skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then MS Office users who aren't computer geeks wouldn't associate it with MS Office at all. In the IE vs. Netscape battle it probably was a big factor that "Internet Explorer" had the work "internet" in it - if a computer-illiterate person wants to surf the internet, which icon will they click?
Linux computers sell in much smaller quantity. This causes increased costs of manufacturing.
Clickable: http://www.snapbill.com
Infinite Glitch
The department of commerce wants to create such an identity system. I'm not sure I like the idea, but it would be "single sign on". I think it is a safe bet that their intention is to eventually make it mandatory, and they have the "ownership", presumed trust, and longevity, not to mention the ability to pass laws "encouraging" adoption.

There are probably better news reports out there, but this is what I found with a quick google:
http://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2011/01/07/us-co...
Clever Algorithms:  Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes
Ask HN: Good engineers in Seattle?
If this describes you:

-substantial experience building web-applications

-deep knowledge of python, django, mysql, etc.

-move fast

-live in seattle

-reliable, nice, and get things done

please contact me. I'm hiring a part-time (mainly back-end) engineer for my local advertising / location-based startup.

Thanks!

nola1919@gmail.com (please put "Hacker News" in the subject line of your email)
The lovely thing about new graphics card introductions are the scrambles by competitors to lower prices to compete. AMD reduced the price of the 6950/1GB to $259 and the 6870 to $219 to nicely sandwich this new card with its $249 price point. Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-t...

[edit: replace ATI with AMD. :)]
We did a full re-write last summer.

It was absolutely worth it and has since allowed us to iterate at a much higher speed. It was a bit terrifying to be at a feature standstill.

Our re-write was from Java(struts2) + BDB to python(pylons) + MongoDB.

If anybody is interested we are giving a talk at PyCon.

MongoDB + Pylons at https://catch.com: Scalable Web Apps with Python and NoSQL: http://us.pycon.org/2011/schedule/sessions/131/
Have you had any experience with Exact Target, at the API level or other? And don't get me started about a certain email broadcaster vendor out of Seattle that starts with "what" and ends in "counts"... their idea of XML is to parse an entire file line-by-line and treat each line independently of the whole. So it kind of looks like XML... to a kid who just learned Java I suppose.
Using external APIs to improve search
Hundreds of these people will be located right here in our technology center in Munich.

Apart from that, I would assume that Zurich will expand heavily. IIRC, it is the largest development center outside of Mountain View.
YouTube - Magnificent Seven on Mars: Opportunity
I don't know anything about typefaces, but I still think it's unattractive.
It's a great name, it prominently displays Liberty. This is much better than Open because the word 'open' is being used for all kinds of software that isn't (Open Document Format vs Office Open XML)
For the Twitter test, the HTTP response code is an error code if you're logged in. So if your work place blocks Twitter and returns an error code like 403 or something, then you will appear to be logged in.

The test could easily be modified so it checks some other url first to make sure twitter isn't generally blocked.

The intention of the article was to describe a general technique, rather than to provide some complete fully functional tests. Although they do work for the vast majority of people.
I was always worried it'd be trivially easy to phish OpenID... I never even signed up for one.
Simon, I know the work you and others have done and continue to do in the OpenID world, and it's commendable work.

The problem with OpenID and other Open Web work IMO is the sheer number of half-baked specs brought forward. Much more than any other standards group. I don't know why. “The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from,” like Tannenbaum said. Perhaps there is a general lack of attention span, a ohh-shiny problem, a not-invented-here problem that is particularly rampant in this community.
I believe the book in question is "The Sentinel", http://econtent.typepad.com/TheSentinel.pdf

or are you speaking of something different?
Try posting to the Digital Eve list there -- it's free, and my previous startup got good candidates for other roles.
Apple, please build these 5 products
I specifically wanted a hardware RAID and only Alienware had it. But I usually also do not scan Ebay for anything.
50-percent-off sites' dirty little secret
The location for the underground office of the game company in "Halting State":

http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/BarntonQu...

