skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see your point - but when Twitter went public, they were still growing, and their valuation was lofty, based on expectations of considerably more growth.

Snapchat is in possibly a weaker situation: they are not making any money - and in order to justify their valuation, they really do have to grow for a long period of time.

I believe that Snap is 'similar to Twitter' in that Snap will not become like Facebook - i.e. 'ubiquitous and incumbent'.

I believe that Snap will likely 'hit a wall' in growth at some point.

The greater risk is that Snapchat may be a fad.

Twitter 'was a fad', but when the hype died down - they are still kind of a broadly usable tool for media, celebs - Tweets are used extensively in reporting coverage. This gives a lot of stickyness to the platform.

Snap ... is the 'zen cool' thing for 18-26 year olds ... but that could change very quickly. There's no reason that their user base can just switch to FB messenger (where everyone else is), SMS or whatever to do 'regular communication' when they are too old to be 'sharing irreverent stories'. And the 14-year-olds today, when they turn 18-ish may have some other cool thing to do.

So if we can separate the 'fad' and 'utility' parts of the platform - Facebook has a good deal of 'utility' that applies to a very broad base. Twitter has some 'utility' to a narrower base.

I'm weary that Snapchat just doesn't have the kind of 'utility' that it needs to survive after the 'fad' dies down.

That said, they have been good at innovating and 'staying cool'. A lot of brands manage to 'stay relatively cool'. They could adapt/evolve into something consistently cool, or consistently useful. Possibly. But there's nothing on the roadmap that says they would.

Which is why I think there is risk in this.
Really? NZ is in a similar situation and I can buy an unlimited 1Gbps residential fibre connection in a town of 43,000 people for NZD115/month.

NBN handover charges are excessive, and interconnecting with Telstra is crazy expensive, and you need to for good domestic connectivity. The NZ UFB fibre network has much lower handover costs, and the incumbent telco here is marginally more reasonable.
Would have like to have seen Firefox's particular handling of this, but it seems like the author's definition of "browsers" (plural) == Chromium.
Twitters yearly revenue is more than 2 billion. So 360 million wouldn't solve their problem.

Twitters problem isn't that they don't make money. They make a lot of money. Their problem is that their stock-valuation means that in the future their investors expect them to make ridiculous amounts of money, and they don't have any obvious way to get there.
That was actually mentioned in Nintendo Power volume 50, it's one of the most well-known and easy-to-perform video game glitches.

They also mentioned the Zelda 2 glitch where you could wrong-warp by jumping off the top of the screen and using the Fairy spell. You could get into a weird town that didn't exist, and if you left you were stuck in the middle of the ocean.
The number 2 music streaming servicd has a rather healthier balance sheet if I recall correctly.
Work as an independent contractor. You are not an employee and even if you create IP for your client, they do not own your off time. For example, if you had two clients, they would not own the others ip.

If they send you a