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drm237on OAuth Will Murder Your Children

Twitter is half of the problem here. Once you request read access and a user approves it, there is no way under the same application then go back and get write access. Ideally every app would start with read and then only upgrade to write when needed but Twitter won't allow it. There are multiple bugs in their api issue tracker and they don't seem to care. The only way to get around it is to have two applications, a read and a read-write which actually is more difficult and why bother working around Twitters short comings when most users don't care?

I know this wasn't only about Twitter, but this is an issue I've had myself and it's incredibly annoying.

drm237on Does Livestrong.com have a spam content farm hidden behind it?

  "I would consider that low value content"

It's actually high value content (from a monetary perspective) otherwise Demand Media wouldn't be creating it. Low quality, high value. Spam is something else entirely.

drm237on Google search and search engine spam

How often have you searched Google and been sent to one of those pages?

They don't want useless content in their serps. If someone goes directly to the domain, that's in no way related to search quality.

drm237on How Much Does a Single Search Cost Google?

That would assume that people using Adwords compare costs with the other ad networks before deciding to advertise. I would guess this is most often not the case.

drm237on Why I Am Switching to Interleaved Email Replies and Why You Should Too

People tend to use examples that make their methods really shine. The example conversations in this post work out really well, but they're more like an IM conversation than most email treads I've had. Try a few examples where someone writes a couple of paragraphs and your bottom reply is below the fold. Most people will think you didn't reply, not that they have to scroll to find it.

This is less of a problem with email and more an issue with how email clients display threaded conversations. Does anyone that uses Gmail think this is a problem?

drm237on Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions, 2010 edition

Linode's Fremont DC is owned by Hurricane Electric which is also being mis-represented.

drm237on Google Will Become an AI Company

I get to the airport 2 hours early, plus 30 minutes driving time to and from the airport. So that puts total flying time at 5.5 hours. Add in invasive airport security, baggage fees, entertainment fees, wifi fees, parking fees, etc. For a family of 5, flying costs thousands of dollars. And once you get there, you don't have a car so you have to rent one!

We're not talking about this next year, we're talking decades away. Toll Plaza's, seriously? We have Ez Pass already, you don't think that can be upgraded to handle faster cars?

If it was between paying more for 5.5 hours of flying and paying likely less for 5, 6 or 7 hours of having a car drive me, I would choose the car every time. Heck, if the car can only average 100MPH, I'd leave at 10pm and sleep the whole way!

drm237on Cambridge University refuses to censor student's thesis

> ... because it documented a well-known flaw in the chip-and-PIN system...

The author of the article at least believes that it is a well-known flaw so responsible disclosure isn't really applicable.

drm237on Ask HN: What do you want for Christmas?

I think that's generally the point where it becomes more fun to give than to receive. At least that has been my experience.

drm237on Power outage in Linode Fremont Datacenter

Linode has multiple "availability zones" aka datacenters so you can achieve the same redundancy with them. I would guess that linodes have better uptimes than aws but I don't have any numbers to actually back that up.

drm237on Power outage in Linode Fremont Datacenter

Half of mine are up, still waiting on the other half. More than 2.5 hours into it now.

drm237on Lars Rasmussen: Why I quit Google to join Facebook

So you were 12 when Facebook was started and had Facebook your entire high school life? It seems a bit hard to be subjective then since you haven't known any different.

drm237on The quest for freedom and safety: Why I donated $100,000 to YesOn19

There are already anti-smoking laws in place that prohibit you from smoking in many (all?) public places (at least in SF). Worrying about your freedom to breath clean air isn't in any way related to prop-19, it's about smoking in general which for the most part has already been dealt with.

drm237on Ask HN: Developing a recurring payments system, what do I need to consider?

You might want to check out http://railskits.com/saas/. Yes it actually costs money, but consider what your time is worth.

drm237on Why we moved to Linode

You wouldn't be happier if you got virtually the same experience for 40% to 50% less money each month?

Having used both Slicehost and Linode, the (user) experience is similar, node performance is better, and the price is cheaper.

drm237on PG: Thank you for putting on Startup School

I think Jessica deserves most of the credit. So thank you Jessica and crew!

drm237on Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

I would guess that the drivers behave just like they would normally. If the car hasn't started breaking by the time the driver would typically, he just does it himself.

drm237on Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

I would imagine in some cases it's harder to navigate a poorly formed dirt road in the desert versus a paved road with lines, curbs, etc.

drm237on SaaS Subscription Billing, or How to avoid getting your n*ts in a vice

Authorize.net also has a vault product.

Chargify still stores the CC at the gateway level, so you have gateway lockin

I don't understand this. Gateways that provide a vault for storing credit card information give you a way to get it out in order to process the transaction. So if you can get the information out, couldn't you just transition to a new gateway if necessary. Only sites like Paypal and Amazon really have lockin.

drm237on SaaS Subscription Billing, or How to avoid getting your n*ts in a vice

how do customers feel about you changing the pricing without their input?

I would assume they feel the same way anyone who has ever had phone, cable, or internet service feels. Outside of a contract, prices go up over time. You send out an email 30 days in advance, tell them it's going to happen, and then do it. If they want to cancel and get a refund, ok, no big deal.

Virtually everyone is familier with recurring billing so I think offering it is entirely for the customer's convenience and in no way a bait and switch or any other kind of attempt to rip-off a customer.

drm237on Ask HN: Best way to sell a small web app?

Hubpages does rev sharing by showing their adsense code a certain % of the time and the authors code the remaining. Maybe this is a good way to monetize the free customers.

drm237on Ask HN: I have users, I have traction, How do I get paid?

I've been using it for over a year with Spreedly without any problems at all. What sort of issues were you having?

drm237on Ask HN: I have users, I have traction, How do I get paid?

Start with website payments pro by paypal. It's the easiest to get setup and approved for and has reasonable rates. Later, once you have more paying customers, you can switch if you really think it will make a difference. And using something like Chargify or Spreedly allows you to change your merchant account without affecting the recurring billing. Paypal isn't always perfect and they certainly screw up, but for the handful of issues you hear about, there are millions of transactions that work out just fine.

drm237on Yahoo buys freelance news site Associated Content

IAC doesn't own about.com. It's owned by The New York Times Company.

drm237on Scroogle down

The ajax api returns completely different results than the normal search and in a different order, so it's not worth using if you want to "actual" google search results.

drm237on Top 50,000 paying Adsense keywords (purchased from a shady looking website)

It's not a list of search volume, it's a list of the top keywords ordered by cpc price in adsense. Some (most?) likely have little to no search volume at all.

drm237on How I Build PHP Applications

It's also one of the smaller frameworks compared to Cake, Symphony, and the other rails-on-php frameworks so I'm not really sure why the author singles it out as "large" framework.

drm237on Page Rank 0 to 4 in Under Four Months, How I did it

301 redirects don't pass 100% link juice so why waste backlinks to a subdomain that you don't plan on actually using? Are you just saying have it available as a convenience thing in case someone tries to guess your blog URL?

drm237on Page Rank 0 to 4 in Under Four Months, How I did it

Most people don't seem to realize that PageRank is per page, not a site wide value. So it makes sense that the front page of your blog has a different PR than your homepage.

See Matt Cutts for more about subdomain versus subdirectory: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

drm237on Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows

Unless of course you use common sense in which case you would have realized it before even visiting the site.