skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is still a personal sphere, but some business do belong in my personal sphere. I'd probably not want your business in my facebook stream, since I don't use you, but there is this artist I know who often makes print that can be bought. I want to see what he's up to, and if there is something good, I'd like to buy it. My webhost, I'd be interested in seeing what they are up to, and knowing that all is safe. When Django is updated, would not mind seeing that in the stream too. I'd like to see politicians too - and I don't want to have to say I am their 'Fan' to see what they have to say or their photos!

I can construct my facebook to deliver the info I want to see. It's easy to hide info from a business when they start spamming and just as easy to remove them from my friends list.

So even though facebook started off as a personal sphere, I think it will have great utility for small business. It's possible to get personal with your customers.
The road to BBcode and smileys is paved with site-specific messaging and karmic business rules engines.

Just add an email address to your profile, like everyone else who is interested in meeting new people.
this should be integrated into editors as undo/redo

i've long thought proper version control makes sense if it's fast enough -- eventually everything will be tracked anyway.

it doesn't make any sense to lose any ideas just because only one of them was "the winner".
I just don't get the utility of twitter for business. I see one great use for twitter, which is what I am using it for right now: Get major influencers to follow you. When you do that, you have a good chance to be republished by one of them, which is great PR.

(That's why I bothered writing two articles recently, trying to raise my twitter 'important people' follower count. It actually works somewhat.)
Networking. Interruption.

That's it. Everyone says that Twitter is all about who you follow, and that's necessary but not sufficient. But judicious use of @replies and @mentions (when you don't start your tweet with a @username so everyone can see it) is easily 10x more powerful for business and personal networking than LinkedIn, which I find 10x more powerful than anything else (meatspace meetups excepted, of course).

Of course, you can leverage Twitter to make your meatspace life better - where to go at conferences, a "hey, can we meet up" in advance of events, where the afterparty's at, etc.

If you think of Twitter as a business tool like LinkedIn rather than a personal tool like Facebook, you'll get a lot more out of it immediately. If you develop a decent following base that's actually paying attention to you, then you can do second-level stuff as "what is the best [x] for me given [y]" and get exceptional answers. But that only works once you've cultivated a good following.
What about I want to see what Linode vs Slicehost are up to, even though I am at Dreamhost? I would just like to follow them for a while while, get a feel of who they are before deciding. Not 'support' or 'fan' them. Facebook should change their verbs.
Hi Daniel-

I guess what my argument comes down to is this: if I were an indie director, given the choice, I would prefer to get my movies seen by more people, and make less money (at least in the beginning), than set a price and make people pay, which will inevitably decrease viewings. I think the best way to accomplish the former, would be to put it on youtube and promote it. Yes, casual browsers would be lost. But, with the pay-per-view model, we are not getting too many casual browsers anyway, since they have to pay. So, perhaps the best way to do such a thing would be to have a youtube for indie movies and just let them be free.

Further, I also see problems with the distribution model. If we store these movies in the cloud, you need internet to watch them. That kind of sucks. If you store them locally, they take up a ton of space. That also sucks. If we can delete them after we watch and then download them later, that still necessitates an internet connection, and kind of sucks anyway.

As a final note, I guess I haven't convinced myself either way, so thanks for playing along.
I think consciousness is tied to the hardware it is running on, so I'm not optimistic about that prospect... If you mean "copy ourselves" then I'd be more inclined to agree.
> Closed marketplaces are good! I tried doing stuff for the internet - I had a BIG discovery problem.

Yes, I am starting to meet iPhone app developers who target specific niches. In other words, people are searching for something like their app. Their app is not found via email/blog/twitter PR primarily. And it helps that the title of their app has one or more of those keywords.
How convenient not?

Everybody uses their own emotional background to give it the meaning that suits them best.

That's the whole point of using slogans, we all identify with them in our own personal way.
His startup is called Directed Edge. They got into YC last year.

And is your handle really "callingyouout?" Go back to Reddit where gimmick personalities are appreciated.
No need for a private message area.

But it would be nice if yc would email people on your behalf. Most people do not think of adding their email address to the profile area.
You can boil much of the Japanese bubble and persistent malaise down to pervasive fraudulent accounting. Fictitious book values and profits were and are everywhere. I dare say it's more common to Asian cultures than Western, as the 1997 crisis and current practices in China indicate.

The moves in the US to weaken mark to market accounting rules to paper over weakness give great pause.
Having my news.yc and reddit lives linked to email would be chaos. The additional messaging system to check would be more convenient -- not inconvenient.
So long as you start the tweet with @[twitteruser], your @reply will only appear in someone's feed if they follow you and also the person you are sending the at-reply to. Or if they are the person you're sending the message to, of course.
"Lyme disease is notoriously hard to diagnose and also very rare."

