I just when back and checked, it's a png of blurred text so it isn't really cloaking. Google presumably can't see that text but it gets indexed from the question, the first answer and the first words of the other answers though. Either way it's a page that's mostly useless getting indexed. Are the results higher because Google thinks a series of images surrounded by relevant text probably have relevant content? Are the results higher from the days when they didn't blur and got a half decent page rank (all those links still pointing at them)? I think Google recalculates fairly frequently, and I personally haven't seen as much Quora in my searches - but it's hard to escape personalisation see the DuckDuckGo experiment - so maybe they are on the decline. That's another argument against them being a one billion dollar company though.
Are you serious about Quora? I'm going to go with no.[1] With the text blurring and desperate requests for Facebook signin details Quora is basically expertsexchange for SV insiders now.
Given the text blurring is a form of cloaking (showing one thing to the search engine, nothing to people who come in from a search) I think search engines should viciously rank them down too. And I don't care if there is some "easy" way to get around the blur (like the "scroll down" for expertsexchange or whatever it was), it's not obvious and it just pollutes the search results. Get rid of it. That said, as was mentioned elsewhere on HN recently, Stackoverflow needs a place for more meta questions to be moved rather than deleted as you can occasionally get a useful one that isn't just rehashing things we've seen 1000 times.
The same is true for me, I will continue to buy Intel CPUs and motherboards, for both desktop and mobile, until someone else takes open source graphics drivers as seriously as they do.
I'm fairly technical, I do a reasonable amount of programming and I've been using various flavours of Linux for well over a decade, but installing vanilla Android on a phone where the manufacturer doesn't support it is just ridiculous. There was a time when I'd be fine to issue endless arcane commands during an install process, or I wouldn't mind manually partitioning my drive and setting mount points, or getting stuck into some X config file to try out some new window manger etc., but now I just want things to work. And that's if you are supported by CyanogenMod, if you aren't it's just a recipe involving random .exe files from "HaKerD00dz" with animated gif avatars from some PHP forum that you have to trust. It's a total mess.
The android OS ecosystem is totally broken on this level by the carriers who have every interest in making the higher cost phones more attractive by not updating the Android version on lower cost phones and not updating the version for existing customers. This issue is exactly why Linus' rant resonated with people and Engadget's position attracted so much fire. Nobody should be on an old version of Android. I've got my phone up to Android 4.0 after a stupid custom process from the manufacturer (which only ran on Windows) but I am fairly certain it's the last official update I will see for it even though it's more than capable of running newer versions. However, unless I can get a source more reliable than some php forum for updating it myself I am unlikely to update outside of this manufacturer version.
I really hope Google's Nexus intervention clears up this issue and finally turns the telcos into dumb pipes, but I am afraid it will only make the carriers offer an up-to-date Android on sale, which then won't be updated later. This is why the ecosystem for installing vanilla Android needs to be seriously improved and Google needs to step up to their responsibilities to provide automatic updating to carriers or a really properly supported community for mods.
I would argue your post and its tone - "no one who isn't a jerk would say this" - is far more offensive than pointing out that getting charts into email isn't exactly a massive victory for mankind. Pointing out that this post is also self-promotion doesn't hurt either given we see tons of extremely thin blog posts make it to the front page here which are basically adverts for the company of the blogger.
With Geoffrey Hinton involved as a supervisor I expect they were on the bleeding edge for other reasons anyway and just decided to scoop up some extra cash as well. I've not looked closely but Kaggle does seem to be a little like 99designs though.
In these there is obviously some contest going on between fuzzy classifiers, as there is in conceptual association games, misinterpretations of song lyrics between people and errors like the Freudian slip. There are at least large parts of our brains that seem to operate in this manner.
That said our use of logic and reason certainly says there is a part of our brain that works in a non-fuzzy way, or at least can be trained to work like. However, while there are people who understand the odds and are just there for a good time, it's instructive to go to a Casino and see how many people believe they can win and believe in lucky charms.
This topic is a minefield of semantic games with hidden assumptions and people arguing across each other though.
This is the second time I've seen astro-turfing on HN in as many weeks. On the following thread there were hilariously bad (registered within the hour, first comment on the product "wow great!") fake accounts.
While I have sympathy with your point, I haven't seen evidence is that Google is subsidizing (as I think Amazon is) rather than just selling at cost. The reason this is an important distinction is that it highlights how much the other handset makers, especially Apple, have been gouging their customers.
Google's disconnect from the hardware also shows how you actually can have performance on older hardware - apparently the new real-time Google Voice is on older iOS devices that Apple said couldn't handle Siri - if you don't have an interest in the upgrade cycle.
Well Hammer-Lahav calls it "the biggest professional disappointment of my career" on his blog[1] so I guess he's aware of that aspect (more[2]).
The Mozilla Foundation's Persona[3] looks to be further along in terms of code and in terms of other people using it[4], differences with OpenID are partially described here[5]. Regardless of quality I think someone flying solo is going to have a hard time getting ahead of Persona at this point.
I know it's based off D3.js but is the rest of the code open source?
I'd like to use it for a project and credit you. The most advanced I've found open so far is just a base rotating D3.js globe (http://bl.ocks.org/d/1246403/).
The OED confirms naivety is also an English word that's been around since at least the 1700s. I am not implying naïveté is wrong in English, just that there is a simpler option should you so choose.
It's especially interesting as my capacity to vote seemed to only kicked in today after a week of being green. The last week my votes seemed to go through but then the arrow reappeared on a later page load and the pages weren't in my saved stories. So it has to have made it to the front page without the help of the current commenting socks, but with votes from elsewhere (or even genuine users I suppose, but the socks put a big question mark over that).
Amusingly I am still green and agree with you that it is sketchy. A wave of new accounts for a company that specializes in inserting product placement into what people consider to be normal communication... And it's one thing to make an account to ask a question about a service - that's plausible - it's quite another to make an account to say "nice site!". Mods should investigate.