skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Alternatives to Omnigraph Sketcher?
So, I have been drawing a lot of economics diagrams lately, and found myself wanting to do nicer versions on the computer. I went looking for tools and found Omnigraph Sketcher...which looks absolutely perfect, but which only runs on Mac. I think it's well worth $30, but not worth buying a new computer for! Astonishingly, there doesn't seem to be anything like it on the web or for Windows. Any suggestions?

What it does: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraphsketcher/ This might look like something that could be achieved in many other ways, which is partly true, but I'll briefly explain why they're less than ideal (hopefully this saves someone else the trouble).

Spreadsheet: you could put in numbers and graph them. But often you just want to explore the conceptual possibilities with a diagram, rather than tie it to any particular numbers. Alternatively, you might want to draw a diagram and specify one point on an axis as being equal to a particular number in order to discover what the other numbers would be.

Drawing programs: Something like Visio or Google docs can make lots of spiffy diagrams, but they're not much good at measuring angles/lengths/geometrical quantities. Pro illustration programs are better, but it's quite difficult to turn the metrics into content on the diagram or export them.

Graphing calculator/math software: a great deal of economic analysis resembles plotting functions against each other and integrating over the results. But it only resembles it, and overconfident application of math wizardry can turn out to be misleading (see: financial crisis of 2008 for an example...). More to the point, you don't know what your functions are ahead of time, and often there's way more software overhead than you would ever want or need.
Right, because people from Marketing don't add any value to a company.
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How Entrepreneurs Gain Credibility
I have to admit that I had just done a bunch of searching around to see what people said about solutions like AuthSMTP, and found more praise for SendGrid. It was cheap, easy to set up, and they seem incredibly knowledgable about deliverability.
Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption
Yes - A decent, lightweight image editor is one of the weaknesses of OS X (though it has a world class screen grabbing capability built in). The very first thing that I put on any new Macintosh (mine, or others) is Acorn. Kind of a pixlemator competitor. Gets 95% of the lightweight cropping, editing jobs done - and, as a bonus - it's free if you don't need any of the advanced features.
I think it's because they're using FB for registration -

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1594596

FB no longer functions this way for me - but Quora populates my full name and pic right after entering my email address (i.e. no credential submission required).
I was surprised they had 140 left.
I really like Helvetica, although I also really like Akzidenz (perhaps more).
I'm not entirely sure why, but Akzidenz seems to be used a lot in German print and often looks downright gorgeous when paired with a good font for copy.
For example, Fluter has some nice design… [example (PDF)](http://www.fluter.de/heftpdf/issue95/artikel9084/pdf_article...).
The login/signup requirement to actually see the site is a problem. You should show the alpha user version of the site to users who are not logged in.
andale mono ftw, baby!
What does "After porting your number to Google Voice your mobile service plan will be cancelled.." mean? I am on AT&T; does this mean I am no more a part of AT&T?
Can too much caffeine kill you?
Using Right Hemisphere of Brain to Win in Chess and Shogi
mission #1: assess and secure paypal funds.
You are right A/B testing to see if people are actually signing up is totally part of idea validation.

Just so that we are on the same page, landing page is same as coming soon page, right? It is not necessarily the home page of your startup when you have actually launched? Because my goal is just coming soon pages with ability to collect beta signups.

(I hope my ESL is not the problem here.)
> Every time I see a web app supporting openid Im glad that I don't have to invent yet another user/password combo

The problem is most people don't bother doing this; they just trust every site with the same password. The benefit I see in OpenID is that it is not a secret, and canot be "compromised" (intentionally or not) in the same way as passwords.

(I also am one of the few, it seems, to use OpenID for my 37signals account)
>>Is this a real product?

Nope. This site features user-submitted designs.

>>If so how does it compare for number of insertions versus 'regular' USB plugs?

Signal integrity would concern me too. Getting USB HS to work right at the maximum allowed cable length is no BS as-is. The diagrams aren't clear enough to show exactly where the two contact layers are or how they're connected, but two divided sets of contacts can kill your SI in a hurry.

As an aside: why, oh why, didn't they make the USB A connector obviously keyed? I'd estimate many lifetimes have collectively been spent trying to shove in perfectly rectangular connectors the wrong way. It should be shaped like a house (a thinner version of the B connector amenable to thin devices) or an arrowhead or something.
UltraTek makes something similar: http://www.flipperusb.com/
worth downloading just for the increase in max number of rows in Calc, imo.
Fair enough - it is definitely something we are going to add very quickly.
I've always wondered why the USB port is the way it is. It seems such an unbelievably stupid design, but I assume there must be a reason for it. Does anyone have a link, or brief explanation?

