[HN Gopher] Free for Developers
___________________________________________________________________
Free for Developers
Author : fs111
Score : 377 points
Date : 2021-02-23 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (free-for.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (free-for.dev)
| tyingq wrote:
| It would be neat if HN could offer something like "Login By
| Facebook" that returned user/create date/karma. Would make a nice
| testbed for offering free stuff while having some high pass
| filter like _" HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma."_
| hinkley wrote:
| How do you feel about the Stack Overflow solution to this
| problem?
|
| My app has 300 features. Beginners get to use 8 of them. Once
| ten people think you are not a wretched toad, you get to use
| 20.
|
| Once you've solved a problem for 200 people, you can edit other
| people's posts.
|
| In fact doesn't HN not let you downvote until you get 500
| upvotes? It's been a while.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It seems to work well. I am an occasional contributor so I
| don't have very much power there but I understand that
| communities collapse without this control since they get
| dominated by drive-by losers. I'm not one, but there's no
| signal I can provide that I'm not one. Metafilter has the
| model where you spend money as a signal that you're not one.
| I guess I'd pay $20 one-time as an upgrade that is revocable.
|
| I am a Wikipedia auto-confirmed user, so that lets me make
| articles without needing to go through the process, so that's
| nice.
|
| The problem with all of these sites is that they don't also
| police the opposite side: the obsessive guy who spends all
| his time on the site and attaches all of his identity to it
| so he is just a negative person despite having lots of
| 'karma'-equivalent.
|
| It's like the value-to-community vs time-spent curve is like
| | - | - - | - -
| | - - | -- - | --
| - |---- --- +----------------------
| | - | - |
|
| In fact, maybe HN should have a high-karma warning. "This
| user spends so much time on HN they can't possibly be
| productive in real life. You are getting the town drunk, not
| the star of the pub"
| potta_coffee wrote:
| At one point in time, I was contributing at Stack Overflow
| just for the fun of it, and I answered some fun programming
| questions. After a short time I ran afoul of some of the
| obsessive types that you describe, and that was the end of
| my time at SO.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| This would have been a killer feature on dating sites
| around the time I was using them: some people were spending
| more time on those than there were hours in a day:)
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > maybe HN should have a high-karma warning
|
| My intuition is that this is less of an issue on HN than on
| Wikipedia.
| hinkley wrote:
| I need to hire you to talk to a community member I'm having
| trouble communicating with. Good stuff.
| mbernstein wrote:
| What about those of us with 10 year old accounts and <500 karma
| since we're quiet? :).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Those should definitely also count. Yours, however, is only 9
| years and 4 months old, so no free stuff for you!
| pselbert wrote:
| Couldn't help but think of:
|
| Brian Called Brian: You don't need to follow me! You don't
| need to follow anybody! You got to think for yourselves!
| You're all individuals! You're all different!
|
| Man: I'm not...
| vanous wrote:
| Exactly this. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write a
| comment, quite exceptionally
| ldd wrote:
| yes, I'd personally say that a more interesting group is the
| subset of people with 10 year old accounts and karma between
| 50 and 500 points :D
| PebblesRox wrote:
| AMA:)
| captn3m0 wrote:
| The most common hack for this has been verification using
| "about" field.
|
| A website asks for your HN username, validated the age, gives
| you a random string to add to your HN about page.
|
| Once done, your accounts are now linked!
| jefftk wrote:
| And, positively or negatively, it offers a form of promotion
| for the website.
| xmprt wrote:
| Sounds like this could lead to another Hacktoberfest situation
| where people just post low effort comments and posts on
| hackernews just so they can get over the threshold. And some
| people might even make tutorials.
| tyingq wrote:
| Right. So it seems like if I were going to do it, it would
| have to be based on things that happened before any
| announcement. Like account age, comment/submission activity
| prior to announcement, etc.
| Jedd wrote:
| When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure.[0] Refer also the law of unintended consequences. [1]
|
| Conveniently we have a natural experiment from a year or two
| ago we can refer to.
|
| Stellar Lumens offered some free cryptocurrency to existing
| users, via Keybase accounts that leveraged external auth-
| equivalence (such as HN). It backfired spectacularly for all
| involved. [2]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
|
| [2] I think this is it - keybase.io's original blog post
| (referenced at [3] ) is 404'ing.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230611/https://keybase.i...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671
| tyingq wrote:
| Did the Stellar Lumens offer extend to brand new accounts?
|
| Edit: Ah, I see, people tried to find dormant HN and GitHub
| accounts. https://www.coindesk.com/stellar-tried-to-give-
| away-2b-xlm-t...