[Edit: This bunker is unlikely to be used as office space any time soon as it is rather badly contaminated with asbestos]
A Stage 3 World
Not a vim user, but emacs has tramp for remote file editing. It seems vim has something equivalent called netrw. http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Editing_remote_files_via_scp_in_vi...
It is nearly the same as a placeholder. The advantage is that even without JS, it still functions and has meaning. This is a big advantage.

Just as your placeholder could happen in post processing, so could the suffix and attribute be added.

Having looked into this more there seem to be only three decent approaches. 1) Send the small image first potentially causing extra HTTP requests. 2) Require JS to make a placeholder swap. 3) Cap the image dimensions server side based on a User Agent/Resolution table.

Option 3 is terrible to implement but avoids the downsides the others have.
How 955 Dreams is hoping to bring albums to your iPad
"Google Will Add 1,000 New Employees In Europe "
Score one for the US recovery?
You can do MUCH better building for yourself. Sadly, some of us don't have the time.
This is what Michael Feathers calls 'seams' in his book, Working With Legacy Code. Often, you have to do exploratory testing, that is, you don't really know the requirements but you make tests that the current code passes. Then you can refactor it. That way, current code behavior won't be changed.

Very good read, if you need to deal with legacy code and you don't know where to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea...
This is quite similar to the setup in Daniel Suarez's novel, but with updated tech.
have link?

edit: nm, found it; thanks for the suggestion.
Seriously consider making a recurring charge, asap, before it's too late. I made a reasonably successful game where the income was based entirely on new users paying in. It was very difficult and discouraging to me to see my game taking off with unexpected success, while my income stream was totally flat. Server load and personal workload for me increasing each month, while my income was totally the same each month. When the income is based totally on growth, that's what success looks like. Active user count double what it was last month, income same this month as last month. And it doesn't feel entirely good. You need recurring revenue. If you figure out how to provide value, the customers will pay.

Godspeed and good luck!
McSweeney's imagined monologue http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/monologues/15comicsans.html
"NanoSail-D will remain closer to home. "Our mission is to circle Earth and investigate the possibility of using solar sails as a tool to de-orbit old satellites and space junk," explains Alhorn. "As the sail orbits our planet, it skims the top of our atmosphere and experiences aerodynamic drag. Eventually, this brings it down.""

Pretty clearly not a solar sail...
Already submitted --- 62 comments here --- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139028
Already submitted --- 97 comments here --- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2138720
302 wont work. It simply redirects to the destination page, and then the onload would be triggered. What you need to find is something which generates an error code, ie 4xx/500. When logged in, this generates a 406, because I set "format" to something invalid:

https://twitter.com/account/use_phx?setting=false&format...

But when logged out, it redirects to the login form which ultimately provides a 200 status code.

There are probably several other ways of making twitter generate a HTTP error code.
I think its more that people wanted a casual, playful font. And comic sans was the only option. Given a simlar, but better designed font, I think most people would choose it. Comic sans is strangely hard to read when you compare it to an actual comic book, for example.

But I agree, the hatred amongst designers is a bit strange, and there are obviously loads of people who want that style of font.
The future: Everything run by Google and hosted by Amazon.
I think you have frustrations with people other than me. I manage my own money, and clearly stated that I think it's fantastic that the original poster is managing his own. More people should do it.

I warned against giving financial advice because I had a bad experience doing it. I fail to see how that's disingenuous, consider it trying to help someone else learn from my mistakes. Making mistakes with your own money is fine, making mistakes with someone elses' is an awful feeling that I would just as soon help others avoid. The thing about investing success is that it makes a person cocky and more prone to offer advice at the the worst possible time, when their performance is most likely to regress to the mean.