It's probably one of the most common, if not the most common, systemic diseases. Any time you have multiple symptoms that can't be explained, lyme is pretty much the first thing a competent doctor would test for. Sorry, but any doctor who heard the list of shooter's symtoms and doesn't instantly think lyme is incompetent. And it's really not that rare, even in absolute terms. Off the top of my head I can think of five friends who have gotten it, and those are only the ones I know of.
I should note that lately I've discovered that my experience in AP Lit was highly unconventional.
Depressing.
Mathematics behind Hadoop-based systems
I agree with djm. I've found no "news" via Twitter that was was either interesting, informative, had actualy content, or was not spam.

At best, I get a link to a longer form of the news anyway on some other site (but usually with an impossible to decipher link shortener so I can't tell if the link is just spam anyways), usually to something I've already read and found through news aggregators or google news or some such anyways with more information and content.
Actually I didn't mention our name since it wasn't relevant to the point. I assumed it was clear from context that I meant, "a startup I work for". I originally wrote that in a reply to said comment, but it's just a trolling account, so I deleted it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=callingyouout
> But I think the normal way countries get out of it is through war, which isn't terribly rosy either.

The idea that war has worked to end depressions is well debunked. In any useful measure economies always deteriorate through war. Living standards in the US fell all through WWII and continued falling until demobilization. GDP goes up during war because of weapon purchases. And unemployment goes down when you draft (enslave) people. So these are meaningless measures. You have to look at households.
JILL - Java Implementation of Lua Language
You can make the inverse argument that people not interested in a messaging system could just not use it while giving those who want it the context + convenience of a native message box.
This doesn't really make any sense. All you would need to do is compile the code on an Intel machine to get fast speed and then you can run it on an AMD machine. It shouldn't really cause any problems as long as developers build on genuine Intel machines. Of course that it irritating, but it shouldn't cause any slowdown on other machines.
But twitter has news on an enormous number of topics, many too obscure for Google news.

For example, you could get real-time news on a conference.
More people != a good movie. I think a director is more likely to want a way to direct their movie at the audience it's intended for more than anything else.
I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less.

I was going to call this a misconception. But, in fact, the answer is that Twitter is a high-bandwidth medium. For readers.

(It's more effort for writers, but who cares about us? There are orders of magnitude more readers than writers.)

It's true that I could dump a lot more raw information on you with a ten-second video Tweet than a 140-character text Tweet. But most of that information would not only be useless (you probably don't care to know the exact quality of the light falling on the bookshelf behind me, or how well I shaved this morning) but positively negative (because it will distract you, detract from my point, and tend to engage and distract many more levels of your brain, thus contributing to the mental cost of context-switching that is the bane of modern existence).

What I crave as a reader, among other things [1], is a source of plain-text links and messages (which can be followed up if desired) that are drawn from a body of people I vaguely trust, or their immediate circle of friends; that have been wordsmithed, at great effort, to pack the maximum content in the minimum space; and that have been arranged on a single screen that can be browsed without fuss or effort and that doesn't contain big blinky ads that have been engineered to be among the most distracting things ever made. And, what do you know, Twitter is a pretty good approximation of that, especially for events that are evolving in real time.

---

[1] This is kind of an important point. Twitter is one tool, for one kind of reading. I wouldn't entirely give up blogs, or YouTube, or HN for Twitter, just as I wouldn't give up all books for Wikipedia.
A Systemic Problem with Sales Attribution
Sociality seems to have negative feedback at the edges. The height of the potential barrier is easy exceeded if you're self-sustaining and near impossible if you're not.

The only part of this I've personally experienced is similar chicken and egg problems trying to move to new country. You can't get a apartment without an employment pass, the bureaucracy can't send you letters without an address. If you have money you can bootstrap off a lawyer or accountant's credentials otherwise there isn't always a way.
Let me clarify a few things:
a) this is a DRM-free digital downloads platform. When I said "store in the clouds," I meant that additionally they are stored on our servers so you can re-download them.

b) Your point about giving away films for free is actually what indie filmmakers are saying. The person I consulted with specifically asked if I could let people pay what they want, and I've heard filmmakers on the internet talk about giving away films for free for exposure. This is also an example of the nuances to distributing online that I was talking about, that I will try to resolve for indie filmmakers.

So on the platform, you can set your price to free if you wish. And one of the other features we want to offer is cross-upload (of trailers and promotional material) to Youtube/video sites. This way your film will get exposure to Youtube's userbase, but you retain all control of the full length film on our site.
Tokyo Cabinet as a Key-Value Store
Twitter won't endure, it's a land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff. It's too complicated for real people, and unlike the bloggers they don't have an incentive to figure it out.

