Show HN: Collections, a fast multiple-account Google Docs client for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://beta.collections.me

<comment><USER2> A desktop client for a web app that replaced a desktop client. Amazing!

<comment><USER3> He should use this exact phrase on the website. Sarcastic marketing FTW.

<comment><AUTHOR> I won't pretend I'm not tempted.

<comment><USER2> A few years from now, you'll be bought by microsoft to replace Office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> thomas-st psql -h ec2-107-22-171-68.compute-1.amazonaws.com -p 5732 -U u1npugarlguimh -d ddbs2kvmqeieon

Since DEBUG=True, finding the password is left as a trivial exercise for the reader. I wouldn't trust the service until they fix the issue.

<comment><USER4> Hi thomas-st, thanks a lot for bring this up. we just fixed the issue and changed credentials on the server as well. All transmission also happen securely through HTTPS and contents are only stored on Google's server, not ours.

<comment><USER5> Actually, your Postgres credentials still work. I am currently able to connect to the database and I can still view people in the role I grabbed.

I'm not sure how to validate that this is still timely, though... oh, I created a table:

public | hacker_news_1342216769 | table | ruwdncbzdkulsh

With the current timestamp. So, if you changed anything, it hasn't actually taken effect in the part that matters -- the exposed database.

<comment><USER4> thanks xb95, it took a minute to take effect, but issue is now fixed.

<comment><USER5> As of right now, 3:16 PM PDT, I can still connect to (one of) your Postgres databases.

        # psql --host=ec2-23-21-85-231.compute-1.amazonaws.com --port=5432 -U ruwdncbzdkulsh dc6jnvg2ce8qim
        Password for user ruwdncbzdkulsh:
        psql (9.1.4)
        SSL connection (cipher: DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits: 256)
        Type "help" for help.

        dc6jnvg2ce8qim=> SELECT NOW();
                      now
        </comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
         2012-07-13 22:17:51.821052+00
        (1 row)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Xb95, we first removed the heroku add-on and thought that it would automatically destroy the database, but that turned out not to be the case. So what we did to fix the issue was purge all of the tables from the database. Now the credentials still work, but they reach an empty database without any content. We're working on revoking the access token for all affected users right now. Thanks for helping us through this.

<comment><USER5> I have confirmed that there is no longer any data in the database I can connect to. Thank you for taking care of this.

<comment><USER6> /xb95 rides off into the sunset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great example of a Minimum Viable Product. It has just enough features to be useful (multiple accounts, search, editing) and no more. From the website, they have plans to iterate quickly, with the help of what I'm sure will be a lot of feedback from the initial release. This kind of discipline in feature selection is admirable, and something we should all strive for in app development.

My only critique is that in the new user dialog, the app showed a screenshot of adding an account _before_ the screen where you could actually add an account. I found this a little confusing (why can't I click to add my account now?). I wouldn't mind seeing that screenshot after adding my first account to let me know how to add another.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi --

I suggest you not use this app right now. It is currently throwing up debug pages that include information that allows someone to connect to Postgres and dump the database containing information about your documents.

App developers -- please update your Heroku settings and/or turn this off immediately. You are exposing confidential company information to the wild.

Thanks.

<comment><USER4> Hi xb95, thanks for alerting us to the issue we've turned off debug mode and reset our database credentials. We are looking through the database server access log right now and going to make sure that 1) all connections were made from our own servers and 2) users in the timeframe affected will be notified of the issue access token revoked immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic and solves a huge pain point. Google docs is a crutch for most people, but the interface and accessing it is generally terrible. The onboarding was simple. This is a good start, I'm looking forward to what you guys do next. As for feature requests, I'd like to see collapsible sidebars, the real estate on the editing is a bit small. Good luck guys!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome. Navigating Google Docs is the worst. But PLEASE do away with the preview mode. I don't want to have to click edit all the time, and I don't really lose anything by just always having the web view.

That and get a nicer app icon :p (seriously)

<comment><USER9> At least for spreadsheets get rid of it. I could see it being nice to remove all the junk chrome that Google puts around docs though. But if I'm viewing a spreadsheet, not being able to add to cells is useless.

<comment><USER4> Try double clicking on either the preview or the list of documents. That will get you into the edit mode right away without having to click on the edit button

<comment><USER9> awesome thanks!

also, if anyone wants a nicer icon i made @mattrossi's dribble shot ([http://dribbble.com/shots/530208-Google-Drive-FREE- PSD?list=...](http://dribbble.com/shots/530208-Google-Drive-FREE- PSD?list=47622-Google-Icons)) into an .icns file you can easily replace: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8875810/google-drive-icon.icns>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One small criticism... Calling your app "Collections" leads to some ominous looking emails when you contact customers: "This is Mike from Collections" makes me immediately feel like I've forgotten to pay a bill.

</comment><comment><USER11> Kind of confused by this heroku error message I received? Are you storing my gmail credentials on heroku? When I tried again I have a google /looking/ login screen?

<http://cl.ly/1p0M0o2t0H1E3Z1h3i0n>

<comment><USER12> I haven't used this so I'm not sure what's going on, but I believe OAuth involves a redirect back to servers controlled by the third party to actually do something with the authentication token. This doesn't strike me as necessarily fishy.

<comment><USER11> I guess I don't understand why they even need to store anything on their servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bdittmer, we don't store any of your content, nor any of your passwords. We only store meta data that describes the organization of your documents and do so server-side so that we can add features in an upcoming release that we otherwise wouldn't be unable to add.

<comment><USER13> Storing stuff? Isn't that what my hard disk is for? If I wanted a cloud solution, I'd just log into Google Docs directly.

I would have thought the _whole point_ of an app like this is to take advantage of the benefits of native UI, not to add yet another point of failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Offline editing would be a killer feature.

</comment><comment><USER15> Super nice, but I worry about the slower webkit in webview. If it is much slower, you would get a better experience in the browser, despite the nice UI additions in this app.

<comment><USER16> Why would an embedded web view be slower than Safari on a Mac? Mac OS doesn't have the restrictions on generated code that iOS does.

<comment> jarek-foksa This is the case at least with apps from Mac App Store. Safari uses WebKit2 which is a private framework. If you want to ship your app on Mac App Store you have to use WebKit1 which does not support split-process model. Flags that enable GPU accelerated compositing are also private on Lion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know that this isn't really related to the application, but anyway... Please, don't let the browser scale the images for you. I don't like opening a site, and seeing something like this (<http://sadpanda.us/images/1078451-DUYING8.png>).

Beside that, this client seems something really awesome, especially the ability to easily edit docs from different accounts.

<comment><USER12> What browser are you using? I thought modern browsers did a better job of scaling. Chrome does, at least.

<comment><USER17> Firefox. Yes, it's a know problem and there is already a patch, but as always is taking forever to get approved. And yes, Chrome do a better job, but still it doesn't look totally right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm. Dunno if it was syncing, or what, but it just sat there consuming CPU (170% across both cores) for a while. Finally killed it.

</comment><comment><USER19> One of my favorite things about this is its presentation. You've placed your app in something that people lust after (a macbookair) and then something 'cool' inside of that (x-men).

