schammy

I know! And the amazing thing is just to think about how relevant this is to Hacker News! Because when I think, gee, I wonder what technology Mega Corp is raking in the billions, this it the very first site that comes to mind!

Fair enough, however, $9.99 is no longer the common price point. Most new releases are $12.99 now, which many people think is too high, and the problem is the retailers can't do anything about it because of this "agency pricing".

I had no problem paying $9.99 for books on my kindle, but most of them are $12.99 now and I just feel like that's too much. In some cases, buying the physical hardcover is actually cheaper than $12.99 too, and that's what REALLY pisses some people off. The physical nature of the product surely is at least $1 - $2 of the actual cost of the the book, so buying it digitally gets rid of this cost.

Also, many books are destroyed if they're not sold (hence the "if you bought this book without a cover" warning in the front of many books). By moving to digital, the publishers no longer have to eat these costs.

So basically, eBook pricing is complete bullshit.

Yeah, I know, interest rate used to be good. I used to get 5% on my emigrant direct savings account. Now it's 1%, and I don't know of anything higher (for a money market account anywys)

> Incoming calls will interrupt data activity.

I don't see why people make a big deal out of this. How often do you really need to talk AND use data at the same time? I've never, ever, ever, ever, ever had to or even had the inclination that I wished I could. I think it's one of those features that sounds cool, but in reality no one really uses.

I know of no such bank offering interest rates even close to that. You're talking 2.5% - 5%. That's unheard of these days. At my current bank, $1M in a money market account would generate about $2,500/year, which is nothing short of insulting. Who are these fabled banks offering 10x the interest rate?

Especially considering these are almost all jQuery 101 tips, e.g. things people learn within the first month of using jQuery. It's not like these are crazy secrets. I was also quite put off by the "check out my book" reference in the very first sentence.

I'll just chime in here and say "I agree 100%", since all replies to so far (excluding the OP's) are basically calling you a moron. :)

Yes, the test had some serious flaws, but I imagine that removing the free plan was by far the biggest factor in the results - especially because there's no demo and no trial. I can't imagine signing up for a pay-only service if I can't even try out a demo of it before entering in my credit card.

I found value from the post, even though, yes, it is flawed.

The second I learned this trick, many years ago, I've used it in everything. The argument that it's "slow" is ridiculous. It's like using while(i--) instead of a for() to shave 0.0000001 milliseconds off your javascript loops. Just admit you have OCD and move on ;)

Nice call. Not sure if I could call it my "favorite" of the year, but it's definitely a damn nice product. I used it to purchase tickets for all of the flights I took this year and was very happy with the experience.

Facebook is not a startup.

Sorry, when you said "I've been involved in startups for the last 9 years (the last 4 as a technical founder)", I took "the last 4" to mean the last 4 startups, not years - from which I gathered there had to be at least 1 more, hence 5 startups. Ok, 3 in 9 years, that's a different story. Sorry, I was kind of grouchy when I wrote my comment... it just seemed like you were playing off any and all problems though as "eh.. it's the weekend".

Yeah, because everything Apple does is 100% original. For example, they don't notice someone has written a nice app for organizing your books and copy it to the point where it's almost cut and paste for their own iBooks software. Nope, Apple would never do such a thing like that.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...

The article is not talking about "bugs that can wait til Monday" or all night coding sessions. It's talking about emergencies that affect your customers that must be dealt with immediately.

You've been with at least 5 startups in 9 years. That suggests to me that none of them were terribly successful, in which case I suppose just about any problem could wait til Monday.

My startup has almost 20,000 paying customers and if something goes wrong, you bet your ass I'm on it immediately, whether it's 3am and I had more than few drinks earlier that evening, or I'm in Hawaii on my birthday and 7 servers lose power and I have to spend the next 5 hours dealing with that mess. Did I mention it was my birthday and I was in Hawaii?

These scenarios are rare, but they do happen. I would never actually take my laptop to a restaurant, but if something bad happens it needs to be dealt with pronto. In the example from the story, I would have either delayed going out, or if it happened when I was already out, then I would leave as soon as possible. In general I don't put work before family or fun but every once in a while you have to if you want to run a successful business.

It's already half garbage anyways. Recipes and fashion tips? Just what I always wanted!

Would be cool if things could be categorized somehow so I could only see the top stories being shared for things I actually care about. I realize this isn't really possible but one can dream.

Yeah, only problem is that is very inefficient from a storage perspective. It depends on the situation of course. If it's only a few thousand per day for example, not a big deal, but otherwise that could end up biting you in the ass hard after a while.

Wait a second... You're telling me there's a senator thinking for himself and the good of the American people, instead of having lobbyists and special interest groups think for him? This is all wrong. Impeach the SOB!

Yes, that's what I meant. Constructive criticism is fine and is much appreciated by most parties, but most of the comments I read (this story is a perfect example) are just proclaiming that something is stupid and will certainly fail.

