skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brief look at the claims suggests to me that this patent probably won't cover Twitter, or much else for that matter. It looks like it has two pretty severe limitations: (1) there has to be a link to an online activity that feed readers can participate in, and (2) the feed must be limited to certain users prior to the feed's existence.

Here is Claim 1 (all the other claims look to be similar):

> 1. A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user;

It is a news feed about user activities. So far, nothing looks so interesting.

> attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items

Ok, the news items in the feed have links. But...

> where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user;

So this is interesting. This means that it has to be an online activity (otherwise how can a link "enable" you to participate in the activity?).

> limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users;

So the news feed cannot be public. Although Facebook might try to argue that this covers situations where the feed is sometimes private and sometimes public, it seems likely that this element would be read to require limiting all the time. If Facebook intended the opposite, then it should have said something like "determining whether to limit access." (Alternately, it might mean that the damages for the patent would be cut off by the fraction of feeds that were private.)

> and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users.

And you display the news feed to some of the users. That word "predetermined" is interesting--it suggests that the viewing users have to be chosen before the feed is made.
Does John Gruber have any demonstrable evidence to back up his opinions? No, they're rank speculation. They are, at best, educated guesses. I tire of this kind of blogging. I'm not saying that Mr. Gruber isn't informed, or intelligent, or perceptive. What I'm saying is that he's got nothing beyond that, and that's not good enough for me.
Are you sure this is real?

I ask because this anecdote seems to be verbatim from the movie "Punch Drunk Love". Although the movie I mention was released in 2002: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272338/
This is the best residential Internet connection money can buy
Fair enough. Why do you still read his stuff, though?
Right now... adding some features to an internal application at work in C# (im at work).

Later tonight though, I should be preparing for my hiking trip tomorrow, and possibly working on some RSS indexing that someone I know wants for their website.
I see that Daniel Gilbert is one of the authors of this study, author of http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/... .

If you have yet to read it and have any interest in the psychology of happiness (and I can't imagine a sentient human who wouldn't have such an interest), do so post-haste.
http://www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm
A website for people to post latin texts, collaboratively annotate them with grammer information, and read both.
Drinking...
do things 'the right way'. high standards are my personal favorite motivation for doing a good job and working harder. if i know the quality of my work matters i will try harder to get it right. in some orgs it seems quality is completely disregarded in favor of 'just getting things done' and respect for the job suffers.
if you look at the film's trivia (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272338/trivia) you'll see that it was based on this story:

The film was inspired by an article in 'Time' magazine about David Phillips, a University of California civil engineer who stumbled upon a lucrative frequent-flyer promotion. By purchasing 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding for just $3,000, he accumulated 1.25 million air-miles.
I guess the proof is in the pudding... (thanks)
I'll tell you another story about Andy Bechtolsheim: he invested in a competitor of my startup about 10 years ago, would never give us the time of day when we tried to raise money. We never got to pitch to him, which is unfortunate considering that he was the one angel specialized in our space. Fast forward 5 years, we acquired the company he had invested in.

Who you know (or rather, who knows you) matters. We were out of towners at the time.
The original headline was a bit opaque. Rewriting journal article titles to read more like newspaper article titles sounds like a good practice to me.
> If you can demonstrate two cap sheets with the typical scenario and the feel-good scenario and it can be shown that founders loose control at about the same stage, this would probably be more digestable.

You're assuming that employees are willing to take less money to help the founders retain control. Maybe, but I doubt it.

If control is worth so much, perhaps founders should be willing to pay for it. One way to do so is to give liquidation preferences to employees.
The ranking were researched and calculated by YouNoodle. [1]

YouNoodle took angel money from Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and The Founders Fund. [2]

This conflict-of-interest was not disclosed by BusinessWeek.

[1] http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/future_of_t...
[2] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/younoodle
Despite the number of oriental and south asian people in the valley, how came their are so few of them in vc, never mind blacks or latinos.
Studying for a Computer Architecture mid-term on Tuesday. I got to program a little bit of a RESTful API for a big school project earlier today though, so the day isn't a total loss.
...water.
Using CouchDB to set up various payment methods for a personal project. The schemaless stuff is great.
This sounds like real fun! My compilers class was a joke, we made it as far as generating ASTs, then the semester ended. Laughable.
11492 accounts, many of them inactive of course. There are more users than that, because many users lurk for a while before creating accounts. We now get around 45k unique visitors on weekdays.
So true, look at the xooglers getting reaquired by the mothership.
By 'still read', you imply that i read his stuff on a regular basis. I don't read his stuff at all anymore, but who can't resist a title like that? :)
Trying to get the video done for our YC app. We're seriously bad at saying anything cool or interesting on camera... all we can do so far is laugh at each other. :)
I'm working on initialization scripts for my VPS: automatically taking it from newborn to installed infrastructure and security settings.