Probably more compelling than a screen shot of a spreadsheet or a table, I bet it triggered an "I WANT THIS" reflex that I wasn't consciously aware of.

</comment><comment><USER20> Last semester I did a big group project using Google Docs but we kept running into an issue where the spacing was different on everyone's computers. The title page would look perfect on one computer and overflow to the next page on another. This was in Chrome on OS X and Ubuntu. It really made me pine for native apps.

<comment><USER21> I recently did a small group project in which we shared a .doc on dropbox between users on Windows and Ubuntu. We had the same issue, as well as disappearing page numbers and other spooky trivia. Multi-user document editing is hand-wavy art at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love it. I have three different Google accounts I use for docs and being able to not have to open up a new tab just to see the other docs is worth the download. The only thing I'd want is a little bit less agnosticism about which docs belong to which accounts.

</comment><comment><USER23> Curious, why did you use a bit.ly url for the app? Shortened urlsm have their places, but I'm a little leery of them,. (<http://bit.ly/MlUfJm>)

</comment><comment><USER24> An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome! Now I don't have to switch accounts! Sparrow for Google Docs. Now make an app for iphone! It's annoying to open webpage to access google docs on iphone :/

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like this app is getting lots of traffic. FATAL errors abound.

Looking forward to this. Anyone know a reason it can't support offline editing?

</comment><comment><USER27> I think this is brilliant. There may be concerns about speed, but I think that for now the convenience and features should overcome that.

</comment><comment><USER28> Great idea, just wish it wasn't crashing on me. Also the security issues which the others have are a bit of a worry.

<comment><USER28> I should add the error I'm getting is:

"An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details."

This happens when I clicking allow on the oauth permission screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> They use Google Docs for the bug/feature submission pages. For some reason, that tickles my funny bone.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great! All I felt was lacking were some options on how to sort the documents in the sidebar.

<comment><USER4> Right click in the list of documents and you'll see the option to sort by title, date created and date last modified. Let me know if this is helpful.

<comment><USER7> An icon to access the sort menu would make the interface a little easier to use. Context meus are nice, but they should be a shortcut to an action rather than the only way to trigger it.

I also noticed that the search box only searches document titles. It would be nice to have it filter document titles as you type, and then perform a full- text search when the user hits enter (like Google's online Drive search).

Awesome app, keep up the good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Couldn't get past clicking next.

<comment><USER3> _Application Error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details._

<comment><USER32> FATAL: too many connections for role "ruwdncbzdkulsh"

<comment><USER33> Django DEBUG = True

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The quotes might seem like a good idea but they're actually just obtrusive.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is awesome. Are there any plans to port this to other platforms?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! There certainly are, but not for a little while. Which would you prefer we support first?

<comment><USER35> Personally, I would love a native Linux version. Especially since there's no official Google Drive client currently available for Linux.

<comment><USER36> I second that.

<comment><USER37> Thirded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> ignore if you're still using snow leopard. requires 10.7. (boo)

</comment><comment><USER39> couldn't install: <http://screencast.com/t/L9SQeTqQT>

</comment><comment><USER25> Oh and Thank You!

</comment><comment><USER40> love it!

</comment><comment><USER41> nice!!

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is it free? Take money for it.

<comment><USER43> Probably not a good idea for a beta release...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Good work guys, i tried it but...I don't really understand why do we need a desktop client. With google drive all the documents/colelction are available offline and accessible with one click from spotlight "cmd+space -> name of the document - et voilà"</comment>


Quantified Self Movement Now Lets You Track Your Money Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/open-bank-manager/

<comment><USER2> One day our soul will be quantified !

For the better : if you quantify you can improve.

And for the worse : The NSA will spy our soul :-) (oups, it is already the case...)</comment>


Solar System Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/my-solar-system/my-solar-system_en.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Been playing with this a lot. Try beginning with one of the presets and changing one number. E.g., look at the "Sun, planet, moon" preset. Then change the y-component of the velocity of body 3 to 45. Then try 207. Fascinating ....</comment>


Google Finds That Perks Can't Keep Some Employees From Leaving - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Finds+That+Perks+Cant+Keep+Some+Employees+From+Leaving/article11794.htm <comment><USER2> It must just be me, but if I had a job at Google I wouldn't leave it to go work at a place like Facebook. All they have going for them is mass adoption which doesn't mean much without a worthwhile monetization strategy which they've yet to find.

Work for a high-flying tech company with more perks than anybody, 20% of my time to work on whatever I want and a proven method for generating massive income or jump ship to work at the "hottest thing" of the moment where they need to take millions of funding each year just to keep the lights on and expansion moving along... seems a pretty easy decision to me.

Have we _really_ gotten to the point where working at Google is considered "soul numbing work?" Some people would be wise to gain some perspective.

<comment><USER3> Hardly anyone gets to do the 20% time. Google has done a good job keeping its engineering hiring relatively top notch, but it has not done the same with its management hiring process. Thus there is a good chance your manager will be a complete psycho.

<comment><USER4> A friend also told me taht he had no time working on his 20% project, because he was so busy doing the other stuff. And I suspect the bonus depends on the regular work, and not on your pet project ;-).

Hell, not even the inventor of python can work on python full time. (only 50%). I expected at least him to work 50% on it, as it's so widely used inside google. The same for people working on php.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think of job satisfaction as a function with weighted attributes. There's a "perks at work" attribute, a money attribute, an attribute for how much you like your team, how many weekly hours the work culture demands of you, how much you like your boss, whether the work is meaningful and related to your life goals, the opportunities to advance in the company and to grow as a person, whether you can live in a location you like, etc. etc. Google's problem relative to this article is that for many people, the "perks at work" weighting isn't that high. So no matter how good Google's perks are, other factors can dominate.

I think there might be a bit of an effect where people don't appreciate what they don't have to pay for, too.

<comment><USER6> The title positions Google as a nice resort no one should want to leave. But for most engineers (who would have pursued a different career if they were purely money motivated) salary and perks are "hygiene factors", which can dissatisfy if they are inadequate but can't really satisfy. See Hertzberg's "Two Factor" theory of job satisfaction <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_factor_theory>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Outside the bubble of SV/Google, some of us accept free coffee (that we have to make ourselves) in the morning as a perk

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't call that "outside the bubble of SV/Google"; I would say that is "inside the bubble of working a crappy job". There are _many_ companies outside SV/Google that offer far more perks than free coffee in the morning (and there are even SV companies like Intel that don't offer even that).

<comment><USER5> Lack of perks, by itself, does not a crappy job make. It may be indicative of other crappiness, but not certainly not definitive.

<comment><USER8> Certainly true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone keeps referring to their lunches as "haute cuisine". Maybe I missed something the couple times I ate there, but I don't think it's fair to refer to a buffet as that. I guess relative to the normal corporate vending machines it's pretty awesome, but it's far from a Michelin 3 Star joint.

<comment><USER10> Are you kidding? How many buffets have you been to with real, decently awesome sushi? Filet Mignon? It's a several leaps above Hometown Buffet in so many ways...