| runako wrote:
| > "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma."
|
| This is kind of gatekeepy coming from an account that's not 10
| years old yet. :-P
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| I'm the only developer out of all of my colleagues that even
| knows what HN even _is_.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I'm the only one who stuck to it. I've given the address to
| all my interns along the years (and my employee), none of the
| interns read it.
|
| Perhaps that is why I'm the entrepreneur ;)
|
| But they make me feel like a boomer. Why gets their info
| through plain text?!?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It's simultaneously surprising and yet also not surprising
| how niche HN really is.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| That is a great idea, i could sell my account for a few
| thousand
| swiley wrote:
| Ah yes: the old "HN karma == developer" myth.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| It's probably not a bad selector for "people who's usage of
| my tool will lead to sales down the road"
| tyingq wrote:
| No, just a stab at some kind of filter to offer something for
| free without an avalanche. It's imperfect, as any other
| filter would be. Perhaps account age and some activity
| existing _before_ the announcement would be a better filter.
| soheil wrote:
| Absolutely not, there are already people on HN pandering to the
| crowd just to get karma points, let's not make karma points
| more meaningless than they already are. This suggestion is so
| rich coming from someone with 34,500 karma points.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It's interesting that I've using HN for nearly 2 years,yet
| today was the first time I checked someone's karma. Didn't
| know it was a thing.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" This suggestion is so rich coming from someone..."_
|
| Meh. I made up a threshold I thought might keep abuse of a
| free service down for a testbed. I picked 500 since I thought
| that was the HN threshold for downvote ability. Sure seems to
| have stirred up the crowd though :)
| cocoa19 wrote:
| I disagree. I rather have people post honest, thoughftul
| opinions rather than pander to a crowd with low quality feel
| good posts to get freebies.
| tyingq wrote:
| It would be harder to gamify account age.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This is why I sometimes enjoy browsing a certain technology
| forum that shall not be named. It's all anonymous and you can
| bet that people will at least be honest with their feedback.
| idlewords wrote:
| I would be totally into OAuth-type integration with HN that I
| could use to lock people out of my site.
| hargup wrote:
| Wow!! This is an amazing list.
|
| A lot of times we aren't event aware that there exists a tool
| which can solve your need. And Google is of no help here.
| neogodless wrote:
| Does anyone know of a decent tutorial for building low-volume /
| prototype interactive web applications using one of the major
| cloud-hosting providers, wholly within the free limits?
|
| Any framework would be interesting for learning purposes. I have
| some older MVC .NET sites and I poked around with Azure free
| Windows Server VMs, but the performance is so painfully bad; if
| you _do_ anything, you run out of memory. But I 'm gaining
| proficiency in NodeJS and Python, and hoping to learn how to take
| advantage of free tiers for practice in development and testing.
| I imagine it can all be self-taught/learned, but if there exists
| documentation to go through the motions in the learning process,
| I think it would help a lot of people.
| dchess wrote:
| Have you tried Heroku? Deploying via git is pretty handy. I've
| mostly moved to using Dokku on the $5 tier of DigitalOcean, but
| the approach is simple.
| neogodless wrote:
| I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure
| almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and
| setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the
| opposite!
| jholman wrote:
| In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is
| you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the
| RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-
| so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own
| nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore
| all their obtuse crap.
|
| Heroku is cool, too, though.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| What about ASP.NET + Azure? I'm still having wet dreams after
| using it on a pet project last year. Azure even has like one
| click deployment for it- super easy. Alternatively, Heroku is
| supposed to cater for this,or Elastic Beanstalk if you want to
| go AWS route.
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| I suspect that pretty normal development using Python, Node, or
| Go would fit free tiers of various AWS services, provided they
| are not serving a lot of requests.
| uberswe wrote:
| I seem to be unable to visit the site, I receive an SSL error on
| multiple browsers.
|
| NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID
|
| Edit: from Sweden if it matters
| weberer wrote:
| Strange. Did you blacklist Let's Encrypt on your machine for
| some reason?
| speedgoose wrote:
| You can move over to Norway when the covid19 crisis is over.
| The website works here.
| MightyOwl13 wrote:
| My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier
| trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems
| higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and
| the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage.
| Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone
| with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task
| (setting up a BookStackApp server) took considerably longer than
| it did on most services on which you pay.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that you do get what you pay for (or
| don't).
| GordonS wrote:
| Oracle cloud pricing seems competitive against the big 3, and
| providing 10TB of free egress is very generous by comparison
| (that'd cost you around $1k with the big 3!). But Oracle has
| such a _terrible_ reputation for behaving like an absolute
| shit, that I 've never _really_ considered with any
| seriousness, or even signed up for a trial.