Incidentally a search for "why is the usb port such a stupid design?" (without the quotes) brings up nothing remotely relevant on any of the major search engines. Strange.
Wish I could vote you up a few more times on this. Mike Feathers called them
characteristic tests. Sure, run them as unit tests, but get them under CI
right away too. Test everything that moves all the time.

This type of work, and this approach, appeals to a limited set of
people, though. It's painstaking, detailed work. The other problem is
that businesses don't understand its value, and don't want to
pay for it, ime. I've seen two companies go down not paying attention in
this area, and two more who are currently dying.

Course, if the thing was under test to start with then things would be
so much simpler ;)
Well, after 10+ years of using USB widgets of every shape, size, and color - I just discovered from reading the article that the USB symbol is always on the top side. So, I certainly got my value out of HN today. :-)
then they'd be moving into MailChimp's turf! I'd say they're in a pretty tight spot...
Success Profile Summary Of John D. Rockefeller’s Life
It's all actually done through e-mail, a la Angelist's early days, so there isn't really an "alpha user version of the site". Based on the comments here, it looks like we need to do a better job of explaining what exactly is going on since the site and the blog post don't. Thanks!
I think that's a good way to minimize risk, but also consider the morale issue. This would be the equivalent of giving one developer a corner, window office while the rest stay in thei cubes.

Perhaps you could apply google's 20% rule? Every Friday the entire staff breaks up into teams and work on skunkworks rewrite projects. I think this will boost overall morale and you might find your developers staying late on Friday nights :)
Damn, I came here to make the same joke.
Upon further research, Twitter and the FB News Feed came out within 2 months of each other, Twitter coming first. However, the News Feed was the first truly successful version of it.

I wouldn't say that a news feed and RSS are synonymous. RSS was not accessible, nor was it really for distributing user created content, it was more for blog posts and news. Those aren't the type of communications I was talking about.
I've had several groups of people sign-up that wanted to be grouped, on the same token, I've had just as many sign-up to play against each other.

The game has several aspects to it, some which incorporate short distance interactions, and some interactions that happen over several weeks, exchanging hands several times (due to longer distances).
Identifont is a "20 Questions" quiz to identify a given font, but I've used it to discover fonts for a given purpose.

http://www.identifont.com/identify.html
I agree. I'd love to hear of a readily available font that has similar feel.

In games, I occasionally use a font called Galette Medium, but it has a decidedly different feel.
Very cool but here's my initial concern. When the set of four contacts are flipped over on top of themselves their order will be reversed and that leads to a potential for a short. The center two pins being data aren't as big of a deal but the outside pins, namely the +5 and ground would be opposite each other and quite close. Since the surface they are mounted on slides, it could potentially also wiggle up and down. Careful engineering would be required to ensure these don't come into contact, which would make a nice little short to blow out one of your USB ports.

I would consider putting a sliding plate between the two contact plates to keep the two sides separated. It would be pushed back no matter which direction it was inserted exposing the correct set of contacts.
I'm not sure how it works now, but the way Facebook dealt with this issue is to present IFrame with confirmation what you're posting on your wall. This of course makes using client side scripting mandatory but it—very efficiently—limits any SPAMing capabilities of a rouge application.

Also, developers could request dropping this limitation but they had to go through Facebook's verification system, part of which was confirming that the app itself presents message before publishing and will only do that on the immediate UI input.
Thats what I thought of when I read this title, and even more so when I read the actual link. I liked that book. We were just discussing it in #startups a few days ago.
Why do you need a Twitter account to be an alpha user? I almost signed up as an alpha user, but this pushed me away.
Maybe the author of the article could be hired to redo the flipperusb site.
I've always wondered, why aren't USB connectors designed to be able to be inserted either way? Does having 4 contacts vs 8 really save all that much money?
Seems like anyone can sign up as alpha user. How is the vetting process going to be?
It looks like WebFinger is not really an authentication system but functions more like a user profile. It lets someone know what music you listen too, or what programming language(s) you know but it doesn't prove that you are you.
You will be assigned a new number from AT&T. You will then point your ported (existing) number from Google Voice to the new number AT&T assigns you. Note, if you're currently in contract, you are subject to early termination fees. This is not any different than porting from AT&T to another carrier such as VZW in as far as they are concerned - even if you are simply getting a new number from the same carrier.
Or the opposite? Quora hopes to be Stack Overflow of varying topics.

Stack Overflow is _the_ Q&A for programming.
I don't really get Quora. It seems to have some good questions, but many inane ones as well. My guess is that with time, there's going to be some crowding out, too.
Because what's a sans face without a serif? Introducing Comic Serif!