<comment><USER3> It's kind of like the whole foods buffet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perks are great - but always remember that there will always be people getting paid $200,000 a year that choose a chance making it big with a startup over a steady salary.

<comment><USER12> And the more you pay them, the quicker they'll be able to self-bootstrap.

<comment><USER13> They've been paid obscenely well in stock options. Even if the Google stock price falls to its initial US$85 per share, at least 2200 Googlers are going to get US$10 million or more in vested stock options this summer ( [http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with- millions/2100-...](http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with- millions/2100-1030_3-6226900.html) ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also, Google's engineering and hiring and payment policies are frustratingly biased towards C++ developers. I know several top-notch web developers who have turned down google offers because they'd be making less than other companies would pay them, and many of those startups offer options as well.

When you find a top-notch web developer, telling them they're not worth as much as a C++ developer (of any ability) is just crazy. They're a rare and hotly contested breed in the valley.

<comment><USER3> It is much easier to find a top notch web developer than it is to find someone top notch who is good at C++. This is the case anywhere in Silicon Valley where C++ programmers who actually know what they are doing are needed. VMWare, for instance, pays like $160,000 starting salary to C++ wizards.

<comment><USER14> > It is much easier to find a top notch web developer than it is to find > someone top notch who is good at C++.

I disagree with this. Top notch people in web development are extremely rare. You can find a lot of mediocre people, or motivated people, but finding people both motivated and talented is hard.

It's also unfortunate that Google limits itself to C++, but that's a whole different story.

<comment><USER15> I agree that it is harder to find top notch people than mediocre, that just seems natural, following the talent bell curve(most in the middle level of ability, some very poor, some excel) but how does Google limits itself to C++? I read a lot of noise on Google using Python: <http://www.python.org/about/quotes/> (and this is just a starting point of the info on Google using Python)

<comment><USER16> They're not limiting themselves to C++. But, view it from a different perspective:

1) C++ is a superset of C (to some extend, this isn't 100% true, but most concepts in C are applicable to C++)

2) If you know C++, it is a little bit easier to grok Java

3) I heard most of their back-end stuffs are written in C++

I also read news about Google being a huge Python company. But to be honest, I haven't heard a product that they shipped that is written in Python.

Python is big internally where they need tools to support their development.

PS:

\- GAE library does not count as their product

\- Exclude YouTube because they chose Python on their own

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe it's just me, but I don't know if I could get serious work done at that Zurich office. I think it would feel more like working at FAO Schwartz.

</comment><comment><USER18> Facebook's perks are better. I've seen both. Still dreaming about that damn candy and drink station.

<comment><USER19> That candy and soda count as a perk indicates the demographic Facebook is trying to woo to work there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It must be a fine line to walk between finding hyper-intelligent people, meeting their intense need for self actualization, and mostly employing them in the soul numbing work of selling ads.

<comment><USER21> This criticism -- that genius is being wasted on "soul numbing" ad work -- strikes me as an inaccurate cheap shot.

First, because most of the brain power at Google isn't devoted to the ad systems, but to the services that attract an audience. Don't you think their most "hyper-intelligent people" are engaged in the constant and noble battle to continue improving search, for an ever-changing internet and against the efforts of many unscrupulous manipulators?

Second, because even creating better ad systems is a valuable and intellectually challenging activity. Directly, because matching people to info about things they may want is crucial to our economy, and online systems can do it better than ever before. Indirectly, because ad revenues make so much of the rest of the internet possible. Ad work is no more "soul numbing" than any other commercial work to "make something people want".

<comment><USER22> "constant and noble battle"

Oh come on, give me a break. Google is a commercial company. They are in it for the money, like everybody else.

<comment><USER21> Google looks at the web and tries to make money. A phisher or scammer looks at the web and tries to make money. Does that make them equivalent?

You can be motivated by money but still be engaged in a noble pursuit.

Newspapers are published by for-profit companies in a constant and noble battle to report the truth, even though many other entities work hard to get falsehoods reported.

Pharmaceuticals are developed by for-profit companies in a constant and noble battle against disease.

The point of my grandparent comment is that the brainpower Google uses for its core service -- improving search -- is engaged in an honorable, beneficial activity. It's a hard problem, they're working against other profit-motivated malicious actors, and we all get a throwoff benefit from Google's work, even if we never click an ad.

That the activity also makes them money, or even was primarily motivated by making money, doesn't change that.

<comment><USER22> Your examples only prove the point: newspapers in a noble battle for the truth? Pharmaceutical companies in a noble battle against disease? No offence, but I think you need some reality checks. Not saying that newspapers don't hit upon the truth occasionally, or that pharmaceuticals don't cure the odd disease. But to quote a physician I once talked to: "I wouldn't be surprised if the cure against HIV is already lying in some drawer and not being published, because it has no benefits for the pharmaceutical companies". Or try reading an actual newspaper (not Hacker News) for a couple of days, then reconsider your opinion. It's very obvious that all they care about is making money, and perhaps they get the odd ego boost out of manipulating public opinion to their whims.

I didn't mean this as a hardcore left wing or whatever paranoid comment (at least I don't consider myself any of those things). Maybe it is just because I am a foreign speaker that "noble" simply doesn't sound right to me. Noble is more than just beneficial in my book, I guess it also involves making sacrifices and stuff.

Again I want to stress that I have nothing whatsoever against people reaping benefits of their work. I just took issue with the label "noble", that's all.

Edit: if you could point me to a newspaper that is really fighting a noble battle for the truth, I would be delighted to hear about it. I might actually start reading it.

<comment><USER21> I thought it might be a word-choice and cultural issue; I suspect in Europe 'noble' has different connotations because there are actual aristocracy doing things, occasionally altruistically. (Americans mainly think of aristocracy as a source of camp entertainment.) I meant 'noble' as 'deservedly outstanding; moral; admirable; honorable; generous'.

The journalists working for profit-making papers I have met do believe their work a noble calling, even when they feel cynical or compromised by the economic realities of their market. Though each has internalized biases one should be aware of, the NYTimes and WSJ are both great papers whose staff is usually fighting hard to arrive at the truth.

<comment><USER22> I think individual journalists are doing a good job and might have the right motivation, I just have never seen the actual newspapers to operate on that basis.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone using machine learning for A/B tests? - <AUTHOR>

I am starting to apply machine learning in different ways, and I would like to know if someone is using machine learning for A/B tests.
For example, is is saving data and then showing A or B based on that data and improving it with each new case. I am not just talking about if A or B converted (that would be only success %), but more data like date, time, gender. For example:
I just came with the next idea: Maybe on the night, your visitors are tired for the day, so if you put something like "Register now. Only takes 2 minutes", has more conversions because has a better effect on tired people.
I am sorry if I am just divagating (and sorry for my English) <comment><USER2> There existed at least one project to do this, but you essentially can't justify it unless you are an ad network with hundreds of millions of impressions. The statistical confidence math is otherwise prohibitive. Ask if you need elaboration.

<comment><USER3> When you say "hundreds of millions of impressions" do you mean that literally or are you meaning "a lot of traffic"?

