skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gregory Smith is not involved in the day-to-day of Qwiki because he's actually a television actor, and I assume he's too busy to be there all the time - he was the lead role on the WB series Everwood, Doug (Qwiki's CEO) knows him from when he worked at the WB. IIRC Gregory played a big part in coming up with the idea for Qwiki, and provided a lot (maybe all?) of the initial funding.

Jay Oh was the tech lead at Doug's previous startup, The U (http://www.theu.com), which shot and sold video tours of colleges (Gregory Smith and several other actors from the WB appeared in and helped promote many of these videos, so it's all very connected); I'm pretty sure they achieved a very nice exit from that when they sold and started to work on Qwiki. I don't know why Jay left Qwiki, specifically, but he's now one of the leads at http://howmutch.com/.

FWIW, I'm not part of Qwiki, but I was good friends with Doug when we were younger - on that note, just based on what I know about Doug, if I had to bet, I'd say that Qwiki has a very good shot here, regardless of what it looks like now. He has an impeccable business sense and will pivot without hesitation if it looks like he needs to, not to mention that he's one of the most driven people I've ever met in my life.
You need to show your mother Comic Sans Criminal: http://www.comicsanscriminal.com/

The best part is that it's not just a rant, there are some free alternatives that meets her "more readable" criteria.
"Thankfully for the ISV, torrent use is on the decline. People prefer direct downloads of the full package instead of slower peer-to-peer downloads."

Wishful thinking unfortunately.
What are the other missing features?
Sounds like fun, I shall try to attend. Emailed.
Try asking on the reddit developers channel on Freenode IRC?

Also, if you're going to use the Open Reddit code, read their license very carefully. It's - IIRC - not one of the run-of-the-mill OSI approved ones, but their own, or a hacked up version of one of the standard ones or something. I forget what was weird about it, it either had some kind of badgeware clause or an AGPL like clause about using on servers, or both, or something... anyway, read it, make sure you understand it and any implications of it.
For an idea of how good these buildings actually are, check out this story about a 13 story building falling over in Shanghai: http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips...
OpenDNS: PayPal most phished, Facebook most blocked in 2010 [pdf]
I knew instantly what this was.

Something very similar to this has been in my ~/project_ideas folder for the last year or so. It comes from the Department of Itch Scratching and I think there's a market out there for a holistic in-house vcs/issue/deployment management tool.

Kudos to the Springloops devs for executing on a vision. Hopefully I'll get to take it for a spin before too long.
That's like "training" a cyclist to use a helmet by smacking them in the head.
How much of the fun of this game is dependent on geographical location? Would it be worth playing at all in small towns/cities? Similarly, how would having friends you see every day playing affect it?
Edison's prediction of Kindle (1911)
I wonder if it's reasoning like this that has kept OpenID alive when it should have died a long time ago. You want the Open world to win over the corporate overloads, build a technology that actually works. A lot of effort has been put into evangelizing OpenID because it's a technology that nobody would want on their own.

The problem was the underlying concept is not sound and no amount of layer on more features was ever going to solve it. What we need now is to get the browser makers involved in a secure authentication system and start it first inside of smartphones.
It obviously needs a HN colored theme including respecting your topcolor choice.
Ask HN: How does Sendgrid stack up on deliverability vs. SES?
I've been a (mostly happy) user of Sendgrid for the last several months. As a startup, one of our big pain points is burn. And with Amazon's new SES, we're looking to spend 20x less on transactional emails than we're currently spending with Sendgrid. This seems like a no-brainer.

But before I make the switch, I'm wondering how SES compares to Sendgrid on deliverability. Sendgrid touts their credentials on getting emails delivered.

So how do they compare?
Feature request: offline operation and background sync, so I can read HN offline. Presumably voting/commenting wouldn't work while offline. Of course, if you're going down that rabbit hole, you also want to prefetch and cache the content of the links.
Hypothetically, couldn't I believe that some large inefficiency exists but that I don't know what it is?
It shows that it's possible. The question is then why others don't implement it well. Obviously it's not worth it to them, but I think that say more about those doing the poor implementations than it does about OpenID.
serverbeach has dual quad-core servers with 6-48 gigs of RAM for relatively reasonable prices, month to month.
By the way, I'm still having huge deliverability issues when using Sendgrid. Emails sent to Gmail accounts go straight to spam. I'm still not sure how to resolve that, and am hesitant to blame Sendgrid for the problem. We do, after all, own a 15-year-old domain name.
A good example of this is Clickpass that Hacker News uses for logins. With Google, it asks for access to "Google Contacts". There is no explanation of why it needs access to Contacts or what it is going to do with it. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything nefarious. I have seen other sites using Google Accounts for sign in with requesting OAuth access.
The reason is that there is no reason to analyze it. There's nothing to do on the screen, and you've already decided you want to download the app (after all, you did press the "Download" button).

