Stop Asking Me to "Sign Up" - <AUTHOR> http://www.gkogan.co/blog/stop-asking-me-to-sign-up <comment><USER2> Author, I'll tell you what the #1 barrier for me to sign up for anything is going to be...

I'm probably going to get spammed if I do. Because I have to implicitly provide email or social network details, and then I'm inviting myself to be hounded with email newsletters or asked to like your posts, whatever.

Even worse, if your company isn't doing so hot in 3 months, you may decide to sell your contact list to a 3rd party. Your privacy policy for information I provide you may allow for this in a weasel-worded paragraph legal suggested you add somewhere buried in there that I don't care to read, even if that was never your intention.

I invite myself to be bothered by your business (or others) in this way, in perpetuity, in exchange for a service that I'm not sure is even worth the annoyance yet. Again, I'm not even sure if I should bother reading through all your FAQs yet, let alone any EULAs.

This is a difficult value proposition.

Is there some way that a startup can convince me that they will not treat me as a commodity to be sucked up and spat out, but instead a precious potential partner to hold closely and want to serve in exchange for money and/or feedback?

Can you word that into your TOS or EULAs to let us know that you are committed to not jerking me around?

That's what I want before I sign up.

Call it "Sign up", "Try it free", "First Hit's On the House", wording is irrelevant. I'm looking for a commitment and some kind of indicator that the risk to my already at-limit information overload is low.

Oh and for the love of god, please don't make me install another fucking app if you could just as easily do the job with a web page that looks good in mobile chrome or safari. It's insulting.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I'm on the fence about whether a webapp/product is right for me, and I look for a demo button, and I find a demo button, and it says "Start Verbing" (for appropriate value of "Verb"), and I click that button, and I get a signup page ...

... then I know I'm going to hate this company, because they're more concerned with their conversions than on providing user value, and I close the browser tab.

If your button is going to a Sign Up page, then you should label it Sign Up.

However, I think gk1 does some of his examples a grave disservice, especially Gliffy's "Start Drawing" button. This is not a disguised SignUp button, because when I click that button, I can actually start drawing, and I am not called upon to sign up! So, good job gliffy, way to show me the user value.

If you make me sign up one instant earlier than is _necessary_ in order for your product or business model to work, then I know you're a spammer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good advice, though I wish the author had focused a bit more on informing the user about the product to stimulate demand than the semantic benefits of just changing the wording.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, author here. I'm curious what you mean by this:

> informing the user about the product to stimulate demand

If you're interested in a specific topic or question and it's something I have experience with, then I may expand in a future post.

<comment><USER4> Hi! I meant the early section where you were talking about giving the prospective user more detail on the product or service, as opposed to just changing the call to action from 'sign up!' to 'get started!' or 'Begin somethingizing!'

I was thinking of the recent trend for just offering a very brief video or textual pitch and inviting submission of email and other details - what you talked about as examples of asking for blind commitment without adding value. I think those issues are worthy of full articles in themselves.

On-revisiting the page to check your original wording I was amused to see how well your pop-up exemplified the argument you made! I'm not big on salesmanship but found your material of a much higher standard than average, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that feedback. I'm actually testing something similar to what you've described on a few projects, and will be able to write about it in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I disagree, if I'm looking to get started with your product then having standard language means I can easily get started. On the other hand, if I don't know what your product does from the rest of the site then I won't even care enough to try to find you renamed it to in your misguided attempts at being unique.</comment>


Historious just got public pages and subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://historio.us/

<comment><USER2> I'd highly recommend you all secure historious.com while you still can get it at a decent price (read: before you get funding, big name recognition, etc). While domain hacks are cheap and cool in the startup world, they confuse average people like our parents and neighbors.

The potential for confusion is one of the reasons that Yahoo forked over big bucks to buy delicious.com and redirect del.icio.us there. Even if you wanted to keep your domain hack, you could always point the .com version to your domain hack. It sure beats letting someone else show ads and confuse customers to where they think you've gone out of business.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very good point and we are certainly considering it, thank you for your feedback!

EDIT: We have historious.net and .org now and they are pointing to historio.us. Thanks again for the nudge!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We are a bootstrapped startup that aims to change the way you bookmark sites. In order to remain bootstrapped, we just instituted a $3/mo subscription that gives users some perks.

We also launched public user pages where you can share your bookmarks and give users the link so they can search your bookmarked items. This is my page, for example:

<http://stavros.historio.us/search/>

We would, once more, appreciate your feedback!

<comment><USER3> It could be clearer whose historious you are searching. It is mentioned at the top of the page, but the text is tiny compared to what you actually interact with on the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, good point, we'll add more cues. Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember Kaylon's PowerMarks from years ago. I still miss the speed and ease of their tagging. I think search results, a page at a time, is a bit of a different paradigm. You might want to take a look at PowerMarks and see whether any aspects make sense to you, perhaps as an adjunct.

Best wishes! Giving your site a go, myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that reference. Unfortunately, the software is Windows-only, which I don't own... I'll see if I can run it somewhere else, thanks again!</comment></comment>


We still need to raise $1,599 this month. In less than 24 hours - <AUTHOR> http://somafm.com/

<comment><USER2> Maybe if the subject line was a little more explicit about why, for what, more people might click it. Example:

 _Still need to raise $1599 to stay commercial-free - underground/alternative Internet radio broadcasting from San Francisco._

Both my own personal experience and text-ad studies I've seen suggest that specific, concrete info drives higher value click-throughs (eg, more people willing to use or pay or your product).

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, and I need about $1200 to pay my taxes from last year. And I'm homeless, deeply in debt, and trying to declare bankruptcy. So?

Why is this begathon posted here?

<comment><USER4> Because we love soma.fm - it's a free service that many of us enjoy

<comment><USER3> I have gone to lunch and come back. It was amusing to watch the upvotes and downvotes for my remarks before I left. That seems to still be going on.

I appreciate that you love it. But that is exactly why they don't need a begathon and shouldn't have one. They could post their donation goal for the month on the site (at the beginning of the month) and post regular updates as to how much they have gotten so far. If it is looking to be a shortfall, an email to their subscribers would be appropriate. No begging required. They offer something of value and they need something of value in return to keep it going. That requires communication, not begging.

And, frankly, with an established audience and relatively highish monthly inflow, at this point they should be hiring someone with experience to help them raise and manage an endowment so one slow month doesn't threaten to take them off the air. Their begathon loudly announces that their business model needs work as it isn't being handled very professionally or responsibly.

I did a lot of volunteer work over the years and I have studied how Not-For- Profit models work. I am not just talking out my ass here.

Peace and carry on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I listen to DI.FM at work. The free streams are ad-supported, but the only ads i ever get are tasteful ones for their own premium service (which lets you listen ad-free in higher quality), seems like a pretty sustainable model.

Oh, they've been running ads for AlienVPS recently, which is actually kind of relevant to my work. : )

</comment><comment><USER6> I didn't realize they were that short, so I donated, again. As a listener (as I type this), I appreciate the post.

<comment><USER7> As a very new listener (as of like 15 minutes ago), I was happy to chip in a bit. Already hooked to the ambient station.

Even though it seems they'd prefer never to have ads, I wouldn't mind them having a few advertisements at the top of every hour, or some similar arrangement. I wonder how much sparse ad placement would help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd forgotten about 'guestbook' pages on web sites!