You are ignoring an important point of mine - that the advice being offered here is terrible. He thought he was going to buy a leveraged oil fund and get double beta, when he was actually buying a day trading tool that tries to offer double beta on a daily basis. It's not the same as buying USO on margin. Anyone that holds UCO over the long term is almost assured of underperformance. That is a fundamental mistake, not nitpicking. And 5% is a larg-ish position in a concentrated porfolio, this was a 15% weighting. Don't get me started on the ARMH selection (well criticized elsewhere) and the age inappropriate / poorly timed 55% bond position.

Finally, it's not like I cherrypicked a random blog to criticize - this person wrote about it and submitted it to HN. I don't have time to police the internet, but this was inviting feedback, and mine is critical.
For cost books have been competing with at cost books for a long time. The reality is reading 50$ worth of books takes far longer than listening to 50$ worth of music. So while I could download 500,000 books tonight I can read them fast enough for that to be a meaningful activity.

PS: At the sub 3$ a book range there is little reason to pirate. I tip waiters more than that let alone entertain me for a few hours.
For whimsy that doesn't waste my time, my favorite recent example is when I ordered a giant gummy bear on a stick for my brother for Christmas (we have a candy gag gift tradition).

It was shipped in a box in a box, of course, and the outer box was padded with packing peanuts. When I opened the outer box, at the very top in the middle was one of those rubber monster finger tip puppets with the wiggly arms--chewing on a packing peanut. Made my day. If they were really smart, he'd have been chewing on something wit the company name on it, which I think would increase the chance that I would remember it now.
Upvoting so more people see this topic, and commenting to say I do the same. Making it easy for users to get off your list is worth the effort both in terms of managing your brand's perception, and making sure your deliverability stays high.
Las Vegas has trade and shipping... tourism.
Holy cow. Aside from the terrible kerning, Comic Sans actually looks pretty reasonable without anti-aliasing.

And even saying that makes me feel dirty. :(
I appreciate that Kadavy actually delves into the technical deficiencies of Comic Sans before he gets to the real heart of the matter at the end.

He misses the larger 'hacker design' point, however - unless you are an experienced designer, you are much better off picking a standard classic font, such as Helvetica, than trying to get all 'design-y' and picking some weird display font, in the mistaken belief that somehow this is adding 'personality' to your design.
The pain is all up front. You configure PowerMTA to slow down its sending due to the responses of the various email providers so they never block you. As the trust for your ip goes up you can send at a faster and faster rate. Also you then store all the email bounces and run a cron job to clean your list. Usually I stop sending to emails that return hard bounces and ones that have soft bounced three times.
For most users I talk to, an email address (rather than a URL) is how they think of identifying themself in a cross-system way. Orienting the spec around that would have made a huge difference.

Were there HCI experts a big part of the community that put together the vision and architecture? How diverse (tech background, language, age) was the original community? Both of those are areas that could have made a big difference.

It remains a great vision, so hopefully people will continue to work on it.
I never really wondered why Everyone hates comic sans so much,that much is obvious. What I want explained is why everyone loves helvitica so much. It's just a plain but readible font, there are tons of those.
wow, serendipitous timing! I am writing my first email newsletter and my unsub was to login to change your pref. Guess I may need to look at way to update my db from Sendgrid.
Identity Aggregator
"gmail really beats everyone else with their thread view of email, which can only be achieved with really smart algorithms..."

Really smart algorithms like comparing subject lines without the Re: or Fwd: and matching to and from email addresses?
You seriously have a comic sans clause? Any chance of a quote of the legalese around that?
I know there's really no point in arguing about matters of taste, but I've seen the film and read the book, and vastly prefer the film. Kubrick's film is a work of genius, if you ask me, and the book was mediocre at best. In my mind, it read like a bad novelization of the film (even if it wasn't written as one.)

And no, you absolutely do not need to read the book to have a clue as to what is happening in the film. As Ebert points out, you just need to sit back and watch, and enough will be revealed.
Probably needs to be mentioned here. The guy running this game, HN user captaincrunch, isn't the "John Draper" captaincrunch most of us are familiar with.