Maybe 80% people will still press "Allow" instantly, but at least this makes the 20% other more comfortable.
It's not a statement of fact, because theft is "the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent."[1] Robbery, on the other hand, is "taking or attempting to take something of value by force or threat of force and/or by putting the victim in fear." Based on your characterization, taxes are much more similar to robbery.

However, taxes are not robbery, they're commerce ("the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information, or money between two or more entities"), because - in theory, at least - you're paying money to the government in exchange for useful things (roads, public services, enforced order, and so forth). If you think that the state can't responsibly spend it (I feel like the country as a whole spends money a lot less responsibly than the state of California, but yeah), then you have four options: replace the government, reform the government, leave the government, or complain. Continuing to use the things that the state is providing to you without paying for them as the state has found reasonable is stealing, just as it would be stealing if I went to a restaurant and didn't pay for my meal.

Also, as an aside, I initially found it amusing that you (as a comparatively new user) were pointing a much older user at the welcome page; however, people must be reminded of the rules of discourse we operate under whenever they stray from them, despite how long they've been part of the community. Pointing him to the guidelines instead of the welcome page might have been slightly more appropriate, though. The rules there are much more concise, at least.

[1] All quotes from wikipedia.
Sometimes when you have a blighted building on your hands, the only thing you can do is burn it to the ground, clear the lot and start fresh. It just doesn't make sense to replace a window here, the plumbing there when the entire frame is rotten and about to collapse.
"Congress put out a report stating that piracy actually (in some way, be it minor or not) helped "digital sales"

"minor or not"

So did it help or didn't it? I don't know how they could ever prove this. How do you prove intent, one way or another? By asking people that pirated software if they would have purchased?

If companies didn't actively try to fight piracy (even if it doesn't work that well), they would eventually go out of business. This is because free versions would become easier for the masses to obtain than the paid version and nobody would be willing to pay money for something they can easily get for free. The only reason it works for big companies like Microsoft and Adobe is because they can take the financial hit. Most small software companies can't.

The same thing is happening with software developers and open source. Companies are slowly realizing that they can get the software they need for free. Sure, they can hire a developer to make changes to it, but that developer doesn't need a college education and can be paid much less (or they just outsource it to India, Russia, or the Philippines).

"I find it frustrating that my lawfully purchased software is sometimes much more difficult to run (keys, registration, ads before it starts up e.g. EA Games) than my friends running pirated copies."

Blame the pirates. Remember that these protections were built as a result of rampant piracy. DRM wasn't around during the Napster days.

Personally, I don't even sell apps anymore..only services. This way, there's nothing to pirate. I suppose this will be the end result of piracy: all commercial software will be services that need to be paid on a monthly basis.
Plenty of times later in life when I saw some cryptic message in a dialog box I suspected that he'd found new employment, but based on the high frequency of such instances it's hard to believe they're all related to him ;)
Perk Monks Tutorials http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Tutorials
Will.i.am is rewriting the Intel Inside jingle?
Amish barn raising in one day...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pg_vpy2mxg.

It's all comes down to coordinated mobilization and logistical management. Seven cranes costs a lot of money, around the clock operations cost even more. Construction schedules are prepared to optimize the start of revenue streams with the cost of construction.
Fedora Project Website Compromised, But No Changes Made to Fedora Code
Google Acquires SayNow
The hunt for neutrinos in the Antarctic | Science | The Observer
Counterpoint: Cory Doctorow points out that the newcomer's enemy is not piracy, it's obscurity. If you have an awesome piece of intellectual property that nobody knows about, people copying and downloading can put it on the map.
Twitter Blocked In Egypt, As Protests Turn Violent
Depending on how they defined success, 73% might be achievable just by looking at co-correlation. Up days and down days tend to run in streaks. If they defined success as predicting 'up' or 'down' for the day for the DJIA, just going with the most popular result for the last N days could work.

But overfitting is definitely still a concern. Looking at the overall trend for the Dow Jones in 2008, I wonder what the success rate of an indicator that always said 'down' would be.
With these stories Wattvision is doing an excellent job of positioning their device as 'something that pays for itself'.

Really, keep it up, super marketing! Have you considered a 'the device will pay for itself within a year or your money back' guarantee?
The Implications Of Google’s Management Change
Google launched wireless printing from smartphones
While I agree that there are problems with access granularity for Twitter, the author ignores the access models of the other providers. Facebook for one provides an extremely rich set of granular controls. The grant screen, is however 1 page, so maybe that is why he chooses not to analyze Facebook further.

