b14ck

To me, wikis just seem 'lazy'. Projects that use wikis as a primary form of documentation make users feel like the project is un-cared for, and not worth documenting.

I have absolutely no stats to back this up--but having officially written documentation gives projects a really good 'feel', and makes it a lot simpler for users to get started (IMO).

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

There are some other small countries / territories also on NANPA, but yeah, sorry!

Hey premchai21, thanks for the feedback! You're completely right. I'll be making some adjustments to the way this operates over the coming days to make things much simpler.

Thanks for taking the time to check us out!

Hey mike, thanks for the feedback. I'll be working on this tomorrow to get a fix out.

After all the feedback here, I realize how crazy it is to be returning a 404.

Thanks for checking us out, and thanks for the feedback!

Hey krrose27, we basically pull the information from a variety of sources, all publicly available. If we can get the caller ID name information, then it means any call made from those numbers to a caller ID capable phone (with caller ID service) will be able to see it also.

Hey ars, thanks for the feedback! After reading the comments here on HN (which are incredibly valuable), I'll be making those changes ASAP.

Sorry for the confusion, but thanks again for the feedback. I greatly appreciate it.

Hey samirahmed, thanks for the comment! I'll definitely be updating my blog post and improving the documentation on the website.

Appreciate the feedback.

Hey Adley, thanks for the comment! I'll update the page shortly.

Hi there. So, I'm the author of this article. Anyhow, for our free-tier users we don't provide realtime lookups.

Basically, we'll only return a result if we have a caller ID in our cache. So, if you get a 404 (no output), then try again a few seconds later after we've had time to do the lookup via our backend.

Sorry about that! Realtime lookups are currently restricted to API key users only.

Thanks, this looks like a really great list. I'm adding these to my reading queue :)

Hey again-- I've actually made a response on the related reddit posting to a similar question. I typed out a fairly in-depth response, so I'm going to paste it below.

I hope this clears things up.

-----

Basically--we partner with telephone companies who colocate our equipment (servers, etc.) which we use to run our software. We purchase phone lines from these telcos (to support incoming calls), and then provide free services for public consumption to make money off the termination cost.

Imagine that you have a T-Mobile cell phone, and your friend has a Verizon cell phone. When your friend calls you, Verizon pays T-Mobile a small amount of money for every minute that your call lasts (this fee is to pay for the physical infrastructure that T-Mobile invests in--telephone polls, switches, service monitoring, etc.). That's why cell phone plans cost money and aren't free.

We operate the same way, except we partner with telephone companies (like T-Mobile in my example above), and split the termination fees with them.

So the more people use our services, the more we can profit from it.

Hopefully this clears it up. There's been a lot of discussion in the internet recently about traffic pumping and companies attempting to get fraudulent traffic to make money. We are by no means doing anything illegal or illegitimate here.

-----

Also: our motivation for building confnow is to basically to make conference calling as simple as humanly possible. I've personally used the other sites out there (namely: freeconferencecall.com), and nothing is more frustrating to me (as a user) to want to make a quick call and have to go through hoops (setting up accounts, waiting for verification, listening to ads, etc.) when you just want to get into a room as quick as possible and move on with your life.

Google voice blocks our exchange numbers in Pennsylvania for some reason :( We're currently expanding into multiple datacenters--so we'll have new exchange numbers shortly. But it seems that our 610-XXX numbers are all blocked by Google.

They're at our datacenter in Pennsylvania. We get paid from termination (like freeconferencecall.com).

We're not traffic pumping or anything--it's a legitimate conferencing service.

Yo! Thanks for giving it a test.

If you add a security pin, then after you enter your conference room number, it'll prompt you for the pin you entered (think of it like a conference room password).

Also: we're in the process of getting more numbers. :)

Man, I'd love something like this.

I enjoy working with other people, however, I do best when working with them through IRC, software, etc.

For instance, in both my professional and personal life, the most successful projects I've worked on with others have been those in which communication was primarily done through pull requests on Github, or IRC conversations late at night.

Maybe it is antisocial, but I just can't seem to function as well working in person with other people as I do on my own.

What sort of stuff do you do better around others? I'm genuinely interested.

Throwing away code feels good inside. It feels a lot like shrugging off tons of worry ^^

I use vim splits as well. I find my typical workflow is something like this:

1) Open a tmux split (vertical). 2) In the left tmux pane, open vim (and split horizontally). 3) On the right side, have my tests open and running via a watch command, eg: watch -n 10 "nosetests", or something similar.