</comment><comment><USER9> Just wanted to say this was the first i'd heard of SomaFM, and am checking it out now. So far - pretty good!</comment>


Qubes: The Open Source OS Built for Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/788085-qubes-the-open-source-os-built-for-security

<comment><USER2> Should be [https://qubes-os.org/](https://qubes-os.org/)</comment>


Educated Germans avoid social media - <AUTHOR> http://www.dw.com/en/educated-germans-avoid-social-media/a-18875970 <comment><USER2> As a german I can tell from experience that in Germany it is much more accepted — and quite often even sympathized with — not to have a facebook account than for example in Spain or Brazil. And it makes me proud, if I'm allowed to add that.

<comment><USER3> As a German I don't use Facebook. Most of my friends also don't use Facebook. For me it's just a waste of time and doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER4> I'm not German and I don't use Facebook either. For the last few years, I've slowly noticed that people who use Facebook only do so because everybody else does and loathe it somewhat, but can't bring themselves to pull the plug because of network effects.

<comment><USER3> What I found interesting is the study that shows that Facebook depresses people, because all their friends put up their best moments and photos and so seem to have all wonderful lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The main reasons social media is used:

a) You have a career that requires some PR management

b) You're the type who gets pleasure in showing off (the best image of) yourself to others

c) You are bored, and you get a small thrill from the attention

Are there any other reasons to be a regular, active participant on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook? I get 'just having one' as a sort of contact directory, but beyond that...

Would an educated, independent thinker, someone who really tries to engage and understand the world and has discovered interesting opportunities which they pursue, really have any reason to spend significant time on social media?

<comment><USER6> Planning social engagements with friends. I can easily see who is going, let organisers and everyone else know if they want to that I may not make it, as well as see if there are other engagements that I've already agreed to go to.

I could do this with email and calendars, but I don't know 95% of my friend's email addresses. We talk over SMS and Facebook Messenger. If I wanted to find another one of my friend's I just search for their name, and if they have privacy settings set to only allow friends of friends to search for me - that's OK too!

I don't have to ask a friend for their email address, or their phone number and then ask that person for their email address. I don't have to phone or SMS people to see if they want to come, and I have an easy way to track it.

Sure, we all got along fine before social media. But Facebook has made planning social events ridiculously easy.

I haven't posted on my wall since 2013 and none of my information like age, email, phone number, etc is public. Sure Facebook has access to all sorts of conversations I've had over the years, but so do my local ISP's and data centres.

For anything that I'd truly like to keep private, I use PGP, OTR or chat in person.

<comment><USER7> the non naive way to look at this is that you and your friends gave up a little freedom (using open, standard and interoperative ways to communicate) for a little convenience (proprietary controlled communication medium)

<comment><USER8> How do they give up that freedom? Did they sign some agreement with FB never ever use any other forms of communication / events coordination? No, they did not. Can we just cut this kind of crap? Facebook or any other social sites did not take away any freedoms from anyone.

<comment><USER9> > Facebook or any other social sites did not take away any freedoms from > anyone.

The freedom from data being stored about the respective persons?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe it's because a lot of Germans have already experienced a total surveillance state and what that means for their freedom/well being when the information is turned against them, or, at least, remember the stories from their relatives who did.

<comment><USER11> Btw, I'll suggest the movie "Das Leben der Anderen".

Even today in German schools the GDR and the Nazi time are some of the most important topics in history class, including us visiting the places, talking to eye witnesses, etc.

That leaves quite an impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What the story ignores, but the data makes quite clear, is that Germany is already an outlier here, regardless of the level of education. Probably because income is less associated with educational level in a richer, more functional society like Germany. Also notice from the data that the difference between educated and less-educated folks is very slight, in terms of social media engagement.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is only a measure of "social media popularity of national offices of either head of state, head of government, or government as a whole" (with respect to national education levels) according to the original report. [1] The report also classifies the social media strategies of various OECD countries, but does not list Germany's. [2, right side] Perhaps the Chancellor's office has other priorities.

[1] [http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset- Management/oecd/governa...](http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset- Management/oecd/governance/government-at-a- glance-2015_gov_glance-2015-en#page148)

[2] [http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset- Management/oecd/governa...](http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset- Management/oecd/governance/government-at-a- glance-2015_gov_glance-2015-en#page149)

</comment><comment><USER14> Germany has a unique historical relationship towards domestic spying and intrusion. I wonder if that influences Germans attitudes towards websites that accrue personal data.

</comment><comment><USER15> Germany has - after Japan - the second oldest population on the planet. Maybe this plays a role here, too as young people almost always use at least some social media - regardless of their level of education.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find the whole premise of this article a bit weird. It starts with "Good news". Why is it automatically good news that educated people use social media less?

I'm a German living in the United States and find this part of German society pretty annoying: Being super careful about anything that could potentially encroach on your privacy (for example see the fate of Google Street View in Germany).

<comment><USER17> Why is being careful about your privacy annoying?

<comment> singiht34-02 "(for example see the fate of Google Street View in Germany)"

and b/c you can't find everyone easily on facebook

<comment><USER17> I am not sure if that answers my question.

> _I 'm a German living in the United States and find this part of German > society pretty annoying: Being super careful about anything that could > potentially encroach on your privacy_

In the case of Google Maps, I understand that a non-functional application might be annoying and at least Google makes some effort to blur data. But in my reading of the original post, the poster is annoyed that the German community at large has decided to exercise their rights to privacy.

<comment><USER16> It just seems like a national pastime to post as little information about yourself or anything you're associated with anywhere online at all. As an expat that it makes it hard to stay in contact with many people.

It's everybody's right to do whatever they want with their personal information, but in Germany it often gets to a point where you're being judged if you yourself decide to post something on a social network site.

It also leads to all kind of weird regulations from the government (again, see Street View as an example or the more recent EU-wide regulation of a minimum age of 16 to open social network accounts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if there are better and/or more alternatives to social media in Germany than elsewhere. Maybe they're just too busy with other things, and satisfied, to bother with social media.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do comments on articles count as social media? The German newspaper sites often have very active comment threads

</comment><comment><USER20> >Or is it historical? Have well-educated Germans better internalized the lessons of German history under Nazi and communist rule?

I don't think there's any need to play amateur psychologist. From what I can tell it's cultural from before the great "isms" of the 20th century. My (German) relatives, who arrived in the US in the 1920s, were less likely to share their business with non-family. That's how they were raised.

</comment><comment><USER21> Many people I know moved their asses out of Facebook after Snowden. The NSA did really help American companies /s

</comment><comment><USER22> Could educated Germans have read enough about the Stasi?

<comment><USER9> Or the Gestapo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe social media is seen as a waste of time? While you're reading facebook, you're not producing anything.

<comment><USER24> I think it's safe to say that it's not a matter of a recreational activity vs. "producing something". I think it rather has to do with the fact that Germans are very privacy conscious. Facebook (and other American application providers) have a pretty bad rep.

<comment><USER11> Indeed.

And, additionally, there are also those people who are still stuck on studiVZ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What about sites like reddit? I don't have any stats, but there seems to be a good representation of Germans.

</comment><comment><USER26> Scientific proof that the germans on twitter are retarded!

<comment><USER11> Interesting idea.

Because Felix von Leitner (Fefe) has been arguing the same. Every time he tries to discuss something, he gets long, carefully argued info via email, and completely retarded insults via Twitter.</comment></comment>


Startups should not use GoDaddy. Ever - <AUTHOR> http://pinolio.tumblr.com <comment><USER2> I moved away from GoDaddy a couple of years ago. Now I have a few expiring domains left on there.