If it is the former then I would like some elaboration; my intuition is surprised that the amount of data required would be that large.

<comment> barry-cotter He is talking about Google. Probably Adwords but maybe other Google properties too.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure that Google and other large ad networks do this.

But I also see small/medium size ecommerce retailers doing "People like you also bought" type stuff. They don't do it as well as Amazon, but sometimes it seems relevant.

So I'm curious about whether hundred of millions of impressions are necessary for this type of optimisation (and that the good recommendations I've seen are just a coincidence - quite possible) or if saying "hundreds of millions" actually just means "quite a lot"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> e-dard Well, Myna <https://mynaweb.com/> uses multi-armed bandit algorithms for A/B testing (or A/B/../N testing if you prefer).

An n-armed bandit problem is a type of reinforcement learning problem, and the associated algorithms for solving these problems are considered machine learning.</comment>


A Town That Runs on Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@socialmachines/the-incredible-jun-a-town-that-runs-on-social-media-49d3d0d4590

<comment><USER2> This is so damn awesome. Do you think Twitter is the best platform for this type of on-demand government?

<comment><USER3> I personally think it's a decent idea. You have the mention notification system. It has the favorite/retweet feature, so if a citizen thinks it's a big issue they can show it by interacting with the tweet

<comment><AUTHOR> and it's public -- even non twitter user can see what's happening

<comment><USER4> Much of government is public - it's just that most people don't care to go to the meetings/look up the records/interact with whatever local website holds the information or whatever.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Urban Planning Behind America's Weirdest McDonald's - <AUTHOR> https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-urban-planning-behind-americas-weirdest-mcdonalds/ <comment><USER2> There are so many examples of this sort of thing. I am frustrated by the ease with which buildings are declared historical sites and how often that designation happens _after_ somebody buys a piece of property to develop it. I think it would be far fairer to the purchaser (and the seller, who makes out like a bandit unfairly) to mandate a 90 day stay when a large parcel is sold to allow for filing of historical paperwork. If that doesn't get filed or if it doesn't get granted after filing, then the property transfers at the agreed upon price. If it does get historical status, then it reverts to a much lower price or the sale is canceled.

You may be thinking "well that damn richie-rich developer can just get screwed, he wanted to destroy important history in my town for his evil profit." I am thinking about the guy who just wanted to live in a nice house walking distance from downtown, so he bought just outside a historical district to avoid all the paperwork, intending to replace a dilapidated house constructed poorly in 1920, only to find that the historical preservation committee extended the boundaries right after his sale went through. Or, in the alternative, the recent news out of Denver where they attempted and ultimately failed to designate a chain diner as "historic" when the owner wanted to sell the place and retire. Using regulatory power to stop the guy from getting his expected retirement payout when he's done being a restaurant manager is unreasonably heavy handed, in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> > There are so many examples of this sort of thing. I am frustrated by the > ease with which buildings are declared historical sites and how often that > designation happens after somebody

The flip side of this is that developers don't have a good record. Cheap, badly done developments and a history of buying, then revealing their true plans. "Oh, it turned out to be structurally unstable, so we have to demolish".

<comment><USER4> Most new development in the US look terrible indeed. I'd rather get overprotection than those buildings everywhere in my city.

<comment><USER5> And what about the subsequent pressure on new ever growing need for housing?

<comment><USER6> What about it? If there's ever a mass exodus to Freeport ME, the people trying to service that need will follow the rules while serving the need. Or they'll get out of that market and someone else will do it. In the "worst" case the local property owners get higher prices which is a win, and the aesthetic rules maintain the (presumed) attractiveness of the town, which is a win. Shrug emoji? The locals hold all the cards, and I'm not even sure that's a bad thing.

<comment><USER7> > the local property owners get higher prices which is a win

Preventing people from being able to afford a place to live so entrenched interests can accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment appreciation is not a "win".

Even if you think that the interests of long term "locals" should be privileged (which I disagree with, all men are created equal yada yada), rising property prices don't benefit all locals, just "local property owners", as you've observed. Local renters and even the kids of local homeowners who eventually want to enter the property market themselves are hurt by constrained supply.

<comment><USER6> In other words it's a win for the winners, just like capitalism as usual. I can't fix capitalism. The people making these laws are the same ones benefiting, was my point. They win because they hold all the cards. We can talk all day about whether they _should_ win. On the "they shouldn't" side, you can make a "free enterprise" argument like this article seems to, or an "equity" argument like you seem to be doing. They're both sound arguments, and meanwhile contrariwise I also buy the argument that being in a place should afford you some amount of self-determination. There's no clear right answer and no moral high ground, just different groups of people fighting over who gets the resources... again sort of "as usual."

<comment><USER8> What on earth does gaming the housing market through government regulations have to do with "free enterprise"? Using regulations to distort markets is the very opposite of free enterprise.

<comment><USER6> You answered your own question; they're related by opposition. As I said.

<comment><USER8> Your answer suggested that you consider restrictive land zoning regulations to be consistent with free enterprise and efficient pricing, which of course it is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally I find that going into a standard cookie-cutter instance of a franchise is depressing; they're usually built with pleasing aesthetics low on the list of priorities, far below "cheap", "easy to hose down", and "does not encourage customers lingering". Going into one that's been shaped by a place with an aesthetic agenda results in something that's got a few surprises, and has design flourishes that exist solely to please the eye.

But what do I know, I grew up in the second city in the US to ever establish a Historic Preservation District and had my tastes shaped by lots of architecture from a time when "maximizing profit" wasn't the only thing ever considered in building.

<comment><USER10> Honest question: why do you think that the older buildings didn't "maximize profit" for their creators?

<comment><USER9> Here, have a look at a representative sample of images: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=new+orleans+french+quarter&bext=ms...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=new+orleans+french+quarter&bext=msl&atb=v1-1&iax=images&ia=images)

Just look at any of those wrought iron railings. From a purely functional viewpoint they could do their job of being a railing to stop you from falling off the balcony with a series of plain vertical bars. But they are these elaborate concoctions of decoration and detail that someone had to cast, bend, and shape. You'll find similar aesthetic choices made throughout the city; a lot of houses have wrought iron bars over their windows to deter breakins, and very few of them are the simplest, cheapest design possible, for instance.

I am quite sure these buildings have made a profit; hell, the ones in the French Quarter are a big part of the modern tourist economy that draws people and money from all over. But there are a lot of details all over that serve purely to make the buildings pleasing to live and work in, which tend to be the first thing to go in modern architecture driven entirely by maximizing profits (and also still in love with the inhuman brutalist visions of people like Le Corbusier, when it comes to building housing).

<comment><USER11> One of the supposed reasons for this is the relation between labour and product prices.

Before WW2, labour was far cheaper then materials, especially in Europe.

<comment><USER12> Labour being cheap made elaborately designed wrought iron balconies _possible_ for relatively modest housing. It didn't make them _necessary_ (and relatively speaking, the iron itself was a lot more expensive then)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Locals seem to be content with all four developments

If the locals like it, and they're the ones who are going to be using it and looking at it all the time, then frankly who cares what the "reception online" is?

