skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem lies in how those iedentities are established. A prolific Twitter or Facebook account makes a good identity precisely because you have spent time pouring your identity into it. Your family photos, relationships, residence and work history on your Facebook page. Your daily thoughts and actions cataloged on your Twitter feed. While not perfect, they're the best thing we have right now to externally verify that you are who you claim to be. They provide context to the authentication. Any external service that implemented the authentication standard that may arise out of this situation lacks that identifying context and the best case scenarion only serves to prove that the user authenticating is the user who setup the account. Taking away Facebook's and Twitter's context makes spoofing that authentication much easier.

Solving that in a way that doesn't violate the privacy concerns of your users seems like something of a holy grail. Panacea if it exists, but far from demonstrated.
The key problem didn't come from people NOT using OpenID, but from the people who did. Supporting OpenID is a nightmare. You have different relaying services that go up and down (OpenID's answer is: "use more than one" - ha!), various levels of incompatibility, and a generally user hostile experience.

If OpenID usage had been in any serious numbers, our support department would have revolted.

If you're trying to build a profitable online business, cutting your support costs is key. And the easiest way to cut your support costs is to dump confusing features or technologies that people constantly write in about.

Same reason we originally dumped FTP in favor of hosting files ourselves. The support costs were way too high.
Forget crowdsourcing, Localmind targets real-time answers with microsourcing
Well Groupon actually raised "like a billion dollars" whereas you equate hiring "like a billion people" to 5.
Ask HN: How do I break into Venture Capital?
Hey guys,

I've been thinking alot about plans for later down the line in my career and while I know you cannot pre-plan everything I'd love to find out how I can break into VC at the associate level.

Context: I'm working in a boutique financial services firm backed by a late-stage VC fund. As such, I'm working across several functions and since the firm is only 5 years old (and profitable) I'm getting alot of experience with just <1 year under my belt.

Any suggestions/help/pointers would be most advisable. I'd really like to know about the skills that are needed on a day to day basis.

At present I'm building relationships with several VCs in my city but I'd love to hear the HN Community's view on this.
>> precious fusspot
> Thank you for that neat, clear and concise evaluation of my personality. Note that I didn't include "accurate".

> My reply to that basically covers your comment, so I thought I'd include it here
...
> If it had been me receiving that email I'd've resented
the 30 seconds it took to check that its content was
"CD posted",

Sounds like you'll spend a lot of time whining about 30 seconds you didn't actually lose...and do it again when the same thread comes up again on HN.

"precious fusspot" sounds accurate:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/precious
4. affectedly or excessively delicate

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fusspot
Brit informal a person who fusses unnecessarily

kb
Google Account auth is nice too. It actually uses OpenID in the background, but the user doesn't have to understand what OpenID is. As it should be.
Wikipedia says he broke his promise because he "ran out of stories" not due to payment
The problem with all these pivots is that Jason never addresses the real problem looking for a solution:

The Problem: How do you couple an ad based funding model to user generated content without having that content model destroyed by ads displayed not in content of content and ads and ad frequency not fitting with user generated content.

Thee is the problem Jason and you still have not solved go back to the drawing board!

And to be fair I do not know if there is solution to the problem with a non-volunteer human infrastructure...maybe there is not one.
I'd like to hear more about the use case if you have time, and can talk about it. I'm kordless at loggly dot com.
Any details on which sites are recruiting? Zurich? Datacenters?
Understanding Workplace Culture: An Expressway to Career Success
negotiate scope, not rates. its likely that they're in the mess they're in because they went bargain hunting.
All that fanfare and... they sent your package via USPS.
You are right, of course. One of the larger issues in this kind of endeavor is that many start ups aren't really using seasoned engineers.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Feynman
Exactly, and it wastes my time trying to work out what it means, rather than letting me get on with things that are more important, more fun, and more rewarding.

I'm not complaining that it's whimsical nonsense, I'm complaining that it's whimsical nonsense that other people insist I should find fun, and then they force it on me whether I want it or not.

I'm 50. I'm no longer a teenager, so I no longer know everything. My life is half over. Please, let me choose where I find my fun.

And GET OFF MY LAWN!
What time.
There is no reasonable justification for any individual, institution, or business to be using the newer MS office file formats.
"one of the worst executed visions of all times"

What could have been done better?

I spent a couple of years advocating for OpenID adoption, because I believed that the alternative (one or two companies controlling login for the entire Web, ala Microsoft Passport or Facebook Connect) would be a massive blow to the decentralised nature of the internet. I believed that OpenID's usability issues could be resolved if enough smart people got involved in figuring them out.

Clearly I was wrong on that last point.

