aneth

It's unfortunate most people need drinks to say what they mean. That doesn't have to be the case. For better or worse, my partners tend to be people who need to try hard to not say what they think.

This site seems like a curiosity to me, and Alexa would agree.

However, they could potentially turn the traffic into something real in the campus dating space.

I'm not long, but it's a cool idea and a nicely executed site.

This is a great article covering the same essence of visual design covered by many books. After understanding these principles you should be competent to do basic layouts. I find many designers do a worse job of internalizing these concepts than your average engineer would if they only took the time to try. Engineers are good at extrapolating from principles. Design is no different.

One theory is that it could be some sort of OCR software that split it up into layers. However if settling this thing was their goal, they failed hard. The birthers will run wild with this.

Yes, that's basically my point. I also think, on average, a higher price wine will be better than a lower price wine.

A lot of these arguments could be made for any product or service. If you pay more for your house, does it mean that you will live happier? No. You may be much happier in central Montana than New York. If you pay more for your clothes, do they look better? If you pay more for your music, do you enjoy it more?

The whole debate is non-sense. Any consumer who thought they were necessarily getting better wine simply because they paid more probably is not literate enough to have understood this article.

What does the current study prove? Some wines cost more?

What needs to be studied is if there is a correlation between price amd consumer preference. As far as I can tell, this was not an effort to do that, but rather to prove the obvious: you can't taste price. This is true for any kind of food.

Can you look at two pieces of art and tell which is ore expensive? No. Is better art more expensive? Sometimes, usually yes, and often eventually. Same can be said for wine. Price is a product of demand, demand depends on information and information distribution. Both products are small batch and highly personal, so price quality correlations will be less accurate and change over time.

Get someone who can tell the difference between a good $40 bottle and an overpriced $10 bottle with a $40 label, have them pick a wine they think is worth $40 and one worth $10, then do the study.

I'm sorry, two buck chuck tastes terrible to me. I'm not the kind of person who sits around debating the merits of various wines, but I do like wine and I am somewhat picky. I can't finish a glass of two buck chuck, whether I knew what it was beforehand or not - and both situations happen all the time at parties.

I've read this type of study several times - either I have especially sensitive taste or there is something wrong with the studies because it is simply not true that there is no correlation between taste and price.

Can I tell the difference between a $15 bottle and a $40 bottle? No, I don't taste price. Are as many $15 bottles excellent as $40 bottles? Absolutely not.

One flaw: if you pick a random $40 bottle and a random $15 bottle and ask someone which they like, this is not a valid study. You need to pick a wine that both costs $40 AND IS WORTH $40 and likewise a wine that's WORTH $15. Just because a wine is $90 doesn't mean it's great, but if a wine is $2 it probably sucks.

The correlation is there and pretty strong, particularly when moving from $2 to $8 to $15, but it is not perfect. Price != taste.

Sense could be an overstatement.

How long before the bit.ly namespace is exhausted?

Twitter is a seriously rough and immature tool. It has no ability to intelligently handle identity or content types. It's confusing to many people, and generally has a style that will quickly appear dated once a well designed alternative gains critical mass.

A few years ago, the micro-blogging community was not big enough for a second player. Now it is, and Twitter will change or be overtaken by a more compelling alternative.

The simplicity of Twitter was once its strength, but like any technology, it must grow to meet the demands of its users. Facebook added chat, photos, a compelling platform, etc... Twitter is dead in the water right now.

Who wants to remember silly @handles? There isn't even a directory of official Twitter handles for companies.

Private group message applications are sprouting up everywhere - Twitter is just plodding along unaware that this is a huge need.

Who wants to see hideous bit.ly links instead of actual content?

Is 140 characters really the future? I doubt it.

Are third party services really necessary to embed media? Do users really need to figure out how to tape together 10 different services and clients to get a good experience?

Twitter needs to grow up, or it will die. And it will happen quickly - less than two years from the day a serious competitor gains steam.

Not in the US, and these are US domain names.

Splintering an application into multiple stacks, languages, wrappers, etc. just to add pretty simple functionality from a library is not a good solution for a large number of reasons.

Using JRuby or a REST API to a Rails app is the kind of complication to an app you desperately want to avoid.

Yeah, or I could use a framework that includes this. I don't want to have to deploy multiple stacks just because of something like this. I was deterred from using Java at all figuring if a payment lib isn't available, it's not the only thing that's going to be missing.