Last week I got a notice they were going to charge me for a renewal, which I did not want. So I called the support guy. Twenty or so minutes later, he sent me to a link to fill out a form where all would be taken care of.

Except it wasn't. Just like my previous few encounters with GoDaddy, when I went to the link I learned some obscure detail about my contract with them prevented me from getting what I wanted -- yet allowed them to charge me in full. I'm not going to go into details. It's a perfectly reasonable request on their part. The problem is they have created this monster of add-on services and items, all with little footnotes and gotchas. And it's all geared to extract more money from me.

Last time I had a domain going to expire that I wanted to keep, I went to transfer it over to my new domain guys. The domain was expiring in a month, but I had to complete a GoDaddy form online to make it happen (sound familiar?). The only way to complete the form online was to check a checkbox. The checkbox said that once I checked it I couldn't transfer the domain for another 90 days. Fuckers got me again.

I could tell you a few more like that. It's always some finely-detailed bullshit that ends up with you paying them more. Last week they got me for around 180 bucks.

So now I plan on using the domain I couldn't cancel. I go to the DNS settings. Looks like the new DNS manager is overly complicated and impossibly to use easily. The "adventure" continues.

I swear I hate those bastards. I consider myself a nice enough person, and I have been disappointed by online services in the past -- no big deal. Some online companies "get it" and some not-so-much. But GoDaddy has crossed a line with me somewhere. I'm not sure if it's the used-car-salesmen experience I get checking out or the policies that exist seemingly to endlessly screw me over in various and sundry ways, but it's just a really, really, really bad service in my opinion.

Did I mention I didn't like it so much?

<comment><USER3> Counter anecdote: I've quite a few domains on GoDaddy. I've transfered a few over the years, both to and from GoDaddy, and while the steps where not explained clearly I never had an issue where I was prevented from controlling my domains.

I also used their DNS service for the first time last month and found it pretty straightforward. Maybe I wasn't trying to do something that would have been complex (I didn't set up mail, for example, or any wild-card entries), but it wasn't to "impossible to easily use."

YMMV and all that.

I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it.

I've tried some other registrars (names eluded) me that were purportedly better/cheaper but found _their_ UIs annoying and troublesome in other ways. Maybe it's a case of "the devil you know ...", but I don't find GoDaddy to be the Great Satan some make it out to be.

<comment><USER4> I share both your criticism and praise, but would add that GoDaddy allowed me to do bulk contact editing which (along with pricing) was the reason I switched to them c. 3 years ago.

Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?

<comment><USER5> I'm taking a stab at simple registrations and management with Coffee & Domains (<https://www.coffeeanddomains.com>).

The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.

I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.

There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.

<comment><USER6> Sorry for asking this under such a nice idea but what happens to those who have domains with a company that goes out of business?

<comment><USER5> I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key- Systems and RrpProxy.net (<http://key-systems.net/>). They also run Domain Discount 24 (<http://dd24.com/>) and are a fairly large registrar.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for being so clear (and open) about it, makes me want to try it and maybe transfer everything there.

I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback. I'll fire up Parallels and do some tweaking on the font type. I do all my work on a Mac so I typically just test with IE on Windows and test the other browsers on OS X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with GoDaddy being horrible, but this really isn't just their fault. Certificate revocation does exactly what it says. It's a technical term that everyone using SSL should know and understand the implications of. Their offer of creating a new certificate for you for $15 actually sounds pretty decent.

And, you don't have backups of all your data and domains? While running your sites on a shared host? This really sounds like something that was bound to happen to you. Be glad you got it fixed and I hope you learned your lesson.

<comment><USER8> Backups don't matter in this case. What is he going to do with backups?

<comment><USER9> His sites were down for "days". If he had backups he could have restored the sites to a different server.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but isn't the problem related to the domains not the hosting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I swore off GoDaddy years ago when I was setting up a website for a friend. It took an entire night to FTP up about 100k worth of files to his account. His website was extremely slow as well, so it wasn't just me.

We're talking about a website that got maybe dozens of hits per day.

He was a _paying customer!!!!_ I've never had such a bad host, even from free ones.

Also, I absentmindedly signed myself up for their WHOIS privacy protection. Holy crap was that a mistake! I can't cancel it because it's actually offered by another company Domains By Proxy, but they won't let me log in because the account was magically setup using some bogus credentials and information which they got from the ether or something. So I can't even migrate that account away without sending them a driver's license, and THAT's assuming they have my correct name on file (which is a real possibility that they don't, since nothing else seems accurate). GoDaddy is no help, I have to call DomainsByProxy (which is GoDaddy, btw). DomainsByProxy is no help either, unless I send them a scan of my driver's license.

It pisses me off so much I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it. It's cheaper just to keep paying. Yuck.

<comment><USER11> I noticed transferring a domain to different Godaddy account immediately cancels that domain's privacy-protection service. You can probably try that first before transferring your domain out of Godaddy.

<comment><USER10> I will definitely look into that one.

<comment><USER10> It totally worked. I have to wait 60 days before transferring it out, but I don't mind that at all.

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No one should use GoDaddy, ever; there are many other registrars in their price range that don't share their onerous practices with regards to transfer, takedown, security and privacy and which have much better customer service.

<comment><USER13> which 1?

<comment><USER14> I like Namecheap personally

<comment><USER15> How long have you been using it?

<comment><USER16> I'll chime in. I've been using them since 2007. For me, they're nice and straight-forward. They don't offer any bulk discounts (NN% off for 5 years, etc), but they do occasionally hold sales.

They also raised their rates a few times. When I first joined, they were $8.88/mo. Then they went to $9.29/mo, then $9.69/mo, and now $10.16/mo. Arguably, this may be one of their downsides, but I've never minded. I believe other registrars were also raising their rates around the same time too. (NOTE: prices include the ICANN fee.)

<comment><USER17> You realize VeriSign increases the registry fee 7% each year. NameCheap from my calculation is actually eating into their own margin each year slightly.

I used to use them back in around 2004, love the company, owner is wonderful. Only reason I don't use them is I got a much better deal at Fabulous.com which is designed for large portfolios. I still recommend them to basically anyone looking for a registrar that isn't holding 100 domains or more.

<comment><USER16> Ah, I didn't know that. Good to know. Although, I didn't see an increase each year. Just the few times I listed.

In any case, I highly recommend NameCheap as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Be incompetent, blame others, profit. Host your site on a shared hosting, with another 1000 users, blame godaddy when it goes down. Don't understand ssl, blame godaddy when you make mistakes.

GoDaddy are freaking excellent! for domains that is. All other services are crap, and if you bothered to actually check your facts, read some reviews, you would know that.

<comment><USER19> One of the only reasonable posts in this thread, sounds like it was more like the users fault than godaddy. I would agree for the kind of low tech shared hosting they provide but I have set some VPS servers up on godaddy that have worked quiet well. As long as you don't need their support and build from scratch without a plex/cpanel type setup they have been fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _It turns out GoDaddy only issues the certificate to the domain attached to the hosting (which is somewhat of a stupid association, really, because it shouldn't matter what domain you use as long as you're accessing your content via a correct route)._

If hosting with GoDaddy was the first mistake, this assumption was the second. The whole point of an SSL certificate is to say that the server you are talking to is a server that is authorized to speak on behalf of domain xyz and, as such, they are generally tied to one or more domains.

<comment><USER21> I don't know exactly how GoDaddy works but on my namecheap account, I can issue purchased SSL certificates to any of the domains I have registered there. I assume I may even be able to issue them to domains I do not have registered there (though I have not tried and may be wrong) because they have a verification process.