I also believe that the author has some fundamental misconceptions about OAuth. OAuth is merely a standardized way of gaining access to proprietary APIs. There is nothing in the specification about what sort of level of permission an access token will provide the consuming site. The statement: "And KanyeAnalysis™ uses OAuth, which lets you use your Twitter credentials to sign in!" is misleading and makes OAuth sound much more like OpenId than it really is.
You forgot to mention this at your PHP Meetup talk last night. I'm enjoying your book by the way. Thanks.
How the Hippies Saved Physics
The notion of a probationary period is largely mythological for places where employment is at-will (which is most jobs in technology in the U.S.). Since at-will employment means you can mostly be terminated for any reason at any time, every day you go to work is really part of your probationary period. There's no concept of a "long-term commitment" and your status as an employee doesn't materially change after whatever "probationary period" the employer might extend to you.
Does anybody know what font Larry Gonick uses in his "Cartoon Guide to..." books? It's informal and cartoonish, but it doesn't bother me (in the context of Gonick's books). I wouldn't want to read a novel in it.
I am not most users. Strangely, neither are most of the people I know. But we're the ones everybody looks to when they need to buy a computer, know if the web is safe, or clean up the mess when it turns out not to be.

Quit it with the "most users" reasoning, unless your goal in life is to part fools from their money.
Hunting for the World’s Strangest Features on Google Maps
You may think this is coming from left field, but have you ever considered talking to a therapist/psychiatrist about this? This sounds a lot like ADHD to me.

I'm 24 and was just recently diagnosed. Like you, I'd spent years of my life needing to the minimum and yet excelling at nearly everything I've done. Still, something wasn't quite right, and things began to get worse.

You sound very much like me pre-diagnosis (and, unfortunately, post-diagnosis, too). I'm currently taking Adderall which has allowed me to focus and get certain unpleasant things done, but I'm suffering from a real lack of skills in organization.

My advice is to talk to someone about this. And if you'd like, you can feel free to email me (josh at goals dot com). I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have and talk more about my own experiences. After all, the only reason why I'm on HN is because of my ADHD: I founded Goals to help me build a tool for myself.
For obvious reasons, I'm reminded of this marvellous (true) story about recognising, rewarding, and hating Comic Sans - http://www.johnbraine.com/2010/10/the-king-of-comic-sans.htm...

In actual fact, I support the continuation of Comic Sans solely so I can share that link / story with people.
Fitting a model to "predict" events that have already happened, isn't anywhere as hard as actually predicting events that have yet to happen.
To go even more Hollywood, some friends and I sat around the student dining table many years back and brainstormed ways of doing a laser gallery shooting game (I don't know what they're called internationally - for UK brand names think Quasar or Laserquest) that could be worn discreetly in public so you could play around your local town centre, shopping mall, garage, wherever you happened to be. And probably get hassled by security for running through crowds and making anything like shooting gestures, but it'd be fun :-)
Ask HN: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?
Which platform is more viable? Have you used any of these programs extensively? Is LibreOffice any better than OpenOffice in terms of equations handling? My experience with OpenOffice with respect to equations was at best terrible. I wish there was an open platform to replace Word but it seems that we are still far from that( with the respect to the developers of OO and LO).

Please do not suggest LaTeX as alternative for practical purposes(file sharing with colleagues that do not use it)
Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
"In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery),
generated by "hydraulic" wheels."
Absolutely! It is not rare for me to get to the allow screen, notice that the app is basically requesting full access to my account which it clearly doesn't need, and leave.

As the worms spreading through e-mail show, social filtering may not be sufficient to identify rogue apps in time.
Immigration secrets & pro-tips for hiring foreign workers
> allowing the craft to accelerate indefinitely.

In theory that's all very nice, in practice the power available for acceleration decreases as the cube of the distance.

Of course a bit of acceleration is better than nothing but this will only work well if you have very large amounts of time, and since all systems will have to survive for all that time I don't see this as a practical means of propulsion. Bussard Ramjets are a lot harder to construct (and shield) but I think if there ever is going to be a practical means of achieving speeds that are a significant fraction of lightspeed then I think that's where it's going to come from, not from solar sails (even though the technology definitely has its charm).
And here I thought Google accidentally indexed their own internal HR websites. What a gyp.
Depending on your photography style, you should definitely consider Aperture, particularly now that it's so much cheaper through the App Store (US$80). I used image-editing software for my photography for a long time, but I have moved almost entirely to photo-dedicated apps like Aperture and Lightroom.
Edit: removed some points b/c charlief made them more succinctly.