Download: http://www.dafont.com/hvd-comic-serif.font

Real life examples: http://www.idsgn.org/posts/comic-sans-comic-serif/

FYI: This is a real font, though these sites have some NSFW language.
HN is unreadable even on a desktop browser, that's not a client fault.
I read it on ihackernews.com
Oh the irony!

However I think the idea has great potential, I certainly love getting feedback from experts.

There's a problem though. What if I'm both a founder and an expert user? I think a lot of founders are like that and it certainly seems to be the case that one of the reasons HN works is that the same people who are entrepreneurial know the best what type of feedback people need and also make great alpha users.
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The reason many designers choose Georgia is that is has character. But I would say it really depends on what you are doing. If you are trying to make something look futuristic or techy you probably shouldn't be doing Georgia but rather. Trebuchet, Arial or Tahoma. Also Georgia does not render equally nice in all browsers.

So although I would tend to agree with them I would caution the Georgia for everything approach.
Yeah, or at least an email-looking identifier. I don't think we need to require it to actually receive email -- but it's a fair default.
...encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-reward opportunities.

My impression is that it's no so much "encouraged" as required. "Publish or perish" (academia), "up or out" (military), and "20% time" (Google) are all roughly equivalent. Roughly.
It gives us a quick and dirty way to vet someone as an alpha user based on their profile, followers, following, and whatnot. LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora and other sites aren't as readily parsable (I know that's not a word, but just go with it) at a glance.
I was just looking at this last night and came upon a source for the whole "I hate Comic Sans" meme.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11582548

Interesting, the folks credited with getting it started[1] were really concerned about its inappropriate use, not that it was otherwise objectionable.

[1]Holly and David Combs, who started the website bancomicsans.com
I've got 33.
openid-abuse@twitter.com
or web interface equivalent.

But even better, the requested capabilities should be specific enough, so that any additional description wouldn't be necessary.
They should hire somebody to do it. It is atrocious!
I really don't understand your website. REally.. I joined and added a description but i see nothing on the home. How do i get feedback. REally you need to improve you site..
Lots of people have signed up as founders with ideas and added their e-mail as alpha users - do both sides, we encourage it!

On a meta product design level, we wanted to keep the submission barrier a tad higher than that for alpha users. Alpha users are pretty busy and we don't really need to have them do submission revisions, so no need for passwords or logins there. We've already seen founders submit their ideas, then come in and revise (over and over again).
This is not a good reaction to missing the mobile CPU market.
I was being sarcastic, these days it's fashionable to be the Quora of something.
Agreed, they should just be like a firewire plug that is bidirectional (ie. not tapered at one end) with the 4 pins repeated on each side. Much better design.
Check out http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Model-url and http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Sync

There's even a local storage adapter: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone-local...
Why not just try to get better at interviewing? Although working for yourself is great, many of the skills you use in an interview will serve you well in other areas of life.
Funny that someone feels fit to critique the use of a particular font, but has no clue how to use proper capitalization.

Now I'm imagining a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, all in Comic Sans.
AOL’s Patch enshrines the event anti-pattern
Can you add an option to autoload via viewtext.org when a post is clicked?
I think this is pretty awesome. Language compilation is a fascinating topic.
Get Action
Why the dig at MS Paint? I'd say the exact opposite: it's a simple pixel-level bitmap editor, and for that purpose served me well for years before I moved to OS X.

I must poke around Preview later to see what it can do.
Look, let's just agree to disagree. You find it whimsical and gently amusing. I find it an infuriating waste of my time and about as funny as a whoopee cushion. I've made my case, you've made yours. I claim that doing this will needlessly annoy paying customers. You think it doesn't matter.

Now I really won't waste any more time on it.
My suggestion is, in the future, always ask for more than you think you can get up front. That way if they want to negotiate you can knock a little off and not worry about it. You might want to read a book on negotiations. I suggest "Secrets of power negotiators.

One very humble approach might be to say... "I am not a good negotiator and i have already give you my bottom line price."

In regards to not coming off like an arrogant jerk... you can't control how people perceive you. If they are saying things and you feel like an arrogant jerk, you're probably being manipulated and might be interested in reading a book about assertiveness like "When I say no, I feel guilty"... which says when people in business relationships criticize you, you should obliquely agree and reassert what you want... "I see how I might be coming off like an arrogant jerk, but I'm still not interested in lowering my rate."
Poll: Have you ever applied to work at Google?
So, Google is hiring like crazy, but they are ultra selective. I wonder if that selectivity precludes some folks from ever applying in the first place. How many of you fit that description?