|
| Would be interesting to see a comparison of Oracle cloud to
| AWS/Azure/GCP, from the perspective of a developer or
| architect. If of course Oracle allows such comparisons in their
| terms and conditions...
| valzam wrote:
| I would argue that Oracle had more to do with that than the
| fact that it was free... Using the paid version would probably
| have been even more difficult.
| aspaceman wrote:
| I got a kick out of this list. Especially this sublist:
|
| > (note: You must pay if you use .casa, .cf, .click, .email,
| .fit, .ga, .gdn, .gq, .loan, .london, .men, .ml, .pl, .rest, .ru,
| .tk, .top, .work TLDs due to spam)
|
| Makes me want to search my spam folder for .gq out of curiosity
| alone.
| vallas wrote:
| What is wrong with these TLDs?
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Anyone on here make use of the free tier of any of these?
|
| While I've known of some of the free tier things on AWS, and
| Google Cloud, I never made use of them long term.
| Swizec wrote:
| Heavy user of free AWS Lambdas ... although I might be paying
| $5/mo for everything combined these days.
| yoru-sulfur wrote:
| I'm using Oracle clouds free tier for the 2 free (tiny) VMs.
|
| I use them to host a bunch of misc. scripts/programs I've
| written, a discord bot I wrote for a server I'm in with some
| friends, my calibre ebook library is also backed up there and
| the calibre content server is running so I can access it over
| the internet should I want something to read and be away from
| my computer.
|
| Mostly good experience, if not the most user friendly. The data
| transfer allowance on their free tier is fantastic, which is
| definitely the exception from most free offerings I've seen.
| CraigRood wrote:
| I'm interested in some feedback on this point too. I'm
| currently looking at what Oracle has to offer as it seems to be
| the most straightforward, and also seems to have a simpler
| pricing structure compared to AWS or Azure for the small addons
| I may need.
| tyingq wrote:
| I like free google cloud shell. It's nice to have a place to
| troubleshoot things from an outside network. Yandex's email is
| nice for some things also, bring-your-own-domain and 10Gb, no
| cost.
| fmajid wrote:
| The first hit is always "free". As in "free puppy", not "free
| beer".
| hinkley wrote:
| Yes. Let the ~hatred~ puppy spread through you. Feel the power!
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| There's also free-as-in-facebook, where you are the product.
| jokab wrote:
| What's the difference? Whenever i get free beers i get to pay
| the next morning and id rather clean a puppy's mess than ache
| all over
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I love your "free as in free puppy" line. I will have to use it
| myself in the future.
| eitland wrote:
| Just remember that the expensive puppy isn't house trained
| either when you get it, and it will need just as much
| attention and eat just as much food as the free puppy.
|
| I'm saying this as someone who knows way too much about
| Oracle databases ;-)
|
| Choose a "puppy" you can love. Get it from someone you trust
| and get one that's right for your situation.
| rapfaria wrote:
| Would be nice if this had a newsletter for updates like "Hey, X
| is cutting costs and your free happy meal will be cut to 2
| nuggets starting 1st of March, and end completely next June"
| yeldarb wrote:
| Nice resource, I submitted a PR with our free-tier offerings!
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Azure Kubernetes Service - Managed Kubernetes service, free
| cluster management_
|
| Since this one is the bane of my existence at the moment.
|
| Yeah, this statement is technically correct, it is _technically_
| free, but you still pay for the VMs that are part of the cluster,
| and their disks. (Unless they can qualify for some other "free"
| metric.) But we've been using this, and we've had lots of spans
| of time where the managed API server will just time out requests.
| There's no guarantee on the free version; there's an SLO, but our
| metrics indicate that it isn't being met. (And our support
| requests were met with "upgrade to a paid SLA"... which we are,
| b/c we're a business, but if you're looking at this list, that
| presumably isn't you.)
| arcticfox wrote:
| FWIW if anyone's looking, the hosted DigitalOcean Kubernetes
| clusters are fantastic.
|
| Despite being very early adopters, we've only had one issue and
| when we pointed the finger at them...the DO k8s team
| immediately diagnosed the issue, and it was our own fault.
| Woops.
| sofixa wrote:
| Same with Scaleway's, both just work and are fully free.
|
| Some time ago i compared them against the competition and
| they fared very well even against GKE:
|
| https://atodorov.me/2020/06/14/comparing-kubernetes-
| managed-...
| GordonS wrote:
| Just want to says thanks for such an in-depth comparison!