An even better question: is the relationship causal? The researchers use Granger causality analysis to test their hypothesis. Wikipedia tells me this analysis "may produce misleading results when the true relationship involves three or more variables." [2] By definition, Twitter and the DJIA are macro aggregates of a number of factors. How could the researchers apply Granger here?

[1] See Table 1 at http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/documents.php?c=c

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granger_causality#Limitations
I'd imagine after all the publicity that got, this one was built to higher standards. They claim to go well beyond the standards, and I don't doubt it for this particular project since they are using it for marketing.

The problem with the building that fell was obviously the foundation, which has to be done way in advance anyways.
man you hate taco bell today
I believe the on-disk is pretty well defined nowadays by their open document promise.

However, HTML is a published standard, too, yet every copy of IE renders in its own special way. I think that is a far better analogy of what is expected here.
Not that weird: they likely have features which cannot be saved in Photoshop format, and users end up frustrated and confused if opening up a file results in something different than was saved.

Being tied to another company’s proprietary and idiosyncratic file format sounds like a terribly obnoxious burden for any piece of software: all the effort in reverse engineering the format and so on never yields quite the result you expect (Microsoft for example can’t even get their own formats right from one release to another, and they have loads of cash to throw at the problem), and any development time spent on it is time taken away from the actual image-making features of the app.
Yahoo to Let 140 Employees Go
I think you misunderstood the efficient market hypothesis.
Since Google has always been hiring at least some people even through the recession, does a blog post like this mean we're back to the torrid expansion of 2005-2007?
LibreOffice feels somewhat more fast than OpenOffice. Of course, I never had much of a problem with OO (except for speed.)
don't you think somebody would like just to install cygwin and write a few scripts - it's free and i guess faster than asking your boss for the money
Work here.

By far the most knowledge I've gained in my career was while I was at JTV.

Oh yeah, and ZeroCater'ed free lunch isn't half bad either. :)
Pixelmator is "The Missing Editor" (to quote TextMate but even more applicable here).

I thought one weakness of OS X was that it came with no built in image editor. People mock MS Paint on Windows, but it's a lot better than nothing.
Hunting leads on conference floor is better than having being stuck on the booth
I have been doing research on this problem, send me an email if you'd like to connect.
If you need the features of Office, a couple of hundred dollars is probably money well spent. Particularly when your colleagues rely on your formatting.
Two big usability issues:

Have a picture on the home/landing page! Show what kind of cool stuff can be made by this. Maybe an awesome, mainly complete picture that still has some "puzzle pieces" blank on it. Then the call to action text next to it is "Help complete this picture" or something. Basically you want to make it clear that by uploading a single small piece you are contributing to a larger piece of art.

The feedback upon "clicking to reserve a tile" is not good. I kept double clicking because nothing was happening. It took me a long time to realize that the details were being populated over in the left column. A better design would be a lightbox that expands the single tile to full screen when you click a tile. Enforces the fact that you're now editing THIS tile. This would be an especially great interaction if you included a rudimentary web drawing tool for directly editing the new big tile.
The post mentions Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was when I started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-reward opportunities.

I do not know what the current salary/options numbers are but is it really high-reward for the top notch engineers they are seeking at this point in the game?
Where I see rewrites fail is when the company has one huge monolithic and interconnected application which really has to be rewritten all at once or not at all.

Dividing your application up into logical libraries and services goes a long way towards making it easy to rewrite. Essentially, you want to obey the single responsibility principle. This means that each component should not need to change if a change is made in another component. From the Wikipedia article:

> Martin defines a responsibility as a reason to change, and concludes that a class or module should have one, and only one, reason to change. As an example, consider a module that compiles and prints a report. Such a module can be changed for two reasons. First, the content of the report can change. Second, the format of the report can change. These two things change for very different causes; one substantive, and one cosmetic. The single responsibility principle says that these two aspects of the problem are really two separate responsibilities, and should therefore be in separate classes or modules. It would be a bad design to couple two things that change for different reasons at different times.[1]

For example, some of your core logic might be written as a library or a stand-alone server. This separates it from the GUI logic and the database logic. So if you need to rewrite the interface, you do that in the GUI code. If you want to refactor the business logic, you rewrite that component. If you want to change the database, you alter your data-access layer.

This makes incremental improvement easy.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principle
Good work. I like the spartan utilitarianism.
By that argument, anyone who offers to settle a dispute for an amount less than what it would cost to litigate is doing a shake-down.

Do you think the right thing for the RIAA to do instead would have been to not offer to settle, but just open with a lawsuit and insist on a trial? Or are they supposed to just ignore people who they have very good evidence are massive infringers?