It's an interesting idea, though. I hope HN captaincrunch keeps us updated on his successes and challenges.

I played in a game like this back in high school (late 80s). It involved at least a couple hundred students and had everyone from chess nerds to football players involved. It was an insane fun time. Couldn't get away with what we did, these days, though (think paintball "assassination" during social studies).
My favorite Joel essay: "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

This discussion comes up a lot. People make strong arguments for both approaches.

If you have an established product/business, rewriting is very dangerous. I prefer to refactor aggressively.
How about wanting to support more than 65k rows in Excel?
Now if we could just kill off this facebook/twitter/nextbigthing login nonsense and use email like proper gentlemen things will be just peachy.
What exactly are OpenID usability issues? I personaly prefer to use OpenID where it is available, yet I don't use any login provider but a php script on my own website.
I don't buy that. That's like saying some people are smart enough to read, but just can't figure out writing.

There will always be those with exceptional aptitude. But if you must be exceptional to simply understand a subject as broad as computer science, that's a problem with how we conceive the science.

The Romans thought multiplication was really hard, too. Exponents were literally unthinkable. We know better not because we're that much smarter, but because we have a simpler and more powerful way to think about it.
More generally, if a company wants me to do something and requires me to log in to do it, I'm probably not going to. I'm talking to you, Meetup.
>Hence, it's hard to charge a high price for labor that people are willingly oversupplying.

Not strictly true. Thanks to digital camera availability there are a near infinite amount of people willing to do your family portrait but I suspect you'll have no issue with paying to have it done.

>Contrast with waiting tables, where people do not enjoy doing it enough to do it for free. If there were a lot of people who loved it so much that they were willing to wait tables for free in their spare time, wages would probably go down there too...

That sounds like an incredibly awful world to live in where people can only get paid for things that no one likes doing and everything fun has to be given away. I mean, I don't mind doing what I love to do for free so long as I don't have to pay for food, rent, etc.
Once I had to:

1) Click the unsubscribe link
2) Uncheck a bunch of never seen before mailing lists subcategories
3) Enter e-mail address
4) Enter captcha
5) Check Are you sure? box
6) Click Save

BAD BAD BAD user experience.
How To: WordPress to Jekyll
Chrome to support Multiple Profiles/ Identities
Historian accused of altering Lincoln document at National Archives
I don't know why this couldn't be done via the normal RFC process. I can imagine a version of this done with something based (very roughly) on DNS.
What does it mean to consider cost without considering risk, when the risk is that the cost may become more than you can afford?
It's authenticity is what makes it so effective. You share your thoughts in process, and people accompany you on your intellectual journey -- and their feedback helps to shape the conclusion. So it functions as great brand marketing for 37signals: you're the kind of company who takes what people say seriously.
Comic Sans replaced a whole profession:

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

Maybe you can understand the hatred if you compare it with the hatred for the iPhone App Store amongst developers?
Well, it's a damn good thing I switched away from OpenID for my current project. I was originally forced to switch because the ruby openid library did not work for ruby 1.9 due to encoding issues. It's amazing how much things change in a year.
Ask Ars: Of solid state drives and garbage collection
No one ever sold anything to me (and maybe others) with mystery and exclusivity alone without any word-of-mouth or any feedback/context. The value in exclusivity comes from associated prestige. The value in mystery comes from curiosity or expectations of the potential of the service. Prestige or exclusivity isn't the point of the service (it is probably done for thematic reasons), so I don't care about that, but I'd like more expectations of what the mystery entails. I do not think this is too unreasonable.
In my experience Cafepress-like systems are fine and can be good quality but can't (or don't need to) compete with a local workwear suppliers on price. But, a local supplier may be targeting the bottom of the market and be cheap product as well as a cheap price.

Where are you based?
> Like any other hacker I just wanted to learn a new tool.