| maccard wrote:
| Unfortunately DO only runs linux, and when a core piece of
| your infrastructure requires windows, it's a hard sell to say
| "well we'll just host _that bit_ on windows, and everything
| else on DO"...
| [deleted]
| abledon wrote:
| really impressed with Azure's new UI... its the little things
| like this that make me want to use it over GCP etc.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Second this. I'm kind of cloud virgin but navigating Azure is
| super easy. It's very logic,while GCP is..well.. it ain't
| YouTube tbh..
| bulleyashah wrote:
| Is there a cloud provider that doesn't require a credit card for
| free tier?
| RogantisAgat wrote:
| Pick up a (re-loadable or not) $10 VISA, Mastercard, or AMEX
| gift card and register it for use online. There's your free
| tier-use-only credit card.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| It would be a nice to indicate with a small symbol next to each
| whether you need to give them your credit card details or not.
| BossingAround wrote:
| This is my common issue with "free" services. It's free, but
| you have to input your credit card. Ah and also, if your
| website blows up, such as from being top 10 on HNews, you'll
| have to pay, but don't worry about that now.
| ttt0 wrote:
| I have a Google account for like 14 years or so, although I
| no longer use it for anything other than YouTube. Yesterday I
| tried to watch some age restricted video on YouTube and
| they've suddenly asked me to confirm my age by either giving
| them my credit card details or a scan of my ID.
|
| Nothing that mpv with youtube-dl couldn't solve, but still.
| jacurtis wrote:
| One trick I have used to overcome this is to use a virtual
| card service. If you have a Capital One card, you get this
| for free (download "Capital One Eno" extension), but there is
| also Privacy.com which does the same thing linked to any bank
| account. So when someone needs a credit card, I will generate
| a virtual card (right inside the browser plugin, its really
| slick and easy) for that website. They will verify the card,
| and then I can go and deactivate that card. At least with
| Capital One you can keep the virtual card open, but just
| deactivated so it declines if they try to charge it. If you
| ever decide you want them to charge you then you go flip the
| switch and the card number works again for that site. I
| generate a different virtual card for every online
| subscription.
|
| This allows you to get around the credit card wall, without
| fear of them actually being able to charge the card.
|
| I also use this trick for any annual membership type things.
| I will put in a virtual card number to pay the annual fee,
| then after they charge the fee I will deactivate that virtual
| card (but not delete it). Now if a year from now they charge
| the card without warning me, it will decline. They usually
| send you an email saying it declined, at which point you can
| either leave that card deactivated and you now easily
| cancelled the service, or you want to keep the service you
| can go and activate that card back up and the next time they
| try to charge the card again (usually 48 hours later or so)
| it will go through.
|
| If anyone knows of other ways to create virtual cards, please
| let me know. I am currently using Capital One's virtual cards
| because 1) it is free if you have a Capital One credit card,
| 2) it allows unlimited virtual cards, 3) their browser
| extension is actually really slick at auto-generating cards
| and filling in the card numbers for you. I have looked into
| Privacy.com which actually offers a lot more granular control
| over your virtual cards. But you have to pay monthly for the
| service and get a limited number of cards, so I stick with
| Capital One. I have a Capital One card that I don't use for
| anything other than online subscriptions and virtual cards.
| But I would love to know if there are other options out there
| that I could consider.
| tetraodonpuffer wrote:
| I don't think that having an invalid c/c absolves you from
| debts accrued when using services that have traffic
| thresholds for switching between free and for pay.
|
| This is definitely a limiter for me when signing up for
| these free sites: it usually is couched with language along
| the lines of you don't want your business to be impacted by
| us turning off your service, but I am not joining as a
| business, I am joining as a "I am a developer investigating
| if this is worth it for my business"
|
| I would prefer plans along the lines of "pay us $10 to
| activate, if you go over traffic we cut you off but
| guarantee no other charges, if you leave we refund your $10
| no questions asked" or "no charge upfront, if you go over
| the free tier we charge up to $10 once only and then cut
| you off"
| judge2020 wrote:
| > If anyone knows of other ways to create virtual cards,
| please let me know.
|
| privacy.com (https://privacy.com, or If you want to use a
| referral, privacy.com/join/NPNDJ ) is also free and works
| across any bank/debit card, although just recently they
| started monetizing by limiting free accounts to creating 12
| virtual cards a month, so if you need more it's $10/mo.
|
| https://privacy.com/pricing
|
| > This allows you to get around the credit card wall,
| without fear of them actually being able to charge the
| card.