<comment><USER14> Irony alert: I suspect if you asked those behind a thing titled "American Conservative" if they liked federalism, they would say yes. But the gist of this article seems to be that they don't like local control of regulation.

<comment><USER15> This is all very off-topic, but if it clarifies: libertarian-conservatives (the kind this publication caters to) prefer local control over centralized control, and _also_ prefer less regulation to more regulation. So a libertarian-conservative would rather Arizona control beautician licensing standards than the federal government, but would also prefer the abolition of beautician licensing altogether. It's a coherent world view.

<comment><USER14> I don't see it as very coherent, because if you favor local control you should favor a local community reflecting its own priorities, deciding to regulate more or less. Obviously there are abundant places that decide to regulate less. Throw in a zealous belief in free market principles (which these types tend to claim) and then I would say: a diverse set of regulatory environments should help markets find the best.

<comment><USER15> I don't agree with libertarian conservatives, I'm just relating the perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > One can't help but wonder, was it worth all the fuss to save a mansion that > sells McDoubles and McFlurrys—a McMansion, if you will? Are teal Golden > Arches really strengthening the heritage of the Southwest? Are faux Greek > Revival columns at the drive-thru window really changing perceptions about > the quality of a humdrum suburb? At the same time that we likely > overestimate the placemaking powers of preserving and designing by > committee, perhaps there's underappreciated wisdom in just letting a > McDonald's be a McDonald's.

Isn't there also an underappreciated wisdom in just not letting there be a McDonald's in your community?

</comment><comment><USER17> The one in Bergen, Norway is in a historical building and has avoided the excessive branding: [https://www.google.dk/maps/place/McDonald's+Bryggesporen/@60...](https://email@example.com,5.3266711,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipN6qMLQlA3vt91viocojlxu1eorkTjkoHpWsuTt!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipN6qMLQlA3vt91viocojlxu1eorkTjkoHpWsuTt%3Dw203-h225-k-no!7i2370!8i2632!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x463cfea7c596593f:0xa9d64b8353210c9d!2sMcDonald's+Bryggesporen!8m2!3d60.3954113!4d5.3266711!3m4!1s0x463cfea7c596593f:0xa9d64b8353210c9d!8m2!3d60.3954113!4d5.3266711)

<comment><USER18> heh! looks like a cheap knockoff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like it when buildings look different. I find it super depressing when you drive across the US countryside and everywhere looks totally the same. I think it's much nicer to have some standards where business have to fit the place instead of the usual soulless cookie cutter style.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm skeptical of architectural preservationism but I don't think the "Most Beautiful McDonalds In America" really helped his case, because I can't imagine anyone preferring a standard McDonalds to the retrofit Georgian Mansion he's singled out.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's one in Leavenworth, WA, a town where they have a Bavarian themed design requirements.

[https://goo.gl/maps/LaCgUjQLbMX3nGuv5](https://goo.gl/maps/LaCgUjQLbMX3nGuv5)

The McDonalds is a bit subdued, the Starbucks is perhaps a better example.

[https://goo.gl/maps/nFemv8G1n7toUa4h6](https://goo.gl/maps/nFemv8G1n7toUa4h6)

<comment><USER21> Here's one from Regensburg (Bavaria), AFAIK a compromise between the city (they wanted no modern branding at all) and McDonalds.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/McDonald...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/McDonalds_in_Regensburg.jpg)

"At the golden M"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The McDonalds (and other chain retail stores) have subdued colors and design in central Kyoto. They are most frequently brown/black based.

[https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20130903-a075/](https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20130903-a075/)

<comment><USER23> The McDonald's stores in the States seem to be heading in that direction as well. Here's a random example from Google Images:

[https://westernnews.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/photo...](https://westernnews.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/photos/2018/01/09/Iphone_McDonalds_r320x250.jpg?1bd91f71766099ac905655bfdbc9e48654aa6810)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> These seems like a triumph of hyper local design regs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ha! I live a half mile from the Sedona McDonald's in the article's first picture. My grandchildren love junk food, so I have been in there more than a few times when they visit. I have lived in Sedona for about twenty years and I don't know any locals who dislike the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER26> It makes a bit more sense when you realize that many buildings outlast the businesses in them. These buildings are unlikely to be McDonalds restaurants forever.

But for stuff that's easily changeable (like color and signs), it seems excessive.

</comment><comment><USER27> The zoning board missed the opportunity to force turquoise paint on the drive- thru. Yellow just completely ruins the local character.</comment>


Studies of brain activity aren't as useful as scientists thought - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-brain-scientists-thought.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Functional MRI measures blood flow as a proxy for brain activity. It shows where blood is being sent in the brain, presumably because neurons in that area are more active during a mental task.

>The problem is that the level of activity for any given person probably won't be the same twice, and a measure that changes every time it is collected cannot be applied to predict anyone's future mental health or behavior.

>Hariri and his colleagues reexamined 56 published papers based on fMRI data to gauge their reliability across 90 experiments. Hariri said the researchers recognized that "the correlation between one scan and a second is not even fair, it's poor."</comment>


Thoughts on a failed launch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/295999544/thoughts-on-a-failed-launch

<comment><USER2> Cheer up. There's a good chance that many of the big tech blogs didn't see your site at all, or your text pitch wasn't all that compelling (but maybe your site is), or any of a hundred other reasons.

The sad fact of the matter is that us tech bloggers get way too much Email. No matter how many Gmail filters we set up, it's a constant struggle to find those 'diamonds in the rough' — the sites that nobody has ever heard of and have no funding. If you get ignored by everyone for multiple launches then maybe something's wrong, but don't get too dejected because of one bad press push.

Shoot me an Email next time you guys launch a cool new feature (it's in my profile). Tell me why it's cool. Tell me why you're more than a Digg for style questions. No promises about a post, but I'll check it out. Also, just from a five second glance at the site, I think you might want to look into changing up the layout/colors a bit. I'm no designer though.

<comment><USER3> I also thought the design was a significant problem with the site (and I am a designer/developer). It's dark and cramped and the header is really uninspiring to me.

I seems like StackOverflow for fashion newbies more than Digg. If it's largely occupied by the hapless, you might want to elevate a few users (beyond the concept of points, etc) to some sort of style-leader designation. And maybe add Gravatars - it really lacked personalities and imagery.

After reading the piece, however, my interest was in seeing the pitch that went out to blogs. How easy was it for them to give you coverage? Did you provide stats, incentives, quotes, ready-to-go screen caps, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah the design is going to be changed, basically it was a choice between launching now, or spending more time tinkering with it. At a certain point, you just have to launch, and leave the fixes for the next version. At this point, I have a list about a mile wide of things I want to do, and you know how it is, every time you finish something you get a dozen new ideas you want to implement.

Gravatars already exist, you just have to enter the actual question to see them. No gravatars on the homepage, so that it loads faster.

And I'll make another post about the pitch email and the press page tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why so negative?