Hey, Stammy, and like that you summed up in a neat little package pretty much every anxiety I've had.

Great article.
it needs to be brandishing a shiv
I know the HN community has mixed feelings (at best) about Mahalo, but definitely watch the video!

When I saw Mahalo in the title I almost skipped the article completely, but Jason provides a solid dissection of his company's evolution and the strategic mistakes they've made so far. (Plus it's pretty short.)

(Skip the Mahalo promo at the end.)
I work for parse.ly. I just want to say that it is in the right spirits of startups... Good work, nice team, exciting goals...
If you're paying $2-3K for an Alienware machine, you might as well fork over $99 for a Windows OEM.

Edit: A link to the actual survey

http://www.alienware.com/Surveys/AlienSurvey.aspx?Id=2960712...
"one of the worst executed visions of all times"
What could have been done better?

I'll tell you what it should look like (the fact that it's impossible is not the point): whenever I land on a site that asks me to login, I get a menu of all my possible accounts, I pick one, and I'm in. End of the story.

Kind of like Dropbox being simple and intuitive when everyone else was building overly complex stuff.
People with dyslexia apparently find Comic Sans substantially easier to read than many other common computer fonts: http://www.dyslexic.com/fonts

It would be interesting to have something similar to CSS media queries for screen size for accessibility flags. Making it easier to change fonts for dyslexic people or color schemes for colorblind people would be great.
> What's an example of "more fine grained control"?

Sure, consider this: http://pastebin.com/H3c83X1K

Here we can give a client a write-only interface to the Mailbox, or one of two readonly (i.e. "const") interfaces that each have access to a subset of Mailbox's "const" methods.
Similar situation for DC. The city proper has 600K, but the DC metro area (the parts of VA and MD near DC) has about 5.4M.
While I agree with you that it would be great to have a viable third party in the United States, the very structure of the voting system here (the single member district plurality system) has been shown to favor a two party system under various game theory analyses.

Check out Duverger's law for more insight on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_law
is it safe to declare Square dead?
Blixa and Neubauten have a large and loyal fanbase from the decades they spent making music the 'old' way. Thus they (like NiN and Radiohead) can skip the hard "build a captive audience" step necessary for something like that to work. A new band no one has heard of is going to have a much harder time making something like that work, so as such it's not really comparable.
Already on to it! http://www.emlr.co.uk
For any individual company, economics favor a proprietary single sign-on (37signals ID).

OpenID was not successful in changing that equation.

RPX, by contrast, appears to have done so successfully for a lot of people.
As mentioned above, there was Majestic, which came out about 10 years ago. It was sort of an X-Files conspiracy type thing. I played for a while because I was interested in the tech. You would get calls on any phone you registered, faxes of documents, emails, etc... there was even an alternate web universe where you would search for information and they would inject results for their sites via a plugin in the browser (if I remember the tech correctly). I stopped playing right around 9/11. For me, it just seemed awfully silly to be getting emails about fake "threats" when it seemed like there were some real ones out there.
CloudBees Hudson SaaS (Free while in beta)
The worst part the description of what OpenID is design for is too much promising. Those who retire OpenID never going to give another chance. Everybody will be waiting for new alternative but that's kind of everything from the beginning.

The story of OpenID (not)success sounds like the html compatibility issue. Overall, time pass by and it starts shaping up. But probably no lessons learned from it (yet).

And when the big players are giving up on it no way small startups will be able to maintain, improve and support OpenID features.
In This Judge's Decisions, You Never Know Who Will Crop Up
Rollovers for Business Startup - Professional Guidance is Critical
like what? If you don't login then how do they know 'you'?

Are you saying that they should be able to know you via link hash? For single actions like 'confirm' or yes/no I would agree that it would be easier to not need to be logged in.

Can I ask you this, have you never not logged in and left the action not done? Or do you log in begrudgingly anyway?