skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you're not into skimming through the history, here's the nut graph:

"Any sex ratio much higher than 108 (52 percent male) at any time during pregnancy is essentially excluded by modern data. Past the middle of the second trimester the sex ratio is known with great accuracy, at least in industrialized countries with strong health systems and reliable vital statistics, because nearly every fetal death after that point is recorded. The sex ratio of 20-week fetuses is essentially identical to the secondary sex ratio: The numbers of deaths after that point is too small to make much difference, even if the stillborn were all male."
A Software Defined Firewall for Heroku
Taking a step back, what's the advantage to society of every company growing into a conglomerate? Why not just let a company live and die on its core business?

Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company boards and executives?
I am talking about the finished actuato rather than just the motor. This includes actuator electromics. Think of all the muscles required to operate a human arm, fromthe shoulder to the fingertip, again, including the electronics to drive them. And then build that into a robot. And then have that robot do gymnastics, MMA, compete in the American Ninja course, jog, trip and fall, in general, deal with, survive and adapt to impact and minor damage.

In the context of actuators, not motors, we have a ways to go. It's not hopeless, of course, but we have to admit that the biological muscle is a really awesome machine.

Series-elastic actuators don't really deal with fragilityy as much as they provide energy storage along one axis. Think of punching a boxing bag or tripping and falling. The actuators we use today are susceptible to damage from relatively minor impact from any direction outise of where they have compliance built in. I can punch you in the biceps and will not break it.
> So they came up with a new term. "Climate change" has the exact same beliefs, political backers, scientists, corporate interests, and studies behind it as "global warming". It's just a new name.

Strange then that "climate change" name predates "global warming"
And those of us that have been flying for years joke about the multicopter gyro stabilized computer guided "pilots" the same way. "Drones" ... they are going to be the death of RC as a hobby.... thanks guys...
Definitely redundant. But to be fair if marketing/advertising/campaigning bludgeons the point home (Eat such and such fast food and have a happy relationship with your children! Buy such and such clothes and have a sexy girlfriend! Have you absorbed this political talking point yet!?) it's only fair that people speaking against that are allowed the same license to labour the point to the edge of boredom and despair.
Interesting - I greatly enjoyed Crichton's earlish work (e.g. Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain), but found his later stuff to be terrible in its scientific basis and _Prey_ was when I stopped reading because I found it too terrible to just enjoy.

Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.
An acquisition is always a failure (2003)
Twitter has appeal and reach, but it seriously needs to get it UX in order and focus on being great at simplicity. The official app is a jumbled mess. Instead of trying to be Facebook it needs to be Twitter. I think the advertisers and many of the investors are placing too much pressure on Twitter to become more like Facebook. I'd wager that Twitter's userbase and power-user is more influential and savvier than the typical FB user. We don't want another Facebook experience.
You're also up against hardware hackers who stand to make a buck selling prepackaged hardware exploits (AKA modchips). You'd be surprised how much resources these guys have available to them.
That's a personal attack. Those are not allowed here.

HN has many users who work for major tech companies. No doubt everyone is biased in favor of their employer, but people also know the most about things they've personally worked on, and it isn't in anyone's interest for HN to have less knowledge in the threads. The solution is for everyone to post civilly and substantively, not be personally attacked for it, and let readers make up their own minds.
I've been short on Twitter from the get-go, I just didn't think it would take this long. This doesn't mean I'm anti-Twitter - I would actually prefer that it stay the niche platform for journalists/celebrities/activists.

I don't know the business strategy to make sure that is viable, but I don't want it to be a mass-market product (except in terms of consumption)...the signal to noise ratio is so much better than other social platforms.

Twitter, quite bizarrely, is filling a void no longer filled by newspapers (wow, what that says about our attention spans). It's only peripherally mainstream but incredibly useful as a _tool_ to a small group of people. It's not any one thing: it's different depending on who you are.
I think what you mean is: "What is the optimal mean surface temperature of the Earth" for human civilization as we know it? In which case that still seems like the wrong question to me. The right question is, in what ways will projected changes in the climate affect our civilization, are those changes unacceptably bad, and if so, what can we do to mitigate them? We should also absolutely be considering the affect on other species and thinking about how to protect them as well.
Google will buy it because Google+ is Twitter minus the people.
That was always a tax deduction - it's business labor.

They can now deduct additional (donated) funds paid directly to LLVM. As would every other company who wants to see LLVM flourish.
To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it.

Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking. They're sitting on a search goldmine yet they're trying to convert signups and popular celebrity post clickthroughs.
>> To make things worse, Net::HTTP doesn't set TCP_NODELAY on the TCP socket it opens, so it waits for acknowledgement of the first packet before sending the second. This behaviour is a consequence of Nagle's algorithm.