And a glass of bourbon.
There are people who buy dollar coins straight from the US mint (with free shipping) with credit cards, deposit the coins to pay off the bill, and accumulate rebates and frequent flier miles. IIRC one guy bought an appreciable fraction of a million dollars worth of coins, a few grand at a time, and got a similarly ridiculous number of frequent flier miles out of it.

One reason this is considered "real life hacking": it's an exploit of a bug. Credit card companies generally exclude "buying cash" from their rewards programs ("some restrictions may apply"), but some of them failed to account for dollar coins as a form of cash.
My entire career came about because the Australian Government banned Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. It was finally released in 2000 - I was a journalism student at the time, and the university cinema was playing it. In the time between my final class and the film beginning, I was killing time in the student union building.

They had a jobs board in the building, and I read one asking for a 'casual sales administrator' ('saturday girl') in a real estate office. Figuring real estate was a practical life skill to learn through a part time uni job, I noted the details and applied.

Being brilliant, I got the job, fell in love with the property industry and on graduation decide to pursue it rather than journalism. That led to a few promotions, and directly into the field of training business owners in the real estate industry, which then led me to my current career (business coaching).

If it weren't for the ban and subsequent delayed release, I might be a working journalist! And to think I've been railing against the Australian government's draconian view of censorship.

Edit: Feeling happier already.
Putting the finishing touches on the app I wrote this week, a co-founder finder.

I also got a Droid this afternoon, so I've been having a hard time avoiding the distracting shiny, shiny new toy.
awesome, out of curiosity, what kind of server is HN running on?
edit: guy below me who maxed out the thread, server not language
ooh... what bug? and are you doing f# for web or just f#?
I'm curious to how you got into the using coffee for energy (especially in the early mornings) it seems that this has become the norm in peoples lives: waking up to two or three cups of coffee and then drinking even more at work.

I like coffee enough to have it regularly once a week on Saturday mornings but the rest of my caffeine consumption is sitting down to a cup of tea at around 5 o'clock which seems to make me happy more than energizing me. But the headaches because you did not have your coffee seem rather scary that it had gotten to that point.
Kojo a Scala Learning Environment
Playing Starcraft with my wife, exploring a new tactic, inspired by the discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1150669

And taking care of my 2-month-old.
Yup, the movie is based on this guy. http://www.snopes.com/business/deals/pudding.asp
Deploying a tiny, tiny app onto a public server...
An example of art imitating life.

(Actually, that was one of the many things that annoyed be about that film. When Adam Sandler was comparing all the different products to gain the miles, I yelled at the TV "Buy the freakin' puddings you moron." When he subsequently did, my wife looked at me like I was prescient; I made the mistake of telling her that element was based on a true story hence my foresight.)
the same thing we do every night, pinky... plotting to take over the world... this time with a shivaplug.
Yes it was.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_10/b41690396...
Trying to figure out how to query the UMLS metathesaurus's WebService (Soap 1.2) API using Ruby. Not having much luck :(
I was going to blog about it tomorrow (never ruin a good chance to blog)

Basically for some reason F# barfs on large types, say types with 500 fields in them. I think the breaking point is 300 or so. There's also another bug that I'll save for the blog entry.

Microsoft was responsive as hell -- I had an email response within minutes and the engineer and I were emailing back and forth all afternoon. I was very impressed. The F# dev guys rock, even though I'm not happy at all with having a broken app.
Burma Shave Contest Sends Winner to Mars (1955)
Give yourself a 15 minute deadline. Take whatever video is the best when 15 minutes are up.
You Want IE To Die? Talk To The Schools That Use It
Sleeping, I hope. I haven't slept a full night for a while.

G'night.
Reminds me of the Burma Shave example from the 1950s - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1152409
Chris Dixon talked about this recently. The first line starts with "For most people I know who join or start companies, the primary goal is not to get rich..."

http://cdixon.org/2009/10/22/the-ideal-startup-career-path/
PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies is the Top-Grossing iPhone Launch Ever
yeah - that's been my experience too. the few times i've dealt with them, they've been back at me in hours tops. hopefully that'll continue despite them hitting RC
Alternately learning twisted and writing software
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.-- Leo Tolstoy
ZumoDrive.
working on my future...
Tonight? Nothing aside from routine email. I need a mental health day.

Saturday? Nothing aside from routine email. 10 hours of day job followed by going out with friends to karaoke.

