects if you set the amount of writers to more than half the amount of replicas, but it just starts to give you a feeling you're using it for an unintended purpose.

MongoDB, on the other hand, provides the ability to define stored procedures. Furthermore, they guarantee that this happends atomically: only one client can update a single object at the same time, which is a great guarantee. Because of this, we could write a trivial stored procedure that takes 2 arguments (the old version number and the replacement object), and does the compare-and-swapping. I even believe MongoDB can do "update if these fields still match these values" operations nowadays, so it looks like this functionality is even integrated within MongoDB.

Of course, in addition to this, we also need the datastore to be highly available and limit the risk of data loss as much as possible: MongoDB has this area covered really well, and automatic failover is implemented within the client drivers.

And this is basically all there's to it. Because of the guarantees MongoDB provides, the work we needed to do was reduced to a minimum. Of course, features like ad-hoc querying and their plans to implement map/reduce capabilities help too (we've already invested a lot of time into Hadoop and Map/Reduce applications, so it all fits).

All in all, it seems MongoDB just came into existence at exactly the right time for us, and the people developing it seem like a very active, passionate bunch of people. I haven't got regret choosing them.
Seems like a cute design, but done on a budget by Verizon. Their oversight to iPhones is possibly bigger than organic SERP.
Isn't the content network clicks generally of much lower quality? The idea being non-content network clicks come from people proactively searching while content network is more passive.
Redis is almost perfect for a queue because of it's lists and atomic operations. And, most of all, because it's persistent. It's amazing how many queues aren't persistent.

I'm glad someone finally did this, it could be a great solution. I'm looking forward to digging into this.
I would use this with a slightly improved UI. The bright color scheme with pink for keywords doesn't really work. But the results were spot on!
My mod-up should be considered shared by 37signals and the product they mention in the "CEO Office Hours" post, Grasshopper.
I have to say the basalt monolith part was one of the funniest things I've ever read on HN.

Can you recommend some resources where the unenlightened among us can get a solid jump start?
Plane Gets 45 MPG at 207 MPH, Capable of 100 MPG (Better Than Most Cars)
ahh, eccentric explorers. who are they in our time?
Why would someone who is not a Java guy in the trenches need to track Java-related names?
If you buy the Android Dev Phone from Google, you get full support for building and installing Android from source. The source code includes the kernel, libraries, and applications - except for a few closed-source apps from Google (Maps, GMail, Google sync providers) or added by carriers.

Every phone sold by a carrier (at least, all the ones I know of) is TiVoized. That is, the user does not have root access and there is no supported way to modify or reflash the system partition. However, for most models the community have discovered ways for owners to bypass these restrictions and jailbreak their devices. Once this is done, you can install modified OS builds.

Even on a stock, non-rooted phone, Android applications are less restricted than, say, iPhone applications. You can install an application over USB or HTTP. (Unlike the iPhone you do not need any sort of certification or third-party signature.) With user confirmation, applications can override standard functionality. For example, you can write your own home screen or dialer or email app and then use it to replace the built-in one.
OSSEC: Agentless to save the day
Speed reading: How I started reading 3-4 times faster in a pretty short time
Time to upgrade open source perceptions of Gartner
I was strong-armed into opening an office in India for an american media company a couple years ago. The caste system is strong as ever-- it's just an economic caste. On the whole people don't give a shit about the technology -- only how many people work under them. It's really quite laughable.

For instance, if you are a "fresher" right out of school you crashed through some .NET/Java course that didn't teach you a damn thing about how to think. But after an afternoon of writing shitty code that someone else will undoubtedly have to clean up, you'll be damned if you have to get up and pour your own hot tea. That's what servants are for. They are so openly demeaning to people it's disturbing. Strict hierarchy is so culturally ingrained that people rarely know how to function outside of a bureaucratic structure.
Less efficient. Sending the intro and letting recipients ignore it is much quicker, instead of going through those 3 steps (compose two emails, wait for responses, compose introduction).
Am I searching for the wrong thing? All my custom searches did not produce good results. In fact, some were just embarrassing. None of them had the 'zero click answer' thing. Props for trying, but all the major search engines have their own 'instant answers' as well as results that are reasonable most of the time.
Thanks, nicely done.
Landing Pages That Convert
I visited the site because I saw their commercial on TV. I imagine most folks will hear about it through their marketing campaigns.

They have plenty of smart folks over there - is it possible they did this intentionally? If their goal is to promote a phone launching later this week, perhaps SEO is not their top concern here?
That's part of SEO. But if you're optimizing for search engines, that includes controlling how your result shows up and what extra things show up too.

If you want to stick to your pedantic definition, then I'll put it like this: Apple isn't just at #1, they have an additional eight links present before anything else shows up. Droid has one link to their nine.
Figuring out a way to monetize the mobile space in this way has eluded platform providers, location-based services, and advertisers for about a decade. Maybe it's unfortunate, but when this happens and the $$ comes, we'll see some radical innovation with LBS.

Call me new-fashioned but I'm looking forward to walking down the street and, at a glance of my phone, seeing all of the cool events and activities currently going on within my proximity...
And, most of all, because it's persistent.

Just a slight caution, since Redis stores it's data in memory and asynchronously writes out to disk it is possible to lose small amounts of data in a crash. In most cases this is an acceptable trade off for the speed of an in-memory database though.

There is also plenty of good info on the project page - http://code.google.com/p/redis/
How Did the Chinese Create Snow?
Want a Stronger Democracy? Invest in Education
Seasoned vs rookie designers
Copying content out of a textbook is way easier than writing down original thoughts.
Toronto Wedding
Welcome to Wedding.TO, where we offer you the best in wedding services in Toronto such as wedding photography, wedding video, wedding limousines, wedding djs, wedding dresses and much more. We customize packages for your budget needs and can give you excellent value for whatever it is that you are looking for.
Jung's Red Book: The art of psychology