<comment><USER22> Regardless of where your domain is registered, you can indeed get an SSL cert from Namecheap. I bought a Comodo PositiveSSL for $9/y and couldn't be happier. When I ran into some issues installing it on a Mac mini server, their CS was responsive and friendly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _No one_ should ever use GoDaddy for any reason. I thought that was geek 101 by now.

Also, incidentally, you never host a startup on shared hosting. If a day or two of downtime is a big deal than you gotta go VPS at a minimum.

<comment><USER24> That's not true. For low traffic sites, NFSN and Webfaction are more than capable.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I'd be surprised if a typical DIY VPS webserver can beat nearlyfreespeech.net's uptimes and resilience to burst traffic.

<comment><USER26> Doubtful. Largely in part due to the average 'vps' user not managing things properly -- or knowing how much they need to scale, etc.

Entities that have been doing it for years have things optimized quite a bit to handle the spikes. I suspect the average shared hosting kicks the ass of the average VPS -- particularly in the IO department.

<comment><USER23> Are you guys serious? No doubt there is good shared hosting, but most of it is oversold to shit. "Average shared hosting" is a race to the bottom.

The reason I say VPS is because that way you have guaranteed resources and the ability to debug and fix problems yourself. I guess if you know the right shared host you can get some good value there, but it still seems like a terrible risk to me due to undisclosed limits, or vulnerability to neighbors traffic spikes. When I said "startup" I thought it was implicit that it would not be expected to be a low traffic site, at least not for long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> OK kids, here's what you need to know. There are three levels of your relationship with Godaddy:

Level 1: You're in balls deep. You register your domains with GoDaddy, use their DNS servers and host your shit on their servers. You also get your SSL certs from them. That's what the OP was doing.

Level 2: You're in up to the balls, but that's where it stops. You register with them, host your DNS with them but your website lives on another providers servers and you get your SSL elsewhere.

Level 3: You wearing a condom and don't give them their own key or underwear drawer. In other words, you register your domain with GoDaddy but you host the DNS somewhere else like DNSMadeEasy which costs, but is reliable. You also host your site somewhere else like Linode for example. And your SSL cert is something that costs more but is reliable. I have an EV cert from Verisign which costs but you get better conversions.

Level 3 is the only place you want to be. Pay them the bare minimum, immediately delegate the DNS hosting to a reliable rock solid provider that doesn't black-list DNS servers and use that provider to point your A record to whatever web host you're using. You get cheap domains and the only time you have to wade through GD's cluster fuck interface is when you change DNS providers or want to register another domain.

My primary domain did over 27 million DNS requests last month via DNS Made Easy with a 12 hour TTL and it's been registered with godaddy for over 4 years now with no problems at all.

<comment><USER28> I would still be worried about the domain.

If my DNS provider messes up, I change to a new one and I am back within 72 hours (at most). If the mail provider messes up, I change to a new one and I am back within X hours (where X is the TTL set for the domain). If my webhost messes up, I am back within X hours (because I of course make offsite backups), etc.

The only part where one needs a 100% reliable business partner is domain registration. And after hearing all the horror stories about Godaddy, I would not trust them, not even if I was wearing your methaphorical condom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does this really even need to be said here? A single visit to GoDaddy and their insane upselling strategies should be enough to disuade anyone that they are in it for anything but ripping you off.

namecheap.com has been quite pleasant so far. I used joker.com for years before that without complaint as well. Plenty of reasonable options out there.

<comment><USER30> Another vote for joker.com. I use them because they are not based in the US, but in Germany, which may result in a smidgeon more sanity when it comes to yanking delegations without court rulings. Maybe.

Also, they are nerds and pgp sign all of their outgoing emails.

<comment><USER31> I could have sworn that Joker was hosted in Switzerland, which is the big factor in my recommendation of them to people worried about government interference in domain handling and DNS. Maybe I'm wrong on that, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I could have predicted this thread would turn into a PTSD support group for GoDaddy survivors.

I have my horrible stories too (all from freelancing days); suffice to say I learned a couple of things:

      * Cheap hosting almost never is.
      * GoDaddys support is designed to minimize their costs, not yours.
      * if their support cannot help you with a problem they will try to upsell you on a plan they claim *will* fix the problem.

Dealing with them on a handful of occasions ranks among the most painful experiences I've had in 15 years of building stuff on the web.

</comment><comment><USER33> Has anyone here used Nearly Free Speech (www.nearlyfreespeech.net)? I have finally started to make my migration away from GoDaddy (I have been planning this for years), and NFS seems pretty good.

I can't seem to find any horror stories about them... but I rarely see them brought up in discussions about registrars. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER34> I've been using NFS.N for over three years now. I have a number of small sites and domains with them. The sites cost pennies a month, the feature set is staggering, and the domain registration process makes Gandi and Namecheap look clunky in comparison. They're also painstakingly honest. They recently corrected a billing error of $56 over three years over their entire client base. [1] My only complaint with them is the lack of SSL, but that's what a VPS is for.

In fact, I like NFS.N so much I made a simple webmail app to interface with their e-mail forwarding service. It's highly experimental though. [2]

[1] [http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small- billing-...](http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing- error-corrected/) [2] <http://www.github.com/kijin/nearlyfreemail>

<comment><USER33> Cheers for that! Thank you for reinforcing my decision. I may just move the rest of my domains over there this week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Paul Graham says "I use EasyDNS. They're expensive, but reliable and never do anything evil."

Source: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150565>

Note that that comment was posted over three years ago. Does anybody have any more recent experience with them?

<comment><USER36> DNS wasn't really the problem here, it was the hosting and setting up a ssl cert. I use GoDaddy for my DNS stuff and have never had any problem with them for that. Most of the horror stories come from people hosting with them.

<comment><USER37> They also provide registration and SSL.

<comment><USER36> Actually, after posting this I found an article that said that GoDaddy is selectively denying DNS requests, so they are now being crappy with DNS as well. I guess I need to move to a new registrar and DNS host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can't believe people are still bitching about GoDaddy shared hosting. I feel like a quote from Richard Pryor is in store: "Boy, it's 1975 you betta get your shit together!"

My point is that if you were smart enough to use GoDaddy shared hosting then you probably weren't smart enough at the time to have a VPS. Take what you have learned from GoDaddy and learn some more stuff and then sign up for a VPS or build a server. GoDaddy can be a good start for those just jumping into webdev and hosting, but after you have the equivalent of a yellow belt, its time to move on.

</comment><comment><USER39> GoDaddy is the worst company ever. Earlier this year I finally took the step to transfer all of my domains to a different company, and I haven't looked back. Instead of transitioning slowly over time, I just decided to pay the money and transfer everything - it felt a lot better to just be free of them. Imagine a company so awful your customers are willing to pay extra to not be a customer!

One painful part of the transfer experience is that their "DomainsByProxy" service is entirely separate, even though it is sold alongside their domains as an add-on. My problem was that I had originally signed up with it years and years ago, and they do not keep your email or password in sync with your GoDaddy account. So I couldn't "release" the domains from DBP to be transferred without going through this crazy process of sending in forms and a copy of my drivers license to reset the account info. It was awful.

</comment><comment><USER40> Please fix the link. It goes the blog's homepage which makes it difficult to find the article later.

</comment><comment><USER41> I cant stand GoDaddy's hosting product. Their interface is awful, they're constantly upselling you, and changes via their Control Panel never happen instantly.