Sunday: Church, gym, minimum viable achievement system in Rails (was supposed to happen last Sunday but I broke site -- scratch one work day), A/B tests incorporating it, deploy live, blog post about solo founderhood.
Adobe Fireworks might be a good tool for you.
Playing with bottle.py and Twilio
The odd thing was that the code was working in 2010Beta, but fell completely apart in 2010RC. It was a case of upgrading the IDE and having my app crash and burn. First thing we did was up the stack size, but no matter how big we made the stack, it didn't work.
Finishing up a presentation for code show and tell at work tomorrow.
I think the IKEA "legal hack" can top just about anything out there. Check it out: http://www.economist.com/business-finance/printerfriendly.cf...
not a virus, I hope
aw that's awesome. your baby must be asleep now :)
interesting. well - we had the same problem with ndjango. worked fine with beta, crapped out with rc. that, and the shifty api is getting annoying. their last minute shift away from ocaml naming was pretty annoying.
Working on a JSON stream parser in AS3, reading data with flash.net.URLStream, for loading up GPS data progressively. The JSON for a ride like this (http://ridewithgps.com/trips/2000) is about 300k, and I think it will look much cooler if it draws as it downloads.
Threats and Risks of VoIP Service
Many of the threats associated with VoIP are similar to the threats inherent to any internet application. Internet users are already familiar with the nuisance of email abuse in the form of spam and phishing attempts.
Lessons in Bootstrapping
Found this today (off TC) http://www.xtranormal.com/

Kinda what I was thinking.
Xtranormal -- Text-to-Movie "If you can type, you can make movies"
Documentation. Or if my eyeballs start falling out from that, a mass mailing engine in PHP for use on commodity-type PHP hosting. (For non-evil purposes, I promise.)
Computer science
I have lats of short notes about computer science
java jsp asp .net sql html xml
It's a server written in arc.
Writing an iPhone app / webapp for givingturtle.org to release before SXSW. For that matter, for anyone looking for something worthwhile to spend a few hours on, let me know...
The Volvo XC90 
The 2010 Volvo XC90 is a full-fledged SUV ensconced in legendary ruggedness and durability. The XC90 is a family-friendly SUV with a comfortable interior, performance and an excellent safety record.
And let us not forget the Lazlo Hollyfeld from the 1985 classic The Real Genius (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/) who computerized his "no purchase necessary, enter as often as you like" way to millions in cash and prizes.
Few districts are going to hire a teacher that's been laid off for poor performance, so if you fire a teacher you've essentially ended their career and kicked them to the curb with a worthless degree, no experience outside academia, and no skills that transfer to other jobs. Firing is serious business, and it's not surprising to me that districts are reluctant to resort to the nuclear option or that teachers fight so hard to prevent it.
Ufc Collection Dvd/season 1-7 Dvd Boxset
Trying to find a vt100 emulator for lisp . . . not working out so great. Or is it? I just remembered emacs had one . . . reading the source code now . . . god help me.
Working on photo upload in a new web app I'm working on. It spawns ImageMagick to do the conversion into multiple photos of different sizes. I had doubts about this until I read that it's the technique Flickr uses.
Why geeks rock at sex
I hope not. In a quest for Linux-usable tools for manipulating Word docs I gave POI a shot, and with even moderately complex documents the results were horrible.

Running Word on an EC2 instance of Windows Server looked to be my best option. :(
"6) Mailing lists. I did this 3 years after starting my business. Knowing what I know now makes me sad I waited that long. MailChimp is an easy snap-in."

I remember the other day you stressed how much you don't spam your customers. So I'm assuming this is an opt-in thing, but:

- Do people really opt-in enough to make this worthwhile?
- What do you do with it that makes it worthwhile? New product announcements?

"15) Backups for all that stuff that isn't on the database. I let Slicehost handle that."

They just back up whole images, and restore them (plonk) to your slice, right? What do you do for data that's not in your database, that was created after the most recent backup? And do you restore to your main slice or a temporary slice?
I did indeed mean the supervisor managing compliance officers, but good info nonetheless!
That's because you are working on their bleeding edge software, if you are working on old platforms, usually they would just mark your bug report as "won't fix".
http://infosthetics.com/ - a blog about visualizations from around the web.
That would be silly of cricinfo IMO. They have a well established decade old brand(in fact, one of the first websites on the Internet, I believe).
getting over some kind of sickness (generic cold, perhaps, but it hit hard) and working on setting up my new 55g saltwater reef aquarium.

hooray hobbies
Making my current project -- a hierarchical outliner -- support multiple documents and user accounts
It's 6.16 am now, and yesterday night I went to bed early so I could work on my projects this morning. So far I've written a guest post for my blog (since 5 am) and I'll now work on the backend of a bog engine I wrote myself in rails. I'll probably do many other things before 9 am where I'll start my day-work.
I scratched an itch today while collecting research materials. I had trouble keeping track of all the pages I was referencing, quotes I liked, etc.