|
| Note that services can see if a card is virtual and might
| block them from signing up for free trials. Digital Ocean,
| for example, does this to prevent referral fraud. Netflix
| also used to block virtual cards from signing up for the
| free trial when they had one.
| codecutter wrote:
| Do you know how they detect virtual cards? I have seen
| some scripts which detect whether card number is valid CC
| or not. But never heard of validation of virtual cards.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It's not inherit to the card, rather it's pulled via info
| from the card network (visa/mc/amex/etc). Stripe, for
| example, returns `card.funding` which is either credit,
| debit, prepaid, or unknown - blocking anything other than
| credit or debit isn't bad for SaaS businesses who doesn't
| want prepaid cards anyways[0]. Outside of that, you can
| use the IIN/BIN (first 6 digits) to build a blocklist of
| virtual-card-issuing banks[1].
|
| 0: https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_methods/object#pay
| ment_m...
|
| 1: https://developers.braintreepayments.com/reference/res
| ponse/...
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > blocking anything other than credit or debit isn't bad
| for SaaS businesses who doesn't want prepaid cards
| anyways
|
| It's not clear to me what you mean here: do you suggest
| SaaS businesses should reject those customers who prefer
| paying with prepaid cards? Hello, this is me! When I see
| a prepayment option or even Paypal, I gladly pay, but
| when you want my credit card info, I wave you good bye!
| segmondy wrote:
| The first 4-6 digits of cards are called BIN (Bank
| Identification Numbers). Every bank has there own. So if
| you started your own company called codecutter virtual
| cards. You will have to get a BIN from Visa & Mastercard.
| Say your BIN is 5123-45 then all the cards you issue will
| begin with 5123-45. Anyone in the industry can obtain a
| list of all who owns' all BINs and the type of cards is
| it. Gift card, virtual card, credit card, debit card,
| etc.
| lukevp wrote:
| Card numbers all come from BIN ranges, most likely these
| virtual cards are all issued within some specific BIN
| ranges (meaning you can tell them apart based on a
| certain # of prefix digits).
| KMnO4 wrote:
| > If anyone knows of other ways to create virtual cards,
| please let me know.
|
| To extend the plea, if anyone knows how to do this in
| Canada, I'd love to know. As far as I know the services
| that exist are USA only.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Might be because of clamped regulations[0] - most of
| these third-party virtual card issuers, including
| privacy, make money from interchange fees, but when those
| are reduced (for good reason) it becomes less profitable
| to support that country.
|
| However, one service that is doing this is Revolut which
| has a private beta for Canadian users and will provide
| virtual cards[1,2].
|
| 0:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/visa-
| mast...
|
| 1: https://www.revolut.com/en-CA
|
| 2: https://www.revolut.com/en-CA/legal/premium-
| fees#card:~:text...
| codecutter wrote:
| I have Citibank DoubleCash card and I can generate virtual
| card number for it. Typically it is for one-time use
| because the expiration date generated is for next month.
| kencausey wrote:
| Please point it out if I've missed it, but any list like this, of
| information that is changeable, should really have a publicly
| posted date of when the information was last confirmed.
| easton wrote:
| Commit history could be used to figure it out:
| https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
| remram wrote:
| That will only give you the date it was added, not the last
| time it was checked.
|
| Wikipedia does that through bot, adding an "accessed <date>"
| to external links. I supposed you could do the same here. You
| could even use Actions to generate a list of entries in need
| of checking (e.g. haven't been checked in 6 months).
| joshspankit wrote:
| We need more of these as wikis, or GH repos that use robots
| to accept PRs.
|
| Tried it and it didn't work? PR. Found a new one and it's not
| on already? PR.
|
| Also, it would be a really nice bonus if "date added" was
| generated from the git commit that added the resource.
| rovr138 wrote:
| That could be bad due to spam though
|
| Specially if you auto deploy it too
| joshspankit wrote:
| Some repos have already successfully used the vote method
| and that feels like a pretty solid defence.
| pwdisswordfish6 wrote:
| > more of these as wikis, or GH repos
|
| The people who live on GitHub are unfortunately unable to
| recognize any distinction.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Indeed. They rapidly go stale. Many of these lists are out-of-
| date by the time anyone finds them.
|
| Maybe it's different for services, but lists of software often
| list projects that aren't maintained.
|
| I've never found anything useful from any of these lists. What
| I do find useful is people on HN talking about what
| software/services they use.
| bootify wrote:
| Crazy, noticed a traffic spike on my page from free-for.dev - and
| it's just one in a (very long) list. Must be a ton of traffic
| there now.
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(page generated 2021-02-23 23:00 UTC)