I have a lot of clients who came to me using GoDaddy and continue to use GoDaddy. So I interact with GoDaddy in some form every day.

But GoDaddy really shines in one area: their support. They're professional, they don't treat me or my clients like idiots, they don't bullshit me, and they're always quick to resolve issues.

(Personally, I prefer name.com and prgmr.com)

</comment><comment><USER42> I've seen a lot of issues raised about godaddy recently, but any suggestions for domain registry that work better?

<comment><USER24> Here's the list that i post every time someone asks this. There are plenty of other ones, but these are the "tried and true" top list.

      * Gandi.net

      * Namecheap

      * Name.com (Some very sleazy practices, see child)

      * Moniker

<comment><USER43> Name.com is pretty evil too. They opt you in to a "service" that displays ads from your domain (where they keep the revenue, of course), and _say that you are responsible for ensuring that the content is legal_

See [http://nathanhammond.com/namedotcom-another-unscrupulous- reg...](http://nathanhammond.com/namedotcom-another-unscrupulous-registrar)

<comment><USER44> I just bought a domain from Name.com yesterday (in an effort to escape from GoDaddy) and I'm surprised at how nasty their interface is. These big registrars really try to make their users suffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know two non-techie people (one a friend, one an acquaintance) who've used GoDaddy and gotten confused by all of the upsells and promos. My friend ended up purchasing a few extra services by accident and had a hard time trying to cancel them. The acquaintance was much less cognizant and ended up paying hundreds a month unknowingly.

I've also used them too, because a cofounder had registered our domain name with them. In Aug 2010, I noticed that GoDaddy had been charging us for an extra service we never purchased. I know this because none of us had logged into the GoDaddy account in a while. Fortunately, I'm really anal with accounting records and noticed the discrepancy in our bill.

After several emails and attempts to get this charge removed, I tweeted this issue with @GoDaddy included in it. THAT got an immediate response. Eventually, the charges were removed and we got a refund.

Moral of the story: Don't recommend GoDaddy to your non-techie friends, and consider avoiding it yourself. But if you must use them and have a problem, tweet about it to get a quick resolution.

</comment><comment><USER45> One of the reasons godaddy is successful is that they are the registrar of referral for people (web designers, programmers, ISP's) that have customers that need domain registration or renewal. When an end user has a domain they need or one up for renewal godaddy is the registrar that is suggested to them by their "tech guy".

This is similar to how Microsoft gained power in a way. They were supported by a huge network of people that made money off of Microsoft. Additionally traditional tech guys want to appear smart and love (even if they don't make any commission) telling people they can get their domain registered cheaply at godaddy. "Wow I'm overpaying" says the customer.

What many people don't realize is that all registrars pay exactly the same price for a domain. Any registrar charging less than a certain amount (say below or near cost) is making it up elsewhere. In the case of godaddy it is by selling you things that you don't need that have no value.

One and only one example of this is "privacy protection". This is like a FUD from Microsoft.

Many godaddy domains have privacy protection that have no need for privacy and in fact privacy, because they are an operating business, with a business address, is the opposite of what they should be using. While having privacy is of benefit in some cases (to criticize your employer as only one example) it is almost always safer to have a real address in the whois records if you can do that.

This of course isn't limited to godaddy. Register.com is the registrar for Fred Wilson's avc.com. Avc.com has privacy protection even though Fred has a business address that he could use and has a public email address.

Domain Name: avc.com Created on..............: 2008-07-18 Expires on..............: 2019-04-30

Registrant: Domain Discreet ATTN: avc.com Rua Dr. Brito Camara, n 20, 1 Funchal, Madeira 9000-039 PT

<comment><USER46> The example of the "privacy protection" reminds me when I was a n00b (I still kinda am), but like 3 years ago I wanted a domain that was taken so I paid ~$15 for them for domain backordering.... LOL. I didn't really know what it was at the time (stupid me) but now I feel so incredibly stupid for basically giving away $15 and getting duped for my money.

<comment><USER45> I wouldn't say it was stupid actually. Stupid is something that you do that most people don't do. Many of the godaddy services seem legit on first glance. That's why they sell so well. The marketing language they use is good. There are cases where someone might actually stand a chance of back ordering a domain. But when godaddy collects $15 for a domain that there is no way they are going to get for someone (like a 3 letter name as only one example) that's taking advantage of what someone doesn't know.

If you want to backorder a domain use pool.com. Last I checked they don't charge anything for a backorder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> See also a previous post, "Alternatives to GoDaddy" at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2753471>

</comment><comment><USER24> This article is spot on. I can't fathom why anyone would put themselves through Godaddy, especially a startup. I feel like you're asking for trouble though if you use Godaddy's _hosting_ , which has a reputation for being absolutely horrible.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is it really a problem if I simply use them as a registrar? I have many domains there but that's all I use them for is to simply register my domain. I have liked them for that because they are cheap (if you avoid all the up-sells which is easy enough) and their prices have stayed fairly consistent over the last several years.

I moved to them from Yahoo. Yahoo always allowed you to register a domain for a cheap price of 9.00 but then the renewals were 34.95...a bit of bait and switch if you ask me. Anyhow, I've been happy with simply using GoDaddy as a registrar but after reading this thread I'm wondering if I should switch??

</comment><comment><USER49> Which is amazing considering how much GoDaddy is used for YC companies: <http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html?2011>

</comment><comment><USER50> I am stunned that anyone would ever use them in the first place. After going through domain registration with them, and being appalled at the amount of up- sale, I decided they aren't the company I would want to trust with anything.

I have been using dreamhost for years, and they make registration management painfully simple (and honest).

Also GoDaddy had an issue years back where they were apparently scooping up domains that people didn't finish checkout with and then selling them at a higher price.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have used GoDaddy for their DNS services and have been very happy with their customer service. No issues so far after ~2 years. I may research other DNS though, comments of how easily they shut people down makes me nervous.

Note to Pinolio: I may have missed it, but I did not find a link to your service on your blog.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been using GoDaddy for years. Never had a problem. I dont' use their hosting, though.

<comment><USER53> Exactly what I came here to say. I don't use their hosting because I've tried it and it's painfully slow and I have had it go down intermittently for a number of clients who I know use it still.

I've had to talk with their support several times for little issues too, and I've actually had excellent interactions. Again, not for hosting however.

I use their SSL certificates as well, and it's a very easy process that I've never had a problem with.

I don't know why HN is the dumping ground for bad GoDaddy experiences. There are review sites for this. I've had miserable customer service experiences with countless companies, but I'm not posting them here, and they certainly wouldn't get voted to the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> GoDaddy is so bad. My heart sinks whenever a client asks me to login and change some setting for them. They've managed to turn the entire process of every function on their site into a purist up-selling unusable monstrosity that confuses customers to such a degree they feel they need to pay more and more money.

If you want a good Domain host try <http://www.webwiz.co.uk>, the guy who runs it is very good and prompt at support, domains are a fair price and the interface is super easy to use. I have no affiliation to WebWiz but since moving all my domains over there it's been a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER55> I used GoDaddy when I first started, years ago, but quickly moved away from them. Been with Dreamhost for years now and it's been very good. Adding SSL can't be simpler, they even streamline the process, allowing you to buy the cert directly in the panel (or import your own from a third party), assign a static IP, and everything works inside an hour. Anyways, just wanted to share my experience.

</comment><comment><USER56> Seems like everyone agrees that GoDaddy is terrible. What's strange to me is the interface has always sucked and gets worse as they've grown. You'd think with the revenues they see, they could get some good designers to make it much more usable.