So I made an app and then open sourced it: http://github.com/pplante/yourcached.info

Not totally finished yet. Waiting on DNS to resolve so I can add FBConnect to it and spread the word.

I only spent 4 hours on this so far. So it wasn't a complete distraction from what I needed to do...not yet at least!
as of ~a year ago: "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1"

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516118
Making a 'carbon copy' of a spacecraft
The worst of moments, and something over which you have absolutely no control.That was how the team behind Nasa's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) were feeling on this day last year.OCO was designed to make unprecedented global measurements of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
Palm CEO’s Letter to Employees
Merging the code I wrote on the road last week with the main tree on the dev box.
Someone tell PG to update his page.
cant wait to aggregate more of this sort of thing freely

HACKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

(what are you going to do about the cops?)

winkwink
Beer.
It wasn't a mistake. As the Snopes link says, the pudding company was happy with the publicity, and the airlines were as well.
Debating adding the deals from my iDealyzer iPhone/Android apps to the supporting website hoping it will help SEO.
I'm localising the latest Flash game I sold, I was fortunate enough to get a good price and a great buyer on it. It's a ton of work setting up their multilingual and branding requirements but I have to get it done tonight, I got bogged down on my little startup (http://www.swfstats.com/) all week and next week I'm off to San Francisco for the Flash Gaming Summit so that really only leaves today and worst case scenario some of tomorrow to get this sorted out. : )

This is my game:
http://www.flashgamelicense.com/screenshots/ss_8ih6r76u9701....

11:23pm
Just had dinner with my girlfriend. Now finishing up this months pro-bono work to clear my plate for next month.
Working on my awesome blogging software. Here's the gorgeous coming soon page: http://www.heyreverie.com. Email me if you're frustrated with Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. and I'd love to have you test my site before I make it public.
Big Change in the Tech World
"2. The format seems to be proprietary. Call me crazy, but if I'm investing the time and energy into marking up documents, I want to take them away in a portable, editable format. Maybe I missed this point on their site?"

Oh, excellent point. I was just trying out the site, and it's quite impressive. But you're comment was something that completely slipped my mind.

For my purposes I'll eventually want a local copy of the document with all the additions. The FAQ says nothing about this.

Also, I was editing a document in 3 different browsers to see how it handled multiple users. I didn't see any automatic updating, like how Google Docs shows other edits in near real-time among my changes.

I had to refresh the browser to see the new state of the file. I can see that creating assorted cross-editing problems.
Oooops, forgot the screenshot: http://grab.by/2GVy
Reminds me of the infinite Jamba Juice hack:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875856
How Do You Become Prejudice?
But you do own GM. (I'm assuming you're a US taxpayer.)
Use a framework that handles user accounts/passwords for you. Twitter, Facebook and other social auth frameworks can be plugged in easily via 3rd party modules.

I use and recommend Django, for example. I would imagine Ruby/Rails would have similar capabilities.

For Django tutorials/docs:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/

Django is also about to release a major update in the first half of March (v1.2). Some GREAT improvements.
And they got free shipping on the coins!

Story is here: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB...

(google link to get behind paywall)
Working to get one step closer to nirvana :)
I don't remember how I got started in to coffee drinking business to help me wake up. But I have been doing it for far too long. I had to have coffee in the morning for me to begin to do something. 3-4 large cups a day (at least) was normal for me.

I don't think a lot of people realize but caffeine addiction is not very different from other forms of addiction (as to how addictions in generally work, not necessarily how much damage they do to you). So my headaches for not having coffee was symptoms of withdrawal from caffeine. I have learned from others who also tried to quit drinking coffee they had to deal with really bad headaches.

My main reason for trying to quit caffeine (as mentioned before) is anxiety. I think I have recovered 90% from my anxiety just by quitting coffee. I am also taking supplements like st. John's wort, which I believe helped me a lot too, along with heavy exercise.

Oh! And I forgot about the dreams! :)
This might sound as an exaggeration, but I don't think I have dreamed for the last ten years or so. Or at least dreams I can consciously remember. The week after I stopped drinking coffee, every night I have been having the most vivid dreams you could imagine. Its amazing! :)

After dropping out of college, this might be the second best decision I ever made. I am so excited I can't stop writing about it. :)