cinbun8

* HN Companies and sock puppets pushing agendas

* Hacker news counter culture movements and backlashes. Seems to be bipolar with pro Rust / anti Rust every day of the week.

* Hacker news nice guys who have account names like "mothsonasloth" or something really depraved. Along with all the other hypocrites

* Hacker news Admins and big personalities driving content trends on the site e.g. (/u/patio11)

* Recycling of posts / knowledge, since there are always new people joining. You get things like "TIL that microservices are awesome" trending once every month. Which is frustrating for veteran users

* Hacker news arm chair generals/economists/politicians. The points system rewards trendy content and doesn't necessarily mean quality. Unlike points in Stackoverflow, there is some degree of confidence in the users competency.

* The fact that Hacker news is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times.

* The "Hacker news Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect

So it came down to cost.

> Over the years, the privacy and blocking concerns were enough to cause us to think about switching from reCAPTCHA. But, like most technology companies, it was difficult to prioritize removing something that was largely working instead of brand new features and functionality for our customers.

I like that they're upfront about this. In most companies / teams of this size, these issues are always swept under the carpet until something ugly forces you to clean up at a later point in time. It's just unavoidable.

Interestingly I did not know about it and only found out whilst complaining to a friend. Friend pointed me to this selection alternative, but it was not obvious.

Do you folks have book recommendations that have tips along these lines? I find these useful while driving hard conversations too (Example: Letting someone go from the team).

> Even then, same-sex reproduction will face one more biological hurdle: scientists would need to somehow make a cell derived from a woman, who has two X chromosomes, into a sperm cell with one X and one Y chromosome, and do the reverse, turning an XY male cell into an XX female egg cell

So no time soon.

I'm still only just getting used to the whole surrogacy thing (not related to the same-sex procedure described in the latter section of the article) that gay couples use today. When I grew up, none of my friends were from gay parents that had the child through a surrogate mother. It's becoming more and more common now. There are even books aimed at explaining gay relationships - http://www.gayrva.com/arts-culture/the-most-amazing-german-c...

Not that I'm against it or for it. Just observing that it was not something I had to understand while growing up.

You do hear horror stories (like that indie developer who quit his day job to make a game and went broke), but that has more to do with little to no planning for plan B.

> At an annual “rewards check-in,”...

It looks to me like this is old wine in a new bottle. Instead of calling it a bell curve you give it a new name. For a corporation to change a system like this where performance reviews are tied to fixed budgets is next to impossible.

Most feedback that I give my employees are during a lunch conversation or a code review. Trickle feedback works quite well. I'm against annual performance reviews too. Adjustments in compensation are not mapped to fixed goals for a year or 8 week reviews. Whoever gets more shit done in the interest of the company gets a pay hike when we can accommodate it. Simple.

Streaming any game in real time and getting enough folks to watch it is still a problem that needs a solution with more polish. Twitch does not keep up and `Steam streaming` does not work half the time. I'd stream games on gaming.youtube.com if they did a better job at it and have a product focused around that.

I can foresee a future where youtube can get those eyeballs on `gaming.youtube.com` instead of twitch.tv. Youtube is already popular for gaming reviews.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch.tv#Acquisition_by_Amazo...

In Singapore or the United States. This is the route they take to avoid this problem.

> I really don't think it's about customer security

It is. Even with the security involved you frequently see people responding to the `You won a lottery from Coca Cola` and getting defrauded.

> Who are the right people to contact who can do something about this?

You're asking for a framework that would benefit SaaS startups. Fair enough. This will take time. Recurring billing is important, but what about contracts ? Did you know that you need a signed document for each customer that a SaaS company engages with in India ? It needs to be signed physically. Credit card charges are only the first step. From a broader perspective starting a company from here is still hell.

You either use a 3rd party provider that can set up recurring billing and move the money into an Indian bank account (like 2CO) or move the base of operations to Singapore / US so you can set that up. India is not startup friendly and this will be the case for some time to come. There is very little incentive to make things easier for the little fish.

While the website looks sleek, I'm not sure the what the expected ROI is on the 3 crores spend. What are we to expect of this system ? That government officials can be held accountable for not maintaining attendance ?

It reminds me of the very first job I held. Work would be allotted to me and I'd finish it in 5-6 hours and head home. I'd work an hour or two on researching how to improve our existing systems and implement them the next day. At the end of the week a manager pulled out a report that said I'd clocked low hours and I was punished for it. Those who stayed back to have tea and a late supper clocked more hours and were considered `hard working`.

Attendance != productivity or progress

I'd imagine it looks something like this when it is finished - http://blog.dreamfactory.com/add-a-rest-api-to-any-sql-db-in.... The concept is similar although I've not used it personally myself. Given that it is open source perhaps Postgresql can learn from the user experience this product has to offer.

* Two minutes in and I don't know what the product is. What problem does this solve ?

* Some of those floating bubbles are so small and travel so fast that I cant be bothered to move my mouse to hover over them. You are making the user "work" to know the product. Knowing the product should be less work, especially for early adopters.

* I was unable to find the sign up page. Finally found it under `subscribe`. Not the best word to choose.

* The pricing is confusing. For 5 apps: Total - 0$; Application - 20$; Base - 10$;. I'm not sure what that is.

* Ability to export to PDF / HTML / ZIP.

* Offline mode - (Which can be actually be achieved through HTML export)

* Public / Private guides

* Send guide via email

* Link to a step in another guide.

EC2 Does have SLAs - http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/

Security: Amazon does not makes any guarantee as to whom it will disclose your data

Please look at the Security and Data privacy section of the agreement - http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/

Persistence: ensuring persistence of your data (that includes, effort to set up the system) is complicated over EC2

Not sure what this pertains to. Ephemeral storage ? Permanent storage being backed up to S3 ?

Management: there are very few integrated management tools for a cloud deployed on EC2

Amazon's web management tool for EC2 is pretty good. Netflix open sourced their tool Asgard which does precisely what this - https://github.com/Netflix/asgard. Perhaps Asgard was not available at the time this comment was made.

The comments on Network and Cost still hold good. Network IO latency can affect throughput severely and cost is not a great win in the long run.

Why would you single out EC2 if you were looking at `Cloud computing` ? The question can be broader in nature even though the OP expressed interest in EC2 specifically.

Does the framework only work on one domain per account ? I was wondering if you could do away with that `domain` field and just ask for the email OR ask for the domain when the user enters the site by activating the account.

I wonder how much time he had on his hands to toy around with feedback emails everyday. Would an email filter with an automatic response not have sufficed ?

Participate in online communities; Get involved in an open source project; Find people in your area that love to code or share other interests (surely there must be some); Make a cool project and show it to us. The possibilities are endless.

Know that what you are feeling is a passing shower. It will wear off when you connect with like minded people and do / share different things. Ups are downs are normal.

This is important. Sometimes founders question themselves when they do not see hockey stick growth. Your product may not be in the kind of business that sees such growth or you may be growing slowly and steadily. The OP's persistence paid in the end.

Congratulations.