I like Enom myself. The API works really well, prices are good, and the UI is clean and usable. I've been much happier since moving all of my domains over.

<comment><USER57> Nicer user interface doesn't always equate into more revenue. Sometimes it's even counterproductive (sales pages w. misspellings/mistakes can convert better!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Are any of the big registrars trustworthy? I'm trying to consolidate all of my domains on Namecheap right now. I transferred one domain from Dyndns and they did the transfer within a few hours (nice!). Then I went to transfer another from Network Solutions and four days later I am still waiting. Do they think I'll change my mind if they refuse to release the domain for a week?

</comment><comment><USER59> All the complaints here about GoDaddy have nothing to do with the one reason to use them, paying the _least_ for a domain with free DNS. If you pay them anything else then you have just nullified this advantage as they can make back the few dollars you saved on the domain by charging you more for things like hosting and SSL (free at startcom).

<comment><USER60> It's only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Digging through pages of upsells takes time. I prefer using a registrar where I don't have to do that. (I use both Namecheap and eNom.)

<comment><USER61> All the upsell checkboxes are defaulted off. I don't understand what the problem is clicking through a couple of pages without checking anything. I've done it dozens of times with no problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I hated using GoDaddy when doing development work for clients...I would never choose to use it for myself just based on my previous experience with them. I prefer self hosting on a fresh Ubuntu Server install on highspeed residential cable from a server I built myself..there's something satisfying about learning about all aspects of web development

</comment><comment><USER63> My first rule is use a registrar to register domains. Never host your site or DNS at the registrar. My second rule is do not host your DNS where you host your site. It makes it easier to switch providers without downtime. With these rules, I use GoDaddy to register domains and never had any problems. For DNS, DNS Made Easy is cheap and reliable.

</comment><comment><USER64> You can buy one service from GoDaddy and they'll give you a second service free for a year, then auto-renew that second unnecessary service. You can't cancel easily via e-mail and you can't cancel over the telephone. You have to log in and face an endless amount of confusion and upselling.

* This was for Domain Auto-Registration which includes GoDaddy Auctions.

</comment><comment><USER65> I couldn't agree more. I've seen firsthand people using Go Daddy to check out a possible domain only to have Go Daddy squatting on it the next day. He was able to get a few of them back, but it such a hassle.

This was a couple of years ago; I can't imagine how much worse things are now.

</comment><comment><USER66> GoDaddy has the best customer service if you pick up the phone and give them a call. They're not like Google - they have a phone number listed and people are always available to pick up the phone - 24/7 if I'm not mistaken.

</comment><comment><USER67> Since this seems to be "my most/least favorite name service company" I recommend DynDNS. They're expensive, but they work very well in my experience. You can set very short TTLs, which obviates the need for static IPs.

</comment><comment><USER68> As of this post, it appears to be working.

And I have to say, it's impressive. Those are some good-looking bookmarks. That's probably the oddest maintenance I'd ever think to write, but in this case, it's true!

</comment><comment><USER69> Just had GoDaddy conveniently renew three expiring domain names for me for TWO years. These were domain names I didn't want any more. Thanks.

<comment><USER70> I think you are being totally unfair.

If they auto renewed, then YOU set them up to auto renew.

If they auto renewed, this means you let them keep your billing information on file.

They spam me once every week to remind me that my auto renew domains are going to auto renew.

And my own personal anecdote, right before one of my domains auto-renewed I got a polite call from a CSR making sure that I was aware the domain was going to auto renew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I was on a deluxe account at Godaddy, tried upgrading to a VPS, had a horrible experience and now I am a happy customer of PHPFog.

</comment><comment><USER72> If this doesn't convince you to leave GoDaddy, just remember that the owner and founder takes summer holidays shooting elephants.

</comment><comment><USER73> Where does he explain how and when the hosting died? He jumps from SSL revocation to hosting downtime.

</comment><comment><USER74> Dynadot is the way to go

</comment><comment><USER75> Does this only apply to hosting or registering domains as well?

<comment><USER76> I'm not a fan but I'll admit they're pretty good with domains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I remember when GoDaddy was the David to NetSol's Goliath.

</comment><comment><USER78> Nobody should use GoDaddy, not only startups.

</comment><comment><USER79> likealittle.com suffered with them too. They are pretty darn evil, they ask for a ransom to let you move your site.

</comment><comment><USER80> GoDaddy: not even once.

</comment><comment><USER81> Why is this news?! I can't count the number of times this has come up on HN, let alone reddit, let alone random prominent blogs, let alone from other big names that have had problems with GoDaddy suspending service, locking them out of their control panels and/or siding with law enforcement and acting before asking. Stop using GoDaddy. It's trivial to find other registrars, and not hard to find better ones.

(Examples of better registrars: Gandi, name.com)

Honestly, not a reassuring way to advertise your new company. There first intro blob admits that they knew this was a risk. "Yeah, we knew people have problems with this, but we were lazy and didn't bother taking the 30 minutes to transfer our domains elsewhere."

<comment><USER82> > Why is this news?! I can't count the number of times this has come up

And yet GoDaddy is still in business and doing great.

<comment><USER36> You can't get past the cheapness of some people. $5 a month for hosting is very attractive to someone looking to bootstrap off of savings.

<comment><USER81> You can get much better supported, more feature-full (and also more "unlimited" and oversold) hosting for $5 or less from people less scummy and likely to shut off your box or domain than GoDaddy.

Seriously, is DNS so hard that typing in the nameservers of your shared hosting provider or DECENT VPS provider is so unthinkable? Or is it registering for a second account? I simply do, not, understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> When I was doing web stuff back in 2003 the common opinion on webmaster forums was that one should never ever use GoDaddy. (There were cases of stolen domains, etc.)

Maybe they changed now - maybe not. But I'm not going to find it out.

</comment><comment><USER84> Don't. Ever. Use. GoDaddy.

Ever.

<comment><USER13> y?

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> > It's a good thing I don't drink, because the blur of Saturday and Sunday > spent on the phone could have really been dealt with better with a couple of > stiff drinks to ease the pain.

What.</comment>


The Myth of Developer Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://dev9.com/article/2015/1/the-myth-of-developer-productivity <comment><AUTHOR> Gist:

\- you can't measure programmer productivity

\- instead of brainstorming ways to increase it or measure it. Focus on reducing friction, impediments to progress and measure fine grained tasks (like design, test, review, release etc.)</comment>


Google show iron fist on chrome, no feature that damage monetization of search. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=7d8fa5246d696fea&hl=en

<comment><AUTHOR> Every other browser on the planet allows for referrer to be (a) disabled (b) enabled only for the same domain.

but google not only avoids this feature as they does away with the community patches. and close forums threads.

There were already two patches that made it to chromium just to vanish later.

one enabled the --no-referrers comand line flag. gone.

another had the Preference "enable_referrers": false. gone.

and i'm using the slow debian builds... who knows what else is gone from the hourly releases...</comment>


Sparse multidimensional structures written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://c410-f3r.github.io/posts/sparse-multidimensional-structures-written-in-rust/ <comment><AUTHOR> Announcing ndsparse, a project that provides structures to store and retrieve N-dimensional sparse data. Currently supports a generalization of the Compressed Sparse Column (CSC), Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) and Coordinate (COO) formats.