Edit: there is lots of interest here... Google folks, turn this into a mini HN/Google career fair.

Edit: Guessing this submission was downmodded by a moderator. Ouch?
I applied and was hired
I applied and was rejected
I never applied because I don't care to work for Google.
I never applied because there is no way I'd get hired.
I never applied (other reasons). Explain below.
American Apparel has cheap high quality shirts/sweatshirts that you can buy in bulk, then just work with a local printer to print them. Also, most local printers already have preferred suppliers (American Apparel is often one of them), so check with them.
Yeah I don't really know about Android. The article was really more about web apps.

But granular access controls are nearly impossible to implement in practice. Unix had it right all along: a set of limited users, and root. You're doing well if you can even defend that security boundary, anything in-between tends to be root-equivalent on general purpose systems.
I get it now :)

Let's nope that Quora will get it's momentum, and userbase - the way Stack Overflow has, because it it doesn't only people following social media news this period will know what means to be the Quora of something.
Life Path
I had a similar experience today... my post made it to the front page and was unceremoniously killed.

Apparently when you say you're hiring a billion people, you'd better mean it. ;-)
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I just might have to hop into this. The last ARG I played was a decade ago, and few premises since then have excited me as much as this one.

Unlike a few other commenters, I'm not particularly worried about being a party to real-life crime. It's in keeping with both common sense and the watch-your-back nature of the spy game to perform a little due diligence on each mission. Plus there's a reasonable paper trail in the event of something going wrong (PayPal, HN account, captaincrunch's internal security measures?).

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some interesting outcomes revolving around factions and the command chain. Whether trust is intentionally broken (i.e. by design of the mission coordinator) or whether mistrust arises spontaneously, there's great potential for each mission to be merely a pretense for gathering intel on your teammates or superiors... then using that knowledge to manipulate others to your ends. This may end up testing the game's operators more than the players in the end!
I'd also like to point out that Stack Overflow's database is available to the public under the creative commons license. Quora's database is not.
You should just read http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/scripting.html (his original paper) because all his statements about systems programming languages reinforces my claim that Python is not a systems programming language.
This doesn't really seem like an abridged version of a month's worth of reading...

If you get enough information, of course you can make a good business. The challenging part is condensing that so you can learn the right lessons in a non-geologic timescale.
Thanks. I didn't know there were other manufacturers making monitors with DisplayPort inputs. I use mostly NVidia cards and Linux, so I was being genuine about my 'naive' status. My impression was that DisplayPort was dead outside Apple. Does you think it's still up and coming, or is it another Beta/VHS problem?
“Let The Hacking Begin” Declares Person Who Hacked Zuckerberg’s Facebook Page
I'd like to, but I feel like I've exhausted my options. I've interviewed all over the place, and I'm generally a nice guy and I think I'm pretty smart, but people seem to never want to hire me, I dunno why.

I forgot to add this: the most recent interview that was discouraging was with a large travel-related company. A recruiter reached out to me (so, I didn't even apply), gave me a few questions to complete that I spent hours on. I worked super hard, typeset it in LaTeX, and figured it was way beyond what they normally receive from candidates. The recruiter even told me they were very impressed. I went in to interview, chatted with some engineers (and I even taught the second guy a few things, like the rename command), and never heard back. I emailed the recruiter and asked why. The recruiter said that the team simply needed to hire a senior candidate. I felt stupid for wasting my time.

Something similar happened with Jane Street; they wanted solutions to questions in OCaml. I spent a long time on the problems, submitted them in Scheme, Python, and OCaml, all using recursion, higher order functions, etc. After submitting the code, they turned me down.

Yelp also turned me down after I spent a long time on the problem they gave me. I did what the problem asked, including writing unit tests. It was fun to write since it was in Python, and I like Python. But again, turned down after submitting the code.

Also, I figured it wasn't a problem with the code, as I had friends who were hired by Amazon and Google review it and they said it looked fine.

These are the types of things that are making me want to stop interviewing.

What I'd like to do is become more active in the HN community, and eventually start working on projects related to studying Japanese or learning about Japan. I'm working on a small project now that will show a new Chinese character per day, because kanji-a-day.com is currently the top result in Google for "kanji of the day", and it's not nice looking.
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I used to go to a bar in Santa Monica (Warszawa) where the Google folks go every Friday for happy hour. The recruiters kept trying to get me to apply, but I never did. I get the impression that they want people with Engineering/CS backgrounds and here I am a programmer with an English degree. I bet I'd have a better chance of building a startup and selling it to Google so that I could work there than going through the application and interview process. I could be wrong though...