I'd be willing to offer advice or a hand to a fellow HNer in need. This will require some discussion so e-mail me if you want to take me up on this offer.
If I understand your comment correctly, I believe the API already works this way, except instead of using PUT, it uses POST for creating new records and zones. To create a record, a client would do a POST with the record to create in JSON as the request body.
Is there some reason to use PUT over POST in this case? By my understanding, POST is typically used to create new resources and PUT is used to updated existing resources.
Also, I can see now that the doc is pretty unclear on how the API expects data to be sent in a request's body. I'll be sure to fix that!
Thank you for your comment and yes I'm in need of more beta testers! Please e-mail me. My e-mail address can be found under my HN account.
I thought there was something with trademark laws that meant owners had to actively protect their marks or risk losing the ability to pursue legal action against infringement. So even though SO and MO are buddy-buddy, couldn't allowing MO to use their name as is theoretically jeopardize SO's trademark?
There's nothing technical DNS-wise that would prevent the name 'canon' from resolving to an IP address, so http://canon could work. They could also add a MX record for the name 'canon' so @canon e-mail addresses would work too. Maybe ICANN has rules around gTLDs that would prevent this type of use?
With the up vote and down vote arrows, have one or the other light up when you mouse over a specific one, instead of having both light up. It will make it clearer which arrow you are about to click.
I like the layout of the two sided debates over the debates with more than two sides. The two sided debates have the sides and results right in the middle at the top of the page. On debates with more than two sides, having the sides and results off to the right makes them easy to miss at first. The first debate I looked at was a more than two sided debate and because of the layout, I was a bit confused on what the sides of the debate were. It seemed like the comments were the sides because of their placement and the up/down vote arrows.
Yeah that's really the best part. The other thing I really like is that it doesn't try to make you use some sort of DSL in place of SQL like other libraries do.
I've never priced a product or service myself, but thinking about the roll over credit model from the consumer perspective I see a potential problem. If a subscriber's usage never exceeds the monthly minimum, then that subscriber is going to roll over credits every month and accumulate credits they will never use. The value of those rolled over credits that will never be used will highlight to the subscriber how much money they have paid for credits they didn't use. No one likes to know they are wasting money by paying for more than they need.
I don't know what your service is, so I can't reason about how subscribers would use it from month to month, but I would think you could control the amount of roll over credits accumulated by setting the monthly minimum low enough that most subscribers go over it and use accumulated credits.
This is already being done lots of places. And if you take the literal definition of the word algorithm, then all web API services are algorithms as a service. So I don't like the name, but the general idea of the post is interesting.
Thinking along these lines, something that I would find more useful would be a web service that makes a well defined managed infrastructure available to me to run my own jobs or algorithms on. For example a service I can use to submit my own map/reduce style jobs to and have it run on a big cluster of systems managed by someone else; Or a service that allows me to submit jobs to run on specialized hardware, like a cluster of systems packed with NVIDIA CUDA cards. Providers of these services could also have a library of pre-canned jobs for common tasks like text indexing, link extraction, parsing W3C logs into stats, etc. With a library like that then you've got what this post is describing and more.
I've always thought this sort of thing would make for an interesting way for publishers of websites to monetize their traffic. Instead of showing ads, a publisher could make it so each page view meant a small unit of work was completed.
A company could do business like an ad network, but instead of matching advertisers with publishers and serving ads, it would match groups needing computing resources with publishers and handle everything involved with serving out units of work and collecting the results.
Does anyone know how iPhone apps are licensed? If this Philip guy bought the app and the database was included with it, are there any terms that say he can't do whatever he wants with the database (e.g., use it for his own app)?
I ran into the same problem when I first used StartSSL a few months ago. It seemed like there were some cases where automatic verification would work and other cases where verification was deferred to a human. I believe StartSSL is a small, possibly one man, operation, so you might have to wait a few hours for human verification. Once my account was verified, everything after that was pretty easy and quick.