The linked blog post is my first writing publication. Please, feel free to indicate possible improvements.</comment>


Show HN: FreshJobs – An aggregator of junior and entry-level jobs - <AUTHOR> https://freshjobs.io <comment><AUTHOR> Some background to this:

The project: Ever been in that catch-22 situation where you need experience to get a job, but you can't get a job without experience? Or maybe you want to go into a new field, or you just graduated from College or University?

FreshJobs sources all the entry level and junior positions from across the web and puts them in one place. When you click the 'apply' button you are taken to the source site to apply. I'm still adding more sources so over time it will grow larger with more jobs across more locations.

Me: I'm on a mission to learn to code by making 6 projects in 6 months (this is 2/6), with my final project being at the end of the year in December. The dream is to live from these projects by that time and help people across the world

The idea: The idea for FreshJobs came when a friend told me a few weeks back after I finished project #1, "hey man, you could probably apply for some junior dev jobs now", so I decided to check the internet out of curiosity to see what there was. I noticed that there was no specific place which had a lot of these types of jobs, so project #2 was decided right there and then.

I truly hope this website can help you find a new job that you love. For those struggling to get a job because they don't have experience, it will be a true pleasure if you can find a job. If you do find and get a job via FreshJobs, please let me know!

All feedback and bug reports are much appreciated. Go easy on me, I am still a total newbie dev!

</comment><comment><USER2> Hello FreshJobs creator.

Consider separating concerns to handle HN traffic: [https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web- request](https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. Was a good read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not working for me atm. Maybe use Cloudflare to cache, quick and easy fix while the post is still hot.

edit: Working now, great job (pi). Would be nice to see some type of filters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the suggestion! I will work on filters for the site. Any particular filters you'd like to see?

<comment><USER3> Salary, technologies if possible, and job age are all useful.

How do you get job data? Is it a mix between apis and direct website scraping?

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Is it a mix between apis and direct website scraping?

That's right. I am trying to normalise the data from all the sources so I can generate some useful filters.

<comment><USER3> Thanks this is fascinating. Do alot of companies (such as indeed) provide APIs for this? I would have thought it goes against their business models.

Also is there any legal concerns for website scaping here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed do have an API, which I have applied for, but they didn't get back to me yet. Still waiting for a few big job sites to get back to me on using their APIs. Hoping eventually I can get them all!

I've made sure not to crawl any sites that do not allow it, such as LinkedIn for example prohibit it, so I left them alone ;)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for getting back.

I wanted to build a service to gather and analyse all types of job information and see trends. I would ultimately sell the data, however I don't think it would be possible reading some API T&C's. Just a flaunting idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Huge need for something like this, but I think the business model here doesn't work. Entry-level employees are a dime a dozen ($0.10/12), but you're asking employers to pay $99 ($99/1) to post a job. In other words, you're asking employers to pay over 1 million percent more to advertise than entry-level employees are worth.

I've been wondering about a service just like this a lot recently, because I recently graduated from nursing school and am looking for an entry-level nursing job. Finding who is hiring new nurses is proving exceedingly difficult, as each employer is on their own schedule and uses their own unique language to describe their new-nurse jobs. ("new-grad", "residency", "training", "TTP", "T2P", etc... while "entry-level" usually has a completely different meaning)

I, and thousands of other new nursing graduates, would gladly pay you $99 each month just to know where the new-nurse jobs are, while the employers wouldn't want to pay you anything. Consider this: compared to the tens of thousands of dollars to get through school and our eagerness to start repaying those loans, another $99 for a few months is no big deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't feel quite right about charging the job seekers as typically a lot of them are unemployed and thus money can be tight. The incentive for a company here would be cheaper labour so its already a saving for them by having a large pool of potential junior or entry level candidates to advertise to.

Thank you so much for taking the time to give your feedback, I will take it into consideration and see how things work out as time goes on for the site :)

Where you able to find some suitable nursing jobs on the site? If not I will see what I can do to make sure those results are coming onto the site for you and your fellow nurses looking for those jobs.

<comment><USER4> For most states, no nursing jobs on your site. They're hard to find (none of the aggregators do well) for the reasons I mentioned. Most of us take 6-12 months or more to get our first job and we mostly learn about them through social connections. If you want to know a lot more, send me an email and I can dump everything I know about this on you. Since I was a darn good programmer (and a barely-passable entrepreneur) for over 30 years I'm also glad to share any discussions about how this task might be tackled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just sent you an email :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not to be confused with [https://freshjobs.ch](https://freshjobs.ch) which is a good place to find tech jobs in Switzerland

<comment><AUTHOR> FreshJobs.io is also listing jobs from Switzerland :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Typo in the browser title bar: "Jobs for juniors, entry level, interns and fresh _garduates_ "

Nice project, congratulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> Well spotted and thank you! I have fixed it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bless your soul, lukehero, you are a hero!

On macOS Safari Version 11.1.2 (13605.3.8), I can scroll horizontally (it's cute, I can see all the flags coming) and I can't really search the website. I put in values, hit return, and nothing happens. Works amazingly on Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

My sever has just been upgraded. Can you confirm if you're still having issues or not?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's a compatibility issue. I can scroll to the right of the page, and see white space, with the flags moving.

Pressing enter with either textfield selected doesn't do anything on Safari.

Firefox and Chrome work perfectly fine.

EDIT: I didn't dig deep, but changing the "marquee" width from 3000px to 100vw, fixed it, but made the flags slower.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you soo much for the feedback! Those issues should be fixed now :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Site doesn't seem to load

</comment><comment><USER9> There's a typo in the page title:

> Jobs for juniors, entry level, interns and fresh garduates

garduates -> graduates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well spotted! Fixed. Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've just upgraded the server :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Buddy great service you want to provide! fix the loading issue and let have fun :) .

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Uh oh, I think traffic is getting too much for my server. Upgrading now!

</comment><comment><USER11> All jobs? Where? And anyway I get a Bad Gateway error.

</comment><comment><USER12> 504 Gateway Time-out</comment>


Yogurt pods are just powdered milk and bacteria without a container - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/26/16366100/yomee-yogurt-pod-kickstarter-gadget <comment><AUTHOR> These people clearly learned nothing from the Juicero debacle.</comment>


The Economist reviews Michael Moore's new film - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14585631 <comment><USER2> My point of view is this.

Capitalism is the most effective way known of getting people to do what it gets them to do. However you have no control of what that is.

Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education, national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism. This is the justification for taxation and government.

The justification for Michael Moore's point of view is that he wants to see those things happen, and capitalism doesn't do that very well.

 _However_ be very careful about using government to try to direct capitalism to meet your goals. Because well-meaning interventions regularly fail spectacularly due to unintended consequences. One of which is that any influential group that is regulated by government will try (and eventually usually succeeds) in getting control over their regulators.

<comment><USER3> The problem is the word "capitalism" - it implies just for-profit enterprises. But capitalism is really just how Marx branded "free enterprise."

> Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education, > national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, > etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism.

Capitalism - free enterprise - handles all of those pretty well except national defense and maybe policing. Charities are part of capitalism. Infrastructure's not so bad for government to build. In wealthy countries, charities vastly outperform government in alms and welfare because it doesn't create power structures that people try to hijack and lobby.

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. Look at the standard American middle school and high school curriculum - very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense. They teach algebra fairly well in American high school and almost nothing else. I can't believe that any educator would be in favor of government-run education: It sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice.

<comment><USER4> _As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice._

What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly _not_ the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education.

The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones?

The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio- economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes.

Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.

<comment> barry-cotter _The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy?_

Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily imagine a smaller bureaucracy.