Btw, I was a java developer for 6 years. I was looking forward to type checking, but the closed community was too much to handle after experiencing the ruby world.

That is my question. At the time there didn't seem to be any easy API for processing payments across multiple processors, e.g. Paypal and Google.

The question seems pretty specific:

I'm looking for a Java payment gateway library similar to the Rails active_merchant or the libraries available on many other platforms. I've been surprised that I've been unable to find one. I'd like something that supports the major gateways and providers, like Paypal, Google, Amazon, and some direct merchant account providers like Authorize.net.

Does such a thing exist in the open source world?

I experimented with play prior to 1.0 and loved it, but I went back to rails because I wanted access to more libraries.

Search stack overflow for java payment gateway library and you will find my as-yet unanswerred question. The java community seems much more intent on monetizing libraries and having annoying restrictions - in ruby shit is just out there.

I actually much prefer Scala as a language (although Play support was not ready then). Ruby is a dog in many ways and common practices in the ruby world are completely against my philosophy, but hey, it works and I know it.

I'd definitely recommend checking out Play and Scala.

It's interesting that rails is headed toward whitespace significance in all its file formats, yet the most apparent difference between ruby and it's main rival Python is that whitespace is not significant.

Between yaml, sass (although not scss), haml, and coffescript, is the next step a version of ruby getting rid of end statements in favor of whitespace? I've often dreamed of such a thing.

  module Foo
    module Bar
      class Fubar
        def boom
          p "I like monkey patches"
        end
      end
    end
  end

Ick!

"No further evaluation was attempted by SA ... concerning the above."

Really nothing unusual here. I can see why they would not be interested in learning more.

If the HN community starts upvoting gossipy TechCrunch articles, the community has deteriorated and the focus should be on rebuilding that. Banning TechCrunch would be treating the symptom and bring the community into more rapid decline, introducing an era of elitist censorship and immediately alienating core constituents.

The HN rating system could normalize for this - decreasing time decay for periods where ratings are less frequent.

This situation makes no sense at all based on the explanations here by chrisleydon.

You have backups of the code - can you explain why it isn't a pretty straightforward process to set up a new server? The fact that you have a fixed IP address has no importance as far as I can tell, and that's the only explanation offered.

> It would have taken us months to get TinyGrab v1 back up to scratch

Really?

This still doesn't make any sense. You have source code and the ip address. Why can you not configure a new server?

I'm not opposed to this, however I didn't realized having your pronouns disagree in number with your nouns had become generally accepted.

The idea that every test should cover only one code change is absurd and a recipe for writing way more code than necessary. More code is more brittle and more difficult to change agile-y. Write enough tests to ensure things work, not to ensure every line of code is where you put it. That's folly and a waste of resources.

Great post that hopefully makes some people feel less need to get into YC. A great founder can be helped by YC, but would be successful with or without it. If you think you need to get into YC to succeed, you're not who they are looking for.

You wouldn't take a photo and project it on a wall. You'd whisper into an ear.

How can he make such sweeping statements about the financial implications of buying a home without actually making calculations based on real numbers? Depending on real estate to rent ratios, the calculation varies dramatically.

From the website of al bogari Holdings, the company Omar is the CEO of:

"If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by writing to or emailing us at marketing@albogari.com"

Case in point of building features valuable to customers and the company before those that are not. Why is there no feature on this website to unsubscribe from marketing, just as there is to subscribe? Because it's work to build one, and it doesn't have immediate benefit to the company.

On a side note, as CEO of a 35 year old international holding company - I find it odd that Omar is claiming to be the "little guy" in this thread.

For CribQ (housing maps from Craigslist) we prompt for ratings. It sucks to bug users but it also sucks to build a great product and not have people find it. To the people complaining about the experience, think of the experience of the developer to balance that feeling out.

We've also had issues with what seem to be targetted 1 star ratings with no reviews. Every new version that comes out we instantly get a bunch of these, and I have suspicions about who they come from. Almost all written reviews are 4 or 5 stars.

It does, however, change the validity of the "peer reviewed" status the paper has received, and thereby undermines the entire reason this paper has gotten so much attention.

If the journal is not credible, has published unreliable science in the past, has a stated agenda, and does not have an above-board peer-review process, then it is no more worthy of trust than the World News Daily.

Undermining the credibility of the journal a paper is published in is fair game when the credibility of the journal is the only reason any credibility is assigned to the paper.