First off thanks for taking the time to share it with us. I read the whole post. Good to see your incremental progress. Which brings me to the header of my comment. I don't see in any way how your launch was a "failure". You have "fail" and "sucked" peppered throughout your post. Why!

 _I wasn't too surprised or worried by the results, since that was more or less what I expected._

2 problems here: Why expect failure? And secondly, can't call it a waste of time then since you knew beforehand what you were getting into - your choice.

Not trying to shoot you down more - quite the opposite! I don't see how your launch was a failure at all. You have more data than 100% of people with "ideas" and 100% of people in "stealth mode". And how is you gaining traffic an epic fail? Even if its one user! I see a positive slope in that graph damnit!

Personally I have erased the concept of "failing" from existence. Simply because if all things are trials, then you benefit from data received back. It doesn't matter whether that data is "good" or "bad", data is data. And one does trials so one can get better at doing those trials! So you fail when you die, till then don't recognize its existence.

Be happy man.

My graphs have a scale of 1-10 (yes im serious). so when i start to see the 1-100 (like yours) I will be ass-happy.

=) Congratulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe too negative? I guess I was trying to show a different side of the coin compared to Paul's post. If it was a standalone post, I'd probably make it more optimistic. "on launch day we hit an unprecedented 500 users in a single day".

But yeah overall it's been a very good month.

Thanks :)

I agree on the failure part, I think the key concept to take away, is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't expect instant gratification

<comment><USER5> I think that you have taken the recent atmosphere of "failing fast" a little too far. A "launch" really can't be considered a good metric for failure or success.

Pegging your product on one massive launch is a flawed idea - it seems to operate under the assumption that massive, immediate reach is what you need to attract users as opposed to leveraging/exploiting other mechanisms. Having product "out" at all stages in order to gain feedback and iterate helps.

In fact, it is far better that you had a "failed" launch now so that users can give you feedback as opposed to trying to remain stealth to build up to a bigger launch.

I think that Skribit's "successful" launch can be more attributed to how Paul handled the pro upgrade screw up. But the TC article isn't what will make or break the success of Skribit.

<comment><AUTHOR> To me failing fast, just means that you realize that the idea sucks and you close down shop and move on. And yeah if you have a crappy launch, you shouldn't use that to discount your idea. You only need to hit a certain niche of users to make your idea work.

To tell the truth, we really haven't gotten that much feedback after we came out of private beta. In private beta we got hundreds of tips, feature requests etc, and now in public beta, nada. Not a single feature request last week.

Yeah an article on TC won't make or break a startup, but it sure does help. a) better response to your other coverage requests b) a small bump to your page rank c) a flood of potential new users to help jump start the site.

If I had to give it a numerical value, I'd say major launch coverage, can help you save 1-2 years of building your traffic the old fashioned way...1 person at a time

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, thanks for writing this up. If I might make a suggestion: at the beginning of this post, you should explain what your site does. As someone who had never heard of it before, I was left with a choice of reading the rest of the post and hopng to find out or navigating away from it to explore the site. A short description would have helped those unfamiliar with your service and wouldn't have offended those that are.

One other thing: For a site about style, the site is not very stylish itself. I think for your site, a designer or a few CSS books (SitePoint has some good ones) would be a good investment.

Again, thanks for the writeup. Looks like it has a lot of growth potential.

Edit: maybe it didn't render properly on my iPhone on the first visit. Upon checking it again, I can see the design. It was just white text on a plain black body the first time around. Looks better now.

<comment><AUTHOR> i added that bit to the start of the post.

I know what you mean about the design, a redesign is definitely in the plans. Just didn't want to spend that extra time redoing the design, instead of launching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't try for tech-blog coverage at all. The overlap with your intended audience is approximately nil. And what if you did get tech-blog validation/coverage? It would only encourage copycats.

That said, I like the idea -- one of the better StackExchange verticals I've seen. But to beat other similar sites -- perhaps even sibling StackExchange sites -- your initial community is all-important. The only successful 'launch' is one that brings the right kind of askers/answerers... and I suspect most of those people _aren't_ rushing to check out 'launched' products; they instead stumble onto new sites by a variety of paths generally unaffected by 'launch' publicity.

And to echo other commenters: the design/color-scheme doesn't say 'stylish' to me, and I suspect for your audience, that could be important. (The dark purple makes me think more of a sports site, and the manila-yellow makes everything look like a field-needing-input.)

Can you follow the design cues of some emblematic sites in the fashion/beauty category? Does StackExchange platform provide any way to A/B test different looks?

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> to tell the truth there really isn't that much competition among SEs. Everyone is doing their own thing. Actually it's kinda getting dead, since a lot of people are giving up. Since it's hard building an audience

As far as actual competitor sites, most of them are generic, and we have much higher quality controls for posts. On Yahoo Answers, "What does the color red look like?" is a valid question, and on ours that gets deleted.

For design cues, I have a whole list of sites that I'll be using for inspiration.

No the SE platform doesn't let you A/B test anything. It's really very basic at this point. Pretty much all you can do is edit a CSS file, and add stuff to a box just above header, footer, 3 spots for ads.

So pretty much if you want to do anything, you need to add a ton of javascript and css.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I may offer some negative feedback...for a site that specializes in Style, it simply looks massively crappy. I mean, the colors on the site don't even match.

I don't know whether it's a problem with the stack-exchange sites in general, but I have yet to see a single one (other than the mother ship) that does not look like utter crap.

<comment><AUTHOR> already explained this, early users complained about our original look, so we kept throwing designs at them, until they settled on this one. We went through like 5 redesigns, and this is what they ended up liking, pretty much universally.

Maybe it's the fact that we are going for a non-techie audience, but they seem to like the "crappy" design. But yeah I agree with you, it's pretty bad, which is why we'll be redoing it a few months down the road.

Pretty much, just wanted to get it over with and launch, since if you keep perfecting your site, you'll never think it's good enough to launch. I'd rather launch and have a 20% churn rate because of a bad design than spend an extra 3 months in development. Waiting to make it perfect.

You can always change your design later, but you'll never get those 3 months back.

P.S. You think SO looks good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting post and thanks for offering a different perspective to mine! In regards to new users, do you think it's because registration is only done through OpenID (which is great on a tech-heavy site like Stackoverflow) with a not-so-tech-savvy style-centric audience?

A massive-to-us 34% of new user signups that day were through Twitter, thanks to a riduculously low one-click barrier of entry.

As for contacting bloggers, we only got in touch with TC for launch day and have yet to reach out to my other blogger friends, et cetera. Gonna wait til after the holidays.

That being said - you are definitely getting some traction with the 700+ uniques/day. Grats!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think openID was really that big of a problem(the login page has a bounce rate of only 1.59%). There is a non-openID login solution in the works, so that shouldn't be a problem in the future.

I think the lack of registered users is mainly because you don't need to register to ask/answer questions. The site is 99% useful w/o registering. The only feature they don't have is voting.

So pretty much the only people who end up registering, are the super active users, who want to dive in, and participate.

We aren't really focusing on registering users, the goal is to make it easy to create new content, more content = more ways for Google to find our site.