I'm a perfect example, I tried twitter like 6 months ago, tried it for a month, than gave up because there was just too much noise. I'm now back, but only because I use twitter to promote my own site. And since I now had an incentive to figure things out, I found things like tweet deck and lists that make things a lot easier.
I would add my email address to my profile if there was some way to build in spam protection such as re-Captcha's mail hide tool:

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/
You'd think a DBI programmer would know how awful MySQL is and how it would be better left to die.
I'd love to see a complete network of all modern web programming languages,and their advantages and disadvantages clearly compared.

Might as well do the same for operating systems, and hardware.
not everybody remembers to leave contact information

This is really a usability issue. It might be more effective to make it clear what is and isn't private than to build an internal messaging system.
I would really like a transcript or synopsis of this. I couldn't find one via the link. Is one available?
Bottom line: it's a business decision. Code generated by the Intel compiler "works" on AMD chips, although it may not be optimal. For Intel to support the optimal codepaths on AMD chips would require a substantial amount of research. I don't think they're intentionally crippling AMD chips; just declining to invest the effort to support them optimally.
"So, what's a real programmer? I believe it's the one who's obsessed with the programming itself, not with the result. It's the guy who would spam your IM with tons of code and discussions about it 4 times out 5 when you have a conversation."

That sounds to me like pedantry. Isn't the real programmer the one who knows programming well enough that he has not just mastered the detail but can put it in perspective?
It would be more interesting if Twitter showed local trends, such as the trends in Tweets by people in my city, or in my neighborhood, or even on my block.
Clarification:
> This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads.

People will be able to download DRM-free videos, and storing in the cloud is simply a backup to their purchases. There are several ways I've come up with to try to make this model sustainable. I won't go into that unless requested.

Also the reason I emphasize DRM-free is that it's quite clear to me that it would be impossible to compete with other DRM-enabled services with another proprietary DRM system. THis would mean lock-in to a small unknown service. But DRM-free video is universally compatible and not locked into any specific platform.
This is actually not a bad idea. I've graduated now, but I would always start taking notes on each reference at the end of my paper. So it's definitely fulfilling a need.

But I wish there was a lower threshold of participation--couldn't I sign up for an anonymous account, and then attach my name to it once I decide that it's useful for me?

Also, Inkscape and GIMP are free, and just as powerful as the Adobe suite, especially for making more basic stuff like icons or logos. Perhaps if you are into photo manipulation or use Fireworks for web design there is some benefit to getting the Adobe stuff.
This is timely considering just last night I "rm -rf projectname.py" instead of "rm -rf projectname.sqlite". D'oh.
I think the compiler generates code which checks processor type at runtime, not compile time. If the compiled code is running on an AMD processor, the "safe" version of the compiled code is chosen automagically.
Peter Michaux: Living an xkcd Cartoon
You have no way of knowing that. Ellison could view even $2 billion as a small price to pay for owning MySQL. MySQL has been a thorn in his side for years, and now he owns it.
MySQL does the job pretty well for applications in which stored procedures and other advanced features are not needed. It is really fast and very effective at doing what is absolutely needed: INSERTS, UPDATES, and SELECTS. I don't think it is "awful" or ready to die.
How much does Oracle stand to lose if MySQL doesn't die a slow death? Probably much more than a billion.
Wouldn't that make the code twice as large?
Yep -- I can definitely see it on some of the more "personal" businesses (e.g. local arts). Balsamiq I think would fall out of that range for most users.

I wonder what percentage of web users start their sessions at Facebook these days? It's clear that that's what Facebook is going for, and what you're suggesting with something milder than "fan" (see updates from..., perhaps).

One interesting thing to throw into the fray there as well is that if a service that I regularly use is down, the first place I check is Twitter, and pretty universally, it works. Facebook still I think has a ways to go before it's seen as a primary source for news in the same way. Twitter is kind of the new RSS.
Here the question is more like - what makes a teenage boy fall into the top 50% or bottom 50% of popularity? The guys in the top 50% most likely did not get there by extreme attention to detail or by wearing expensive accessories.

Why is it that nerdy kids often fall into the bottom 50% despite their clothes not being substantially different from others is an interesting question that has not been conclusively answered. If it is because they are short, weak and have unattractive faces, then what in the world causes the correlation with IQ?
Great. Ellison owns a piece of software anybody can fork and use as GPL!
Think about this from the perspective of the user though. When I go on Facebook, I expect that whatever information I put on the site is public, regardless of privacy controls (btw, I didn't change any privacy settings when they made a fuss about it because I didn't care/ didn't understand what the difference was from before). If people don't want this information broadcasted, why post it in the first place?