If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents.

Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the bigger a school district becomes.

Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think 10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private schools, and second would be to think about moving.

<comment><USER5> > If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area > with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the > bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents.

This only works when parents have the available free time and resources to replace these administrators with their free time. The problem with this is that parents with available free time and the motivation to donate to their child's school is very unevenly distributed. You are also going to end up duplicating a lot of administration bureaucracy across these smaller districts and losing a lot of efficiencies that can be gained from centralization. Centralization has its own costs, but sometimes these costs are not as large as the cost of a lot of duplicated effort.

<comment><USER2> The problem with this argument is that the larger the distance between bureaucracies and productive work, the more free the bureaucracy is to grow based on internal dynamics with no reference point to actual productivity. Therefore when it comes to bureaucracy, I generally expect centralization to cost more.

Point of comparison based on actual statistics from Detroit 20 years ago. (See <http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014> for a citation.) Administrative overhead for the Detroit public school system: nearly 40%. Administrative overhead for parochial schools run by the Catholic Church: 0.7%. Key difference? The parochial school system is bottom up, whenever possible responsibility is pushed down to the individual school. By contrast Detroit's schools centralize responsibility with the district, and over time that grew into an ever expanding bureaucracy.

Admittedly not an entirely fair comparison. However decentralization sure looks good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Capitalism has its foundations in reciprocity. Instead of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine," we have "I give you money and you give me a service which I desire." All capitalism does is make a barter and trade system more efficient, allowing you to trade with someone for something you want even if you don't have anything they want. Calling that evil is sort of... dumb.

<comment><USER7> That's a tad simplistic. Capitalism rewards the externalising of costs - so, for instance, decreasing your unit costs by increasing your pollution is more profitable. You need external regulation to make sure that decisions are not made solely on a capitalist basis, because that would make them entirely heartless.

<comment><USER8> All systems reward the externalizing of costs, by definition.

<comment><USER9> But they may reward externalizing different kinds of costs, and the relative rewards may be larger or smaller than in other systems.

The question is what provides the best results (and, for that matter, how to define "best").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find Mr. Moore no more altruistic than the various "evils" that he frequently attacks. His methods are equally as dubious as his opponents--the difference is he masks himself as a benevolent crusader.

</comment><comment><USER11> Next up on HN: Cats give their opinion on long baths

</comment><comment><USER12> Please don't take Michael Moore too seriously. He is an entertainer, just like Rush on the right. The difference is that Michael Moore has talent. With Roger and Me, he invented a new style of documentary filmmaking.

Go see the movie if you want; you will be entertained. There isn't much to discuss here though. Yes, Moore is a hypocrite. Yes, capitalism is the best thing we have. It's still healthy to raise awareness of some of the worst excesses of capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER13> The economist doesn't like Mr Moore's attack on capitalism?

Tomorrow - the Catholic News review of Dan Brown's latest.

</comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps Mr. Moore's arguments would be made stronger if he would disclose his net worth, and where he keeps his money?

<comment><USER15> sure, you can start and we'll just go down the line.

who CARES what the guys net worth is? Why does it matter? Can not a successful film maker speak for those who are in the down and outs? Just because his films are good, does that make him less worthy to call out the greedy bankers? Who are you, Sean Hannity?!

<comment><USER16> reminded me of the line in "Roxanne":

"Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a, a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at. "

<comment><USER15> pretty idiotic reasoning. go back to school bud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't see how Moore can blame Capitalism for big government intervention (bailing out banks) led by his Democratic friends. Seems more like a hit on central banking. (But maybe that's too Jeffersonian for Moore.)

</comment><comment><USER18> I suspect JD Lasica was right when he said it should have been called: "Greed: A Love Story"

<comment><USER19> Greed is pretty much inherent to capitalistic systems, which reward greed and treat it as a virtue (along with profiteering and selfishness).

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's really the right way to think of it. Capitalism _acknowledges_ greed, and builds a system that can survive and bring virtue in spite of it, and to some extent, because of it.

While it's OK to decry greed, it isn't OK to build an economic system based on the idea that people aren't greedy. They are. There are billions of year of history behind the greed of humanity, and I'm not exaggerating. If you build an economic system based on something that is, fundamentally, not human, you will get bad results.

That's where other systems tend to fall down, and why for all the "failures" of capitalism, the worst off in a modern capitalistic society is better than all but the best off in almost any other society.

I'm willing to listen to other economic systems that also acknowledge greed. I recommend the book "Accelerando" for a half-decent exploration of the question of whether there is something better once you have pervasive computerization. But the solution to the problem of greed isn't trying to build a system based on the belief that there is some way to make people not greedy.

Greed is not capitalism's fault. Greed is, ultimately, traceable back to the fact that for every live form that survive to reproduce, there are thousands that don't. Greed may look odd in the incredibly, utterly strange place we currently find ourselves in where we have more resources than we know what to do with, but this is the strangeness, not greed.

I'm pretty skeptical of every other system I've ever seen, including socialism and communism, because they are basically built on the idea that we'll take control away from the greedy, shortsighted people and give it to the enlightened, ungreedy ones who will run things better. There is of course the (perfectly correct) argument that the information flow of such a system can't be made to work with the tools we have, but there is also the even-more- fundamental problem that the "enlightened, ungreedy" class of people _doesn't exist_. There are only people _claiming_ to be the enlightened, ungreedy class. Until you can build a non-capitalist system that isn't based on this fundamental failure, it's not going to do well.

(That said, I'm only a little-l libertarian and I acknowledge that the government does have a place. I'm talking economic system here, not whole society system. Just as capitalism harnesses greed, instead of denying it, a government should harness capitalism, instead of denying it.)

<comment><USER21> What is interesting to me is the inconsistency in the arguments of big-L libertarians, which basically boils down to claiming that self-interest will turn into a virtuous result when a person's job title is "corporate executive" but a vicious result when the job title is "Congressman".

In theory, democracy should exploit the same effects as unregulated or lightly-regulated capitalism: politicians act in their self-interest (pursuing power, prestige, etc.) but in order to do so must provide tangible benefits to voters in order to keep getting elected.

In reality, of course, politicians run all sorts of schemes on the side to their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of voters. In much the same way, executives run all sorts of schemes on the side to their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of shareholders in their company (the analogue of the voters).

Yet in the politician's case this is heralded as a failure of government, and little additional discussion takes place (since the presumption before the fact was that government must always fail); in the executive's case all manner of arguments are advanced to try to explain that it is not a failure of capitalism (since the presumption before the fact was that capitalism must never fail).

In a very real sense, then, this turns into the fallacy of begging the question: capitalism does not fail because it is postulated that capitalism does not fail, and government fails because it is postulated that government fails.

<comment><USER22> The difference is that a business person makes decisions which allocate their own capital, politicians get to play with other people's money.

<comment><USER21> The business person makes decisions which allocate money provided by investors; it is unlikely that the executive is the only, or even the majority, investor in the business.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A hiring challenge...for salespeople - <AUTHOR> http://seatgeek.com/blog/hiring/introducing-sell-yourself-to-seatgeek-a-digital-sales-director-hiring-challenge

<comment><USER2> Just a note about the website: I got bugged with 2 overlays as soon as I opened the page. Maybe a sales guy decided to do that...? :)</comment>


Y Combinator vs Techstars - <AUTHOR> http://www.toutpost.com/d/21378/YCombinator_vs_Techstars

<comment><USER2> Let the non-biased comments commence! ;)</comment>