Basically at this stage it's a SEO play, the goal is to become THE answer site for fashion/style questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Im interested why you targeted tech blogs (not your audience at all) instead of style blogs.

There are plenty of big beauty/style blogs out there who might have covered you :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I targetted both, about ~15 tech blogs, and about 80 style ones.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> btw guys this was pretty much off the cuff(I was actually planning on making this post after christmas, after I got the comments fixed), so if you have any ideas about what else I should talk about in the post, let me know

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to wonder, is there some minimum value add for a site to be considered a startup?

I mean, great, but this is just another Stack Exchange instance .. how long before that software is considered as basically a standard tool like WordPress? If it isn't already? Do we talk about some lightly-customised Wordpress blog "failing to launch"? Hell at least that might have original content.

Making available an instance of server software you didn't write, with some minimal twist, != startup, IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> true, but the key to any site is content. It doesn't matter if you have some cool new technology, users don't care about that. And I call it a launch, since noone knows about SO, let alone SE, except for a few thousand tech geeks. So the idea of "oh it's just another wordpress blog" didn't come up in the decision to cover it.

And hey, I had a phone interview with Venture Beat...when I launched my "non- startup"...which is more than some "startups" can say.

Techcrunch is just a wordpress blog and it gets 7.5 million uniques. WikiHow is just a mediawiki instance and it gets 20 million uniques. You can't focus too much on a platform. You think those guys couldn't build their own product from scratch? Sure they could, but then they'd have wasted 1-2 years in development time, when they didn't have to, and that's just stupid.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of turn key solutions being used to make a business. Meanwhile your cool new startup with 3 years of coding, 100,000 lines of code, gets 50 hits a day.

Sure I could have went out and coded up my own Q&A site, but why do that when I can just use a turn key solution?

Plus there are already >4,000 lines of customization code in the site, which is probably more than some people have in their "unique" web apps, who you'd label as a startup.

Being a startup is a state of mind, you can be a "startup" with a hello world application, as long as you feel you are. It doesn't matter how you get there, all that matters, is that at the end of the day you are working towards building something positive.

And we are getting plenty of traffic to justify that we are doing something people need. Hence the startup label.

<comment><USER10> > It doesn't matter if you have some cool new technology, users don't care > about that.

That's precisely what they care about :)

BTW those examples you give built up content and traffic over a long period of time. They were innovative in their areas - but not with their technology, with their content and their focus.

(Im not commenting on you being a startup or not btw)

<comment><AUTHOR> actually no they don't. All they care about is results.

Same goes double for me. Sure I could have coded the thing up myself. Wasted a year, two, building the product, made 2-3 extra features. And for what? To get a "good job, but it's just another answers site" and a pat on the back? Screw that, I'd rather use those 2 years to build up my content and traffic.

Content is all that matters anyways. Content drives traffic, content gets users to stick around. Who wants to waste 2 years building a site, only to have to start out with 50 users a day traffic numbers?

<comment><USER10> I wasn't talking about building a site etc. Just addressing that one statement. users Really love cool stuff.

What you have isn't something with cool features, your right it is content. That kind of site will take a year or more to build up. But it is the same process your pouring scorn on :-) there is still no guarantee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool features will come later. The current version of the site is basically just a way to start building up traffic for the big idea.

But yeah it'll probably take 1-2 years to build up the content and traffic. But you gotta start somewhere, 10 people here, 10 people there, and before long, you are hitting millions of people a month.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


11 Books All Software Engineers Must Read - happy-go-lucky https://www.coderhood.com/11-books-all-software-engineers-should-read/ <comment><AUTHOR> Awesome list!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Finance Reform Bill would severely throttle angel investment - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/finance-reform-startups/ <comment><USER2> I think we need to pass the bill to find out what's in it. The time for debate is over. Anyone against this bill is for the status-quo. Our country cannot afford any more delays or deception. If you oppose this financial reform bill you are probably a racist.

EDIT: I was being facetious :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this concept of "accredited investor" exist under current law in the US? The article seems to imply that it does. If so, does it apply to both equity and debt funding?

I've never heard of such a thing, or any kind of legally-imposed qualification requirements for one private party to lend/give money to another. If this exists and is enforced, I'm astonished that it hasn't attracted a great deal of outrage.

The article also talks about SEC involvement in auditing startups. What authority does the SEC have to intervene in a business that isn't publicly traded? What if I'm seeking private funding for a startup that I have no intention of ever taking public? And even if I do at some point decide to go public, how would the SEC become involved before I start planning my IPO?

<comment><USER4> The concept does exist, and is essentially an exception to some of the normal securities laws: if you offer stock only to accredited investors, you're exempt from some of the registration/reporting requirements, on the theory that those requirements are intended primarily to protect non-sophisticated investors, so are unnecessary if you have only sophisticated investors. See: <http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm>

Nobody's actually _prevented_ from accepting non-accredited investors, but if you do, you have to comply with the registration/reporting requirements, which many startups don't want to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was at the ACA meeting last week, and the consensus was that things are going to change, but they wont be this radical. They have an amendment that is currently going through committee that takes out some of the absurdities of this (SEC oversight, etc). We'll see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congress needs to be severely throttled.

</comment><comment><USER7> The best way to fight this is to render it impotent.

If anyone is interested in working on this, let me know: <http://me-vc.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the difference between an "angel" investor and "begging from friends"? I mean I appreciate the difference, but why couldn't you put together a deal with an "investor" as if they were just a friend or acquaintance? Do accredited investors get any benefits your friends and family would not?

<comment><USER9> > What's the difference between an "angel" investor and "begging from > friends"?

There is no difference.

> I mean I appreciate the difference, but why couldn't you put together a deal > with an "investor" as if they were just a friend or acquaintance?

You don't understand. There's nothing special about friends and acquaintances. If you're taking money from folks, there are certain rules. The rules are a lot tighter for taking money from ordinary folk than they are for accredited investors. (Close family might be a third category - friends aren't.)

<comment><USER4> There are some differences depending on whether you have a "pre-existing relationship" and whether you openly advertise. So under current law, at least, your uncle offering you $10k is different from putting up www.please- fund-us.com that solicits some random person you've never met to give you $10k.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's really frustrating the way these huge bills get created. You might have 20% good ideas, 20% toss-outs to the PACs that elected you, 20% earmarks, 20% total crap, and 20% unknown.

Is a bill like that worth voting for? You can pitch it as solving a huge problem, being an indication of rampant corruption, making progress in a key social or political movement, being a vehicle for bringing money to your state, or being a terrible mistake. Fact is, it could be all of these. Then congressmen can use legislative tricks to both vote for and against the same bill, effectively rendering any kind of simple debate meaningless. Which is the exact reason why it's constructed the way it is.

I think in terms of startups, this is the worst bill I've seen in years. And while I'm sure professional Angel organizations are all on top of the changes and such, we need to be moving in the exact opposite direction than this bill is taking us. I think real reform is needed, but I am deeply worried that the underlying theory here -- that market risk can be managed by committee or legislation -- is deeply flawed. Adding to that structural problem I have is all of these other really bad tack-ons, like giving the FDA more control over the vitamin and supplement business.

