goosmurf

However (recognising that this is what a lot of folks use Bintray for), we don't offer any free plan, nor public repositories. This is a deliberate decision as we are bootstrapped and our end-goal is a sustainable business focused on private distribution.

Full disclosure: I am a founder of Dist, happy to take any feedback and questions.

There's 34 listed just for San Jose and Santa Clara...

Consider this cost relative to the cost of a trustworthy ops person, plus the capex & opex of running your own reliable & scalable DB.

There are some aspects of reputation systems which are useful for identifying misbehaving participants but I don't see any evidence of such use cases on HN. Yet the karma system encourages karma whoring which IMHO significantly reduces the SnR of contributions (both articles posted, and velocity and content of comments).

Maybe as a starting point the karma scores can be hidden from public view?

http://i.imgur.com/575Br.jpg

In both cases those methods yield potential investments which I then look at financials as a basic check - does this company's balance sheet and P&L indicate anything obviously dodgy? More importantly, do their accounts offer any insight as to how their business is actually going; in many cases I find this is not the case as through sufficient accounting manipulation little reflection of reality is left in the reported figures.

In terms of your service what I would like to see is some sort of graph of executive management & directors and their histories. I have a personal blacklist of individuals based on their ability to ruin companies, and I also have a few folks that I basically would invest in anything they do. This is largely industry specific though not always the case as there are folks from finance & legal backgrounds who end up being chairmen or directors across a wide variety of industries; this can be good for finding investments in new industries.

Another thing is the company's history, particularly (but not limited to) the balance sheet. In some cases future prospects look great but the company has burnt existing investors through heavily dilutive raisings (as an example). These holders will suppress any rise in price so for me that is a reason to stay clear despite everything else.

You asked about "before" but on-going is also important. For the small (speculative) companies that I invest in I try to stalk most of their staff; in particular I want to know if key members of staff leave (not necessarily executives); or if there is unusually high turnover. Tools like LinkedIn and Twitter have made this a lot easier but it would be great if it could be automated.

I think verification of the legitimacy of a complaint should be a critical step before disabling a site, otherwise you're prone to DoS.

It would also be good to know what steps the complainant took. Did s/he try to contact Pandaform, or immediately go to Rackspace as the owner of the IP?

Without knowing whether the complaint was legitimate, and what steps Rackspace took to verify this (or not) its tough to say whether their actions were appropriate.