I think rather than a consequence of Nagle's algorithm it is the situation that the algorithm is intended to optimize when an app generates many small packets.
Out of curiosity what would be a better theme to follow that is "hacker-y" if 1337speak is not currently trendy. It is something that is deeply ingrained in the culture and was never really a trend to infosec people. It's fun. Would something be more to date if the titles were emojis?

Side-note: Attended a BlackHat training and one of the people who works on the show (didn't catch their title) was attending one of the classes. Even saw them interracting with the offenisve security[1] cr3w. This small gesture adds an air of legitimacy in the infosec crowd.

https://www.offensive-security.com/
What is a better way to sell a candidate to clients than to say she is in the top 1%? They have every reason to count out as many people out as possible. Nobody looking at this kind of service wants to hire candidates who are not the best.
For me (on FF) HTTP/1.1 was faster in around 5/7 attempts. I'm on corporate network so not sure that's affecting it.
I think Gp means not carrying the recessive genes to term. Setting aside the ethics, we have the tech to do this right now.
Twitter is like a car in first gear: loads of noise, loads of turnover (rpm) but profit (speed), not so much yet.

However if you want to get somewhere you actually need to shift up at some point: growth numbers start to decline so they'll have to, before investors lose their faith even more and they end up in a downward spiral.
I agree with you that editing the human genome is not generally ethically objectionable and should be allowed, but I also think that tinkering with our genome will create a whole new set of societal issues that will reinforce the current ones, which humanity has been historically bad at solving.

Imagine a world where genetical engineering is very effective, but not cheap. The already advantaged can create designer babies and therefore have the ability to give their offspring an additional edge. Social mobility could be seriously limited if unmodified humans have a worse chance to get good work or work at all. Even today, many people see the poor as inferior because they often have a bad education. In the future, they could be legitimately genetically inferior.

Gattaca (1997) is an excellent movie with a similar theme: “A genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel“.
Good for him!
Maybe the platform runtime one, but I could be wrong. ;)
> But for me this is not the norm, most days are a mix of too hard and too easy, so motivation is sometimes a struggle and/or I'm exhausted and glad if I can go home and recharge for the next day. Even if work is good and fun, sometimes I'm just so much more exited about something not work related (at home, with friends, cool new tech), that I'm also eager to leave or am just distracted while at work.

> For me it is "hard" to simply give 100% with no distractions to my fullest potential for 8 hours.

Working hard's not easy, and something I continue to try and figure out how to optimize further. I use small wagers (e.g. coffee) with coworkers to help with motivation, noise canceling headphones and asynchronous communication (IRC, email) to help minimize flow disruptions, website blocks to break idle browsing habits, task lists and breakdowns to help eliminate "uhh... what next?" indecision, single-tasking as much as possible...

Friends and new tech I can sometimes integrate into work, but yeah, not always.

> I can't even do that for 8 hours most days, so why expect me to do it for 12 or even longer, there would quickly be a negative ROI like the article suggest.

At this point, I'll push back hard on management that asks me for more than 8 hours, and it's a serious consideration when job hunting. I'm willing to, on occasion, put more than that in - if I'm convinced the occasion warrants sacrificing long term productivity for some very short term gains - but I'm not willing to let it become a pattern.

Even then, at 12 hours, I'm typically a mindless zombie suitable for little more than manual input fuzzing (read: mindlessly spamming inputs), running build scripts that were prepared and debugged earlier, and uploading build artifacts. I'm not even productive short term for most work tasks anymore. Even bug fixes may do more harm than good.

I've even managed to frame it as an ethics issue to myself: Allowing my employer to repeatedly sacrifice my long term productivity for extremely short term gains is doing wrong by myself, and doing wrong by my employer. Worst case scenario, if (respectfully) standing up to management gets me fired, or turns the work environment toxic, I have another opportunity to find a job that appreciates my work instead of my self-flagellation.
Does anyone know much about multicopters before they buy one? I know I didn't. Pretty much all I did was look up the regulations in various countries and then had at it.
Good times to buy into $TWTR ;).
Are you really asking that?
There weren't very many PhD programs for Computer Science in 1968. A quick Google search reveals the first US Computer Science Phd was awarded in 1965.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kenneth_Keller
I think there would be value in publishing what ever you call your react lib (all the t*$ stuff) as a distinct js library.
Apparently over 430,000 questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=closed%3Ayes
You're absolutely right -- and that needs to die in a fire -- but studies consistently show that Wikipedia contains generally accurate information. What we need is some way to automate the process of exposing shill editors. I would pay good money for a bullshit detector.
Birds are made of something that a blender with a 100W motor (or less) can turn into mash in seconds. Drones are not.
John Henry Holland, Who Computerized Evolution, Dies at 86
Twitter should print out these comments and throw darts to pick their new executive team.
Not remotely pioneering though. Being 5-20 years (or more) behind the curve might be insightful to the average reader, but is in no way pioneering.