Bad. Bad. Bad.

<comment><USER11> The only part of your post that I disagree with is that the bill has 20% good ideas.

If the federal government really wanted to discourage excessive risk-taking in the financial marketplace, why doesn't it allow people who make bad bets to lose money? The market offers free financial "regulation" called "losses".

Instead, the feds bailed out bondholders of large financial institutions at a rate of 100 cents on the dollar. They bailed out counterparties who took out insurance contracts from insolvent firms. They bailed out the unions that killed the very companies they worked for. They gave $billions in handouts to homeowners who bought a house that they couldn't afford.

And what happens to the prudent people who didn't make bad bets? They get to pay taxes to bail out the imprudent people. Thrift is punished and recklessness is rewarded.

Then after the fact the feds pass some anti-capitalist bill that they can trumpet in the press that does more harm than good. The feds micromanage the economy in an attempt to prevent the effects of the incentives created by their own past actions.

It's all highly irrational.

<comment><USER12> It's very rational for the politicians ladling out the money ... until they "run out of other people's money", to paraphrase Margret Thatcher.</comment></comment></comment>


The Command Line for Your Datacenter - <AUTHOR> http://mesosphere.io/2014/09/02/introducing-mesos-cli/

<comment><USER2> I'm really excited about the lazy matching. It's great to see because Task IDs are long and normally require cut/paste to get the exact matches. Now that task parameters are partial matches there's no need to type that long thing in.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is a bit more detail on examples and additional calls at [https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos-cli](https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos- cli)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for providing a link to the GitHub repository. What's the status of the docs in [https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos- cli/tree/master/docs](https://github.com/mesosphere/mesos- cli/tree/master/docs)

<comment><USER3> Luckily, at least there is some debugging tasks on mesos documentation. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> love it, how you can just tail all the logs across cluster with a single command!!!

<comment><USER2> "mesos tail -f task stdout stderr" FTW</comment></comment>


The Zuckerberg movie is good for Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/04/theZuckerbergMovieIsGoodFo.html <comment><USER2> Of course. Any press (good, bad or otherwise) is good press. Even if Zuckerberg and FB "officially" denounce this movie, I guarantee that they're dancing with glee behind closed doors, thankful for all of the extra media attention.</comment>


How much climate change can still be considered safe? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SISeneviratne/status/1142825458200928256 <comment><USER2> A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030. It's that after that point, we'll no longer have any realistic hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change that will arrive in the following decades and centuries.

Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope that untested immunotherapy treatments will work.

If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed. We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable.

<comment><USER3> People have a hard enough time caring about humans suffering and dying on the other side of the world. Trying to get them to worry about humans that don't currently exist is a total lost cause.

<comment><USER2> You might have thought they'd care about their own kids and grandkids, but here we are.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, most people don't even care about their _own_ future, i.e. retirement and such, and instead buy cars and other stuff that they can't afford, because short term satisfaction is more compelling than long term one.

So while I agree with you that I care about ny children and grand-children, I don't see this as being a mainstream thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's assuming it's already safe. There is a good chance several armed conflicts of the last decades were influenced by climate chances consequences. Conflicts that also cascaded into other tension rising events, because of immigration, altered business, demography flux, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> People have already died because of climate change. So we're already beyond "safe" climate change.

A good, free, and quick primer is just searching for "uninhabitable earth". He talks about the real world implications and impacts for various levels of warming.

<comment><AUTHOR> The death toll in India only, from heat waves only, in recent years is in the thousands. This is an illustration that the "rising ramp" fable would be more realistic if the ramp itself was of varying height.

Some parts of the earth are expected to become more inhabitable with extra 1-2 °C. India is not one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't state the fact that if we stop all emissions now, the temperature will keep rising because there is already too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I recall hearing it'd take 500-800 years to stabilize if we literally stopped all emissions right now.

<comment><USER9> Even with current emissions CO2 levels are periodically FALLING 6ppm each summer => Without emissions we would be back to normal in 30 years:

[https://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2013/05/mauna- loa...](https://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2013/05/mauna-loa-C02-ppm- full_record.png.860x0_q70_crop-scale.png)

<comment><USER8> IIRC it's falling because the oceans are taking the hit. I might be wrong about what exactly the figure was referring to, though -- might have been not just atmospheric temperature stabilization but other things too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: AskKen – Startup resources curated for you. For free - <AUTHOR> http://askken.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello fellow HN readers,

We created Ask Ken as a way to help entrepreneurs find the right learning resources for their specific Startup needs.

All feedback will be greatly appreciated!

All the best, AskKen Team</comment>


Ask HN: What are your experiences with source-available licensing? - <AUTHOR> I am working on some software that I would like to open-source. I want to build a business around the software though. Therefore, I have (seemingly common) concerns regarding a competing company using the software.
There are some source-available licenses that seem to offer most of the good parts of open-source and protect against my worries. However, I'm not sure if source-available or these licenses in particular are the right way to go.
https://polyformproject.org/
Does anyone here have source-available experience they can share? There are almost certainly aspects of this decision that I haven't considered. <comment><USER2> With source available, you can't use the words open source anymore. These licenses are starting to be rejected by the OSS license committee.

IMHO, the companies using these want to have their cake and eat it too.

Look at how Google has partnered with these companies that did this relicensing primarily because of Amazon. Look what Amazon did with elastic search

<comment><AUTHOR> > With source available, you can't use the words open source anymore. These > licenses are starting to be rejected by the OSS license committee.

Is this something to worry about? I am more concerned with the actual effects on users than terminology. I'd love to hear otherwise though.

<comment><USER2> We're not doing these Faux Pas licenses and claiming open source. We want to actually be open source as we believe it is better for all in the long run.

Do you want to do open source or something else? Are you worrying about Amazon before you need to? Set up contributor agreements a certain way (like Google, not GitLab) and you can change it later once we know more about how it works out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Check out JJ's site [https://coss.media](https://coss.media) and be sure to check out his interviews on YouTube, in particular the one with Sid from GitLab and another with Armory

Too much amazing info to unpack here

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Definitely some good info there.</comment></comment>


Estimate your English vocabulary size by proving you really know the words - <AUTHOR> http://my.vocabularysize.com

<comment><USER2> Quote:

        Your performance on this test ranks higher
        than 107% of all native English speakers
        who have taken this test ...

Well, that's an accomplishment to be proud of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like you retrieved your result just as I was updating the formula based on some previous results. If you reload, you should see the correct figure. Thanks for pointing that out.

<comment><USER2> Too late - different machine, now closed, and with 140 questions it's too much of a time commitment to do it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> no worries. it was supposed to say 'higher than 98%'</comment></comment></comment></comment>


WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? - <AUTHOR> http://autonom.io/what-is-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> INTELLIGENCE IS TO KNOW NOT TO USE ALL CAPS. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> I was just about to say the SAME THINGGGGGGG</comment></comment>


Black hole 'hair' could be detected using ripples in space-time - <AUTHOR> https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-hair-gravitational-waves.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Quantum Hair on Colliding Black Holes

[https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01106](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01106)</comment>