As an example, consider the "relationship status" feature. I don't know about you, but for most of my friends it was a running joke that you weren't "official" until you listed your status on your profile. So I think most people understand that their information is public.
In addition to just the question of what path is optimal, they'd have to keep track of all the bugs in AMD's, Cyrix's, Transmeta's, and other implementations which aren't the same as the bugs on Intel x86 chips. Falling back to a subset of the architecture that is more likely to produce the right behavior is the sane thing to do.

e.g. http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_an... v. http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.p... - these aren't just a couple gotchas you can put on the back of an index card
I would say it is better to spend all your time productively in what ever you do best. You can get someone else to do the promoting. As a result you spend 100% of your time doing what you do best, programming for example, and someone else spends 100% of their time promoting, which they perhaps do best.
I worked on http://www.webnodes.org/ - it's a proggit visualization.
NASA also uses Django. Here's the first link I found by google: http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/framework/ but there is also someone whose blog is frequently featured on the Django community aggregator that works for NASA.

... (Searching w/ Reader) ...

Daniel Greenfield! http://pydanny.blogspot.com/
That isn't exactly how it works.

The proper way to do it:

if( CPUIDbits & SSE1_CAPABLE ) {enable SSE1}
if( CPUIDbits & SSE2_CAPABLE ) {enable SSE2}
[etc]

The even better way to do it:

if( CPUIDbits & SSE1_CAPABLE ) {enable SSE1}
if( CPUIDbits & SSE2_CAPABLE ) {enable SSE2}
if( CPU is Athlon 64 ) {disable some SSE2 functions}
if( CPU is Pentium-M ) {disable all SSE2 functions}
[etc]

Intel's way of doing it:

if( CPU is Pentium 3 ) {enable SSE1}
if( CPU is Pentium 4 ) {enable SSE1/SSE2}
if( CPU is Core 2 ) {enable SSE1/SSE2/SSE3/SSSE3}
[etc]

Practically all sane applications do things the first way; a couple do things the second way. Anyone doing things the third way is just asking for trouble both in terms of future compatibility and resilience to unexpected situations. For example, some VMs disable certain instruction sets, which would result in SIGILLs when using the last method.
Perhaps, but size doesn't really affect runtime performance that much, especially if most codepaths are never execute -- no processor cache churn because the unused paths are never executed.

I don't really know anything about this compiler, so I'm certainly speculating. My assumption is that one writes some function foo() and the compiler prepends a dispatcher in front which forks (code paths, not processes) to one of N optimized but functionally equivalent codepaths based on the actual processor upon which the code runs.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! After months working quietly, it is very relieving to hear someone else understands what I'm trying to do.

A few answers regarding anonymity:

You can create an account and your personal bibliography remains private.

What I haven't done yet is implement privacy controls on your profile, but that is certainly in the cards.

Currently, you can post anonymously to public spaces (i.e. without an account). I'll see how that goes. To be honest, it could completely suck because of spammers, griefers, trolls, flamers, etc. However, creating an account that can post anonymously but trackably is an interesting idea I'll roll over in my mind.
A defense of the GPL
I'm working on a piece in Inform 7 for this interactive fiction design comp:

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/game_design_competiti...
The USA has little to lose by confronting China's trade polices
Nope. Checking the vendor string to determine capabilities when the CPUID instruction already has flags for different capabilities is unjustifiable. When a CPU claims SSE2 support, the compiler should enable SSE2, regardless of the vendor string. If AMD's implementation of SSE2 is buggy, that's their problem, and Intel should have no trouble making it into a PR win.

This is really no better than printer manufacturers putting chips into their cartridges so that they can use the DMCA to prevent third parties from refilling or making compatible cartridges.
What's the unethical component to this? To me, it all depends on what you do with this information. If you use the demographic info simply to understand your users and improve the service for them, then why is that bad? Perhaps you realize after looking at this demographic info that your assumptions about your userbase are wrong and you need to adjust your offerings or cater to a minority that you neglected. On the other hand, if you use that info to discriminate, then ya, that would be unethical.

And if you think giving this list our to MTurkers is unethical, then I have to ask why as well? I think you have to ask yourself that by giving away this information, does it open up your users to vulnerability? Would you be enabling unethical behavior on the part of someone else, thereby making you guilty by association?

For the record, I downvoted you because with a subject this sensitive, you should explain your position...not just make a quick, semi-accusatory statement. We need more comments with substance on HN.
Ask HN: review my app - a minimalist's to-do organizer
that's the point, if my message is only to that one person, why would my followers want to read about it?
A Fruitful Decade for Many in the World
A status theory of blog commentary
Good one. There's a nice site that does it for Wikis. http://www.wikimatrix.org - I guess it's all about separating the objective from the subjective. Maybe I'll setup up a wiki.
I had just finished on this: http://www.goopendb.org - Elastic Lists for movies. Back to work from today ;(