That'd be like saying Dolly the Sheep was pioneering in ideas about cloning humans. The ideas/ethics/concerns were around for decades. That average people willfully ignored them doesn't make the ideas new.
Apache Cordova is the largest project for developing mobile applications with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). It may be worth a look as that should be the fastest place for you to start.
Put simply, future value. Otherwise a sidewalk lemonade stand profiting 1 cent per glass would be far more valuable than a lemonade manufacturing business which sells millions of bottles a day and pumps all the profits plus additional investment money into manufacturing facilities. At some point, the money-losing lemonade manufacturer no longer needs to ramp up their facilities, they pay down the equipment cost, and generate boatloads of profit. That or they get bought out by a larger player who wants to enter the lemonade market but doesn't want to reinvent the wheel.
The overview didn't answer my biggest question: what kind of (compile time) type system does it have? Can I use it to get proper type checking, inference and primitive types?
This. I get that they want sign-ups, but it's hard to sell the service with that page.
CNN is precisely the journalism niche they are talking about.

It isn't about niche celebrities, but celebrities as a whole is their niche. And journalists, of course. Newspaper websites publish vast quantities of tweets because it costs them nothing, it means you indirectly consume a lot of tweets.

But the celebrity content consumed by journalists is as a whole still a niche, even if all celebrities are on there.

FWIW I think it would be a mistake to abandon that, but it does raise questions about how they grow.
What he said.
LLVM these days is huge.
"If you can't build a viable company with 300M of the most influential users, then something is very very wrong in the world."

One of the intriguing thing I'm keeping my eye on is that if TWTR keeps sinking, will there be any other follow-up effects? Because if TWTR can't convert eyeballs to money at the Wall Street-expected rate, that suggests in that invester-sphinctor-tightening way that maybe the other companies depedent on that model may have trouble too.

The market's faith in eyeballs ---advertising---> money has always struck me as excessively strong. Not that it's a stupid idea, just that Wall Street seems to believe it's about 5-10 times more effective a plan than I do.
Fair enough. Twitter definitely doesn't produce profits in the billions. Twitter doesn't even produce profits at all. It's a poorly run billion dollar company imo [1,2].

If operated and ran efficiently it has the reach and potential to produce billion dollar profits. I highly doubt we'll ever see a twitter like that though. They're too far entrenched in the culture of frivolous spending and Silicon Valley economics.

1. http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/technology/social/twitter-ca...

2. http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/04/28/us-twitter-results-...
Businesses are usually valued on reasonable (e.g. 12-18x) multiples of their profit (and by that it's their actual profit not these silly non-GAAP 'profit if you ignore all this stuff we don't want you to look at' profit nonsense). Tech companies often try to pretend this isn't reality, but after you've been trading on the public markets for a while reality starts to set in hard.

So for Twitter to be a legit business valued at $18.5 billion (as it is today) they need to consistently churn out around $1.5 billion a year in pure hard core profit. They are nowhere near that and there's no sign of how they will get there. Hence all the negative pressure on the stock. When you bring it back to fundamentals that's the issue here.
No admin touched this post. It dropped in rank because of user flags and the flamewar detector, which is algorithmic and treats all posts the same way.

HN admins don't penalize posts for being anti-YC or anti-YC-startup.
Backup+Android+Contacts+Methods
I would argue that Heroku is still the fastest way to get a web app deployed for the first time. One command to push and one click to setup a solid database.

As your systems get more complex, you can still peel off services to AWS or the like, but until then, Heroku combines the following tasks and AWS services into a dead simple process: configuring instances, Scaling Groups, RDS, Cloudwatch (some metrics, consolidated logging) and ELB.
If drones acted like birds and actively got the hell away from the big, loud, flying thing approaching them then I would agree with your assessment.

And it's not my position that this is anything other than a marginal increase in risk; my position is simply that the risks associated with drone strikes can be quite significant.
Drink smaller beers, with a glass of water (or two) on the side. Just like wine (Few people drink wine from pint glasses). Allows you to taste more different (craft or otherwise) beers in one sitting, and you won't get as drunk/hung over.

Say you drink 0.25l of a 9% beer along with 0.25l of water (probably a bit more water, actually). The water fills you up, breaks your drinking "speed" -- and now you've technically had 0.5 of 4.5% beer.