While I agree with some of you that this probably wouldn't get nearly as much attention if there was an unknown team/investors behind it, I still find all of the negativity surrounding startups these days on HN and other sites like TechCrunch to be annoying and totally counter-productive. If you think something is stupid or lame, fine - whatever. But do you really need to tell us all about it? Why do you think any of us care? My guess is that most of these people are probably failed entrepreneurs and the only thing that makes them feel better is wishing the same failure upon others trying to make it.

As for myself, I am not particularly interested in this service and have no plans to use it, but that doesn't mean it's lame or that there's no market for it or that it can't be a success.

Yup. This move is based purely on greed. But as if godaddy doesn't make a metric asston of money already? I guess I don't really get it. The only thing this is going to result in is a lot of pissed off customers and a lot of chargebacks. I guess that's good though, godaddy is a horrible company, anything that makes people hate them more is a step forward in my eyes.

I hear lots of awesome things about Linode, however they are actually hosted by Rackspace so with Rackspace's known reliability issues... maybe an issue.

Another service to consider is VPS.net. We have 6 virtual servers with them. They are cheap and perform well, their control panel is great and they have tons of great pre-configured OS installs. However downtime can sometimes be an issue. Usually it's not major, e.g. a server will just be unavailable for say 30 seconds or maybe a few minutes, but this happens probably an average of once or twice a month for each of our servers so it can get annoying. Like I said though the outages are usually minor. There's only been one that I remember that was major, and lasted several hours. We've been using VPS.net for about 8 months and overall are very happy with them. Not sure I'd recommend them for your setup but we only use them for a custom built CDN and for that it works very well.

Agreed. We do colocation for about 50 servers. Up front costs higher, long term costs MUCH lower - but man can it be a pain in the ass sometimes when there's a problem. :)

Is Bing really a big source of revenue for them though? I thought something like 90% of their profit was Windows and Office.

Either way, good point in terms of promoting their own search engine, but unless it's a significant source of profit then again I say, what is the point?

What I wish is that Microsoft would just give up on MSIE. For its time, IE6 was the shit. But they let it linger for what, 6 years? Meanwhile Firefox started being awesome, and now we also have Chrome which seems to be setting the standard these days.

As a web developer, MSIE has caused me nothing but hell. Versions 7 and 8 improved a lot, but they still have very annoying headaches that I am constantly dealing with.

One of my biggest fantasies is Microsoft one day realizing how much they HURT rather than HINDER the web, and just throwing in the towel. "We give up."

Developing their own browser does nothing for Microsoft anyways. It's not like using MSIE makes you special or makes your brand awareness of Microsoft any stronger. If they had any forethought for the future, they would just give up now. One can fantasize, anyways... :P

Yes, this is true - it's not going to stop someone who really wants in from finding your SSH port. But at the very least, it's useful when looking through your logs, because the ONLY failed log in attempts you will see are from people who mean business.

Did they learn nothing from the Recurly debacle a few months back?

I don't think their pricing is bad but they need a starter plan that's less than $99/month.

Also, why are both Chargify and Recurly doing "bucket" plans with such high starting price points? Why not charge based on actual usage? If you have 500 paying customers you can justify $99/month no problem, but most people are going to take a while to build up to that size of customer base. These people can't start off with a $99/month plan. At least give maybe the first 10 customers for free, or charge on actual usage, e.g. $X per 10 customers or something like that.

One thing's clear at least, if I ever go into the recurring payment business, Chargify and Recurly are both very good examples of what NOT to do to win customer loyalty.

We're monitoring traffic for 260,000 web sites with over 200 million daily page views. We have almost 10TB of data stored. That requires a lot of servers. Yes, it's sharded. There are no slave servers.

Well, most of those queries are just to look up the "name" for a given ID. And of course we use memcached to cache almost everything. But it still requires a bunch of round trip requests to either the database or memcached.

Before anyone asks "why don't you just use a join?" it's because we have tons of different types of data stored in a couple of summary tables. It's 100x faster to just grab all the IDs and values, and then grab the names one at a time (most of which will always be in memcached) than to do it as a join. Don't believe me? We used to do it that way and the performance sucked.

My concern about that is communication between web and DB servers. Some reports need hundreds of queries to generate - wouldn't the lag severely slow this down?

Most of our servers are DB anyways. We have 2 load balancers, 6 web servers, and ~40 DB servers.

Thanks. That is exactly my fear. Most of the commenters on our blog told us this probably isn't a good idea so we're very unlikely to do it at this point.

I'M JUST SO DAMN SICK OF DEALING WITH PHYSICAL SERVERS. :)

I was referring to power loss. Although in the cloud, it's not actual "power loss" that's the issue, but the end result is the same - the database is shut down uncleanly and must be dealt with before coming back online.