And yes, my latest project (lanyrd.com) uses Twitter rather than OpenID for authentication. From a developer point of view, that gets me the benefits I hoped for with OpenID (SSO, portable identities, instant contact lists) without having to wait for the world to agree on the standards. I just wish we could have figured out a decentralised solution.
How did you determine it was whimsical nonsense, and only whimsical nonsense that did not contain anything that needed to be acted on? Were you able to do so without reading it?
The RIAA was involved in the Viacom v. Google case?
John Adams defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, despite how much he abhorred the British control over the colonists.
Libr?
I'm choosing to spend time trying to save other people time, and giving them a gift of an alternative viewpoint.

That's my choice to make - it's one of the ways I try to make the world better.

Besides, I type really fast.

(now see if you can work out when I'm being sarcastic, and when I'm being genuine.)
I think that's an overly narrow definition of "rewrite". In fact, I'd argue that piecemeal is the smart way to go about a rewrite, if that is at all possible. In which case the rewrite is just an aggregate of refactorings.
Except they already have auth setup for all their other webservices. Why not make email yet another service and the auth infrastructure is already there.
Try using a

text-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.01);

for the text.
It makes the text prettier in some browsers, like chrome, by faking anti-aliasing.

Example: http://www.graphnode.com/stuff/text-shadow.png
A $250 graphics card that actually can play literally any title you throw at it, at reasonably high res and eye candy turned up.
Write a nice letter thanking them for the opportunity and refer them to someone else. Don't offer an excuse, just say you've decided to pass on the project.
I almost wish attacks like this could be used to trim down all the options provided by uber-social sites that offer me the option to twitter/like/stumbleupon/reddit/digg/etc... every single page.
Payrolls Decrease in 35 U.S. States, Led by New York
As much as I admire any manufacturers interest in linux, I hardly think there's any sense in anybody shipping with it. Few people who want to use linux are incapable of spending the 20 minutes to install it themselves, and no matter what distro you pick you'll never satisfy a large portion of your linux using customers.

Just sell me a computer with a blank harddrive. That would be swell.
Yeah, well keep in mind a few things:

* Until today, MailChimp was by far the cheapest option, esp. if you compare them against similar services, e.g. Campaign Monitor.

* Mailchimp is a lot more than a dumb email server...it's a list management service, it offers stats, a pretty robust API, etc. You'd have to spend a lot of time to build up those capabilities around SES.

* I'm not sure SES is meant to handle the volume MailChimp handles. (I don't mean technically, I more mean what is allowed by Amazon.)

Just a few thoughts from a pretty well satisfied MailChimp customer. (I'm also a SendGrid customer, and you can bet I'll be taking a close look at SES as a replacement for that service.)
... and I still can't wait for asynchronous I/O events on both a socket and the console...
Image of a laser hitting a reflector on the moon: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Goddard_S...
The disasters were driven mainly by an attempt to create a manageable codebase while keeping the end user experience fairly similar.

The successes were things that built on existing systems but focused on delivering things that were actually radical improvements in functionality, with the rewrites being driven by this, not an end in themselves.
It seems like Amazon is friendlier than SendGrid about bulk marketing email.

Does this lower the barrier to entry for MailChimp/Constant Contact/Consumer Newsletter Service competitors?

Or are there other high technical barriers as well?
I think providing Facebook/Twitter logins for other social media sites make a lot of sense. Want to login to post on Yelp? Done. Want to checkin at 4sq? Gotcha.

But using those services to check into the applications running your business? Fuck no. I'm certainly not going to let anyone depend on their ability to get paying work done by whether Twitter is up or not. And I know of plenty of people who aren't interested in mixing their private-life Facebook with their work-life accounts.

Then of course there's Google. I'd be weary to let a large number of customers be owned by that Gorilla.

OpenID was promising because it was an open standard, not controlled by any one party. But unfortunately it had the usability of your average open source project (acceptable for hackers, terrible for anyone else).
Paid news service Ongo launches
2011- A Big Year for RFID Technology
I think I'm starting to understand 37signals advertising strategy through DHH tweets, that admittedly only works because they have listeners.

1) Tweet negative/positive questions about x.
2) Tweet negative/positive observations about x.
3) Tweet negative/positive observation backed by data about x.
4) Tweet article about how positive/negative x is on blog.
5) Take action about positive/negative x.

Usually over the span of a couple days. It feels like you are watching DHH come to the realization that something is good/bad which helps you come to the same realization.

There is nothing wrong with it, and I don't know if its intentional but its super effective.
But they already are, so we have to support them now. That is the problem.
I close my tabs in chrome how I used to in opera, with a middle click anywhere on the tab control.
That "narrow" definition is the one being used by Joel, and the other authors who have weighed on in the debate. A rewrite isn't an aggregate of refactorings-- for the purposes of this debate, it is the opposite of an aggregate of refactorings.
It sounds familiar. I'm sure there was an attempt at a subscription based "Real Life Spy Game" several years ago (>10 ?) already. You would receive phone calls from strangers, mysterious emails, have to check website links, and such.

It wasn't a success as far as I remember, but it was definitely ahead of the times, and also "single player" only . A massively multiplayer game based on the same concept has definitely more potential...
Wasn't web finger supposed to fix some of the usability issues with openID? I don't think I ever saw that added, but I could be wrong.
Uhm, because they are the bad guys? John Wayne films are pretty clear on why the bad guys are considered bad. I realize that these films are not high brow entertainment, but factual honesty is always a bonus. Witty false statements playing on a cliche kind of irritate me.
Are you familiar with refactoring? It's difficult to give specific advice because it depends so critically on the local landscape, but in general, factor out a layer and give it a good healthy coating of unit tests, and repeat until done. It is more complicated than I make it sound, sure, but in some sense it is also really that easy. Factoring out the data access layer sounds like a first step, creating some sort of service that actually unifies the data access patterns and then moving up from there, but I can't guarantee that.

All but the truly worst worst scenarios are better met with this approach than a true rewrite. In this case by "rewrite" I mean the creation of a new system next to the existing system that doesn't work until all (or at least most) of the new pieces are in place. If you've truly got an epic snarl, rewrite may be the only option, but odds are you don't actually have that epic of a snarl. With the proper approaches and tons of unit tests, a refactoring is like a rewrite in the end, except you have a running system the whole time. It can actually be slightly slower in total, but you also get the value of being able to choose when to stop and a continually improving system that is always actually running; it's only slower vs. a rewrite that actually succeeds and completes and that is not a sure thing!

With a database backing you do also have the option of trying to bring up a new system that also hits the old databases, but that will in practice require the first step I laid out anyhow, the refactoring of the data access layer, and once you've done that the use of the rewrite value goes down a lot.
Nvidia and Intel are both on a tick/tock cycle.

2010 shrink the die size
2011 new architecture
2012 shrink the die size

Nvidia and Intel are both going to put out really high performance chips on the new architecture before the die shrink, but I am not going to buy them so it's irrelevant. An i5-2500 + GTX 560 are a great price / performance match and things are not going to really change much for another year.
Play Game ★ HTML5 Multiplayer Game
Part of the reason could be technical analysis paralysis. I've worked on projects rewriting PowerBuilder components in C#. Getting the two to talk to each other is non-trivial, so determining where to slice off chunks to rewrite is an anxiety-inducing prospect.
Since the invention of e-books and digital audiobooks I probably buy 3-10 times more of these.

Audiobooks in particular, of the on-demand variety where I can instantly get them on my iPhone through the Audible app, have led to me reading a HELL of a lot more. It's easy and convenient.

eBooks also help because I buy more books and search through them. I can also read them on mobile devices while I take a shit in public washrooms.

Right now I am in the middle of:

* 2 non-fiction audiobooks

* 3 fiction audiobooks

* 4 standard ebooks

I task-switch between these 8 products based on my mood. I could never carry around 8 dead trees or fit 5 audiobooks onto my walkman. It just wouldn't happen.

Digitization has led to me spending way more money on authors. In the past I would just get dead trees from libraries or friends, or not buy them because they were too much money.

Now that I can get an audiobook for an ~$8 audible credit I try out new things way more.

That I can instantly buy an ebook I need for ~$10 means I read a lot more. If it's 2am and I want to read some particular book, I can instantly get it, I don't need to put it on the shopping list and waste so much time finding a bookstore and standing in line and searching through stacks of shelves.

I spend more time reading/listening and far less time deliberating, searching, planning, and waiting.
How to Turn Disaster Into Gold
That's what 'private browsing' is for, then you switch back, it is fantasti.cc
Of all the literature produced by the current system in the last century, how much of it is actually valuable in the sense that having it is a great boon to society?

How much of that would not have been produced had the publishing industry not existed? I'd wager that authors would still produce literature regardless; you'd have to be insane to write a book with the sole intention to live off the proceeds. It hardly ever happens NOW. You could make more money cleaning pools.

The loss of the entire publishing industry is not necessarily a great disaster.

Like publishers, the music industry never produced culture; it marketed the latest fad to teens relentlessly. That's a live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword business model. When teens decide you're no longer cool or necessary, there's no alternative but bankruptcy.

Now, if I could actually find physical copies of great new music that isn't compressed all to hell for not-outlandish prices, I'd buy it in quantity. But that's not what the music industry is selling.

Same for publishers; these people aren't providing the same value they used to, which is to cull through the crap and only offer the good stuff to the customer. The Internet does that for me now.

As for the financial incentive for the author to write, I really don't care. A patronage system could work. Public funding could work, and might even cost less than enforcing copyrights.

But nobody owes anyone else a living, least of all the middleman between the author and the audience.

If we're really worried about piracy and the book is that great, only sell paper copies. Self-publishing makes that possible too.
An Intro to Backbone.js: Part 1 - Models and Collections
Why is localhost IP 127.0.0.1?
So tags are more flexible. Offers sounds like a subset of tags.
> If one is interested in doing this optimally, it should be better to compile python code to javascript directly.

Well no, this is not possible, because python and javascript have very different semantics, notably regarding numeric types. You would have to enclose every python numeral in an object, and that in itself would already cripple the performance quite a bit. It would probably be less than the emscripten approach, but not by that much of a margin.

I started doing a python to lua compiler, and did hit that wall very fast.

Pyjamas python to javascript compiler is basically a toy regarding compliance to python spec. Every number is treated as a float, which means any numeric python library/function may not work correctly in pyjamas.

That's not the only difference in semantics between python and javascript. Just the most performance expensive.
How to increase conversions with a stellar landing page
Maybe duplicates do get removed. (I thought that generally only one at a time would get upvoted.) But not within half an hour.

If you're thinking that it was only submitted once, and a bug is causing it to appear multiple times --- they are clearly different submissions: different scores, different submitters (though you've cropped that out), even different titles (the dashes are different).
Rookie mistake. Always have a no comic sans clause in your contracts. If the client asks to remove the clause during negotiations, run.
It would be interesting to see if the magsail or electric sail concepts are developed as well. The simplest design appears to be the electric sail, which only needs radial conductive wires (easy to manufacture and deploy, although it needs to be launched well outside the Earth's magnetosphere).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_sail
The claims about what spy satellites can see have been exaggerations at least since the 1960s. They are still exaggerations today. I hope everybody knows that the "satellite" view on Google Maps is from conventional aerial photos (taken from airplanes) as you zoom in.
What's do you guys think the this article? Is mobile THE disrupting obstacle for Facebook? In what way?
I wish I could brand that as a fancy marketing scheme, but I think the answer is much simpler. It's simply transparent discovery and thinking. If it happens to work as advertising, that's a positive side-effect, but the main dish is coming to good conclusions.

I certainly grew more confident in the decision to dump OpenID after talking with lots and lots of people on Twitter about it. You get to test your ideas, see what the feedback is, tweak, and retry. All while making the decision process public.
Rate my Startup: SnapBill - Automated recurring billing
Hey guys,

We're a small team from South Africa that have finally decided our startup is ready for release (been in private beta here for a while).

* Our main focus is on creating Services, and selling them. Once you add a new service to your account, we'll automatically generate signup forms (based on custom fields you specify) and deal with all the monthly invoicing.

* We do provide standard invoicing (ala Freshbooks/co) but its not our focus at all and is purely intended for the once-off invoices recurring billing companies need every so often.

* We only support PayPal for automated payments at the moment, but more support is coming soon - promise!

I'd love to hear any thoughts or comments anyone has.

http://www.snapbill.com
"James Hansen". Pretty much anything he's ever said in public. No, it's not hard at all. It's hard to find a scientist's name in the (conventional) media who is not playing politics. (In this case I don't include the explicitly-science section of the papers. There you get your choice of either a journalist playing politics with science or a journalist not understanding what they are writing about, or both, but that's not the scientist's fault.) You think it's hard because we've become so used to it you can't see it anymore but scientists do hardly anything but make ought statements instead of is statements anymore.
Tell HN: If I can't unsubscribe from your emails in two clicks, I flag it.
I hate to flag someone not spamming as 'spam'. But, if I have to "log in" to unsubscribe.. I just click "spam" in gmail. If I have to enter my email address after clicking a link; I hit "spam".

Basically, if I click unsubscribe, and I have to do anything other than click 'confirm'.. I flag the email.
How could it be insider trading, if they're not doing anything with GOOG?
I don't actually know, it's some Intel stuff that can be configured to 0 or 1 pre-boot.
This reminds me of Electronic Arts Majestic game -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game) -- an alternate reality game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
He keeps saying it's an 'unattractive font', but the truth is, it became popular because so many people like it.

Here's the kicker: It's only 'unattractive' to people who know everything about typefaces. Nobody else cares, and they find it pleasing.