In my experience, what really matters is how much pure alcohol is consumed per unit of time (assuming you're not actually drinking something stronger than 60% at an unnaturally high rate). Shotting hard liquor is a strong outlier - but sipping doesn't have to be. I find that drinks and strong beers generally end up being about the same -- if you drink at a natural pace, and no water on the side, you'll get drunk -- slow down and drink at least as much water (in volume) as alcohol and you'll be fine. Personal tolerance/degree of alcoholism will vary from person to person, of course. Adjust to what pace suits you.

We can say 0.5l/500ml of 5% beer ~ 25ml of alcohol. If we calculate 5 glasses to a bottle of wine, a glass of 13% wine is 750ml/5 = 150ml ~ 19.5ml of alcohol. This happens to be about the same as a pint of 4.5% (455*0.045) -- but it's more concentrated.

Might want to add two glasses of water to each glass of wine. Uptake will be a bit slower without gas in the mix.
John McAfee AMA
The kind of investments you are referencing (ones which to me are many steps removed feom core impact) are hard to do before the core business is nailed down, which in this case the market seems to think Twitter had not yet done.
It's not really an explosion.

The volatility just means the wreckage of the drone burns for a few seconds. That's not nearly as big a problem as the impact itself.
TWTR right now has a operating margin of -26%. So they spent ~1.3B to get that 1.0B in revenue.

If I were to make a bunch of goods for $130/each, and then sell them for $100/each but managed to sell 10M of those goods should I be valued as a billion dollar company?
There is a search icon in the upper left of the landing page for me. It opens up a search bar.
> "Niche is Instagram"

Except Instagram has more active users than Twitter...
I like the uArm, an Arduino powered arm for $340. http://evol.net/
In living memory, "rule of law" has included the holocaust, gulags, forced sterilization of the handicapped, forced abortion, police brutality directed against minorities, and various other forms of tyranny and injustice. Many times those things are described by the government as "in the best interests of the people".

Those are the associations some people have with the line "limiting human behavior". Of course that's a rather one-sided presentation -- I've left out positive things like "ending slavery" -- but the point is to demonstrate where the fear comes from.
Consulting with Scott about a movie to Mars is all their budget can handle.
Thanks!

Do you have any experience on it? Do you recommend some book or diving in the docs directly?
'Base Jumping' Spider Soars from Rainforest Treetops
Writing over someone else's work is a form of disrespect and the cause of much conflict within the Graffiti community.

Banksy is a polarising person within the Graffiti community. Most notably because he defaced a piece by Robbo.

So yes, it was 'supposed to happen' and depending upon your stance it could either be seen as justified or something to 'feel sad about'.
I know that and I use it, but the problem is bigger because that homepage has no idea what it is or what it's trying to do. Search is an afterthought and I'm suggesting that search should be their primary focus for this page.

Logged in, yea you can get your feed and do whatever you want. But this logged-out page has absolutely 0 value for anyone who isn't a Twitter user.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094289
> Amazon was released in 1982 for the Apple II Computer—that’s seventeen years ago.

The article is from 1999, based on this quote from the article.
That's a great point for the larger societal stakeholders in our collective capitalist enterprise. But given the limited horizon that the market places on Twitter's management and shareholders, I don't know that it answers the question of why Twitter doesn't expand beyond its current narrow focus.
It's not really a societal advantage, it's an investor one. If you're an equity holder you expect some return on capital you've contributed. If you're Twitter, this means returns on current products/services or on new ones. Hopefully, from a strategic perspective new products are either higher return on capital than current products/services or exhibit (excuse the wording) synergies with current products/services.

Additionally OP alludes to a greater vision which a company may use to impact its decision making on new projects to pursue.
The big issue is this -
The goal of many start ups and software companies (especially modern ones circa 2000) is to get really big and then figure out how to make money. The problem with Twitter is that its doing just that. Exactly that even after its IPO. Its humongous yet doesn't have a decent business model (thus the falling stock prices).

You can't get much bigger (well known) as a brand/company than Twitter. From networks such as CNN, FOX NEWS, ESPN, ABC, etc... Twitter is everywhere! Everyone knows them.

So, there's a check. The issue happens with the second part : what do do with our fame?

Can Twitter use their power to make services that are profitable? Yes! Do they? No, not really :(

I often wonder why it takes so long for companies like these to blatantly monetize their services. They are backed by billions yet you rarely see an ad here or a "shop" there. Its as if they feel that its a bad thing to do. Its as if they feel that they are betraying the people using their services.

I feel that these services can survive with a little more push towards that. Then again I'm not the CEO or founder of that BIG company so I'm sure most would feel that my idea is not valid. It just frustrates me that you see so much potential (money-wise and service-wise) in a product/service yet it takes a long time to see those changes.
Trust vs. Discount
This would be fantastically niche and tech-person-oriented, probably not the right move for the company as a whole. That said, nothing stops you from writing a bot on top of Twitter to power any of these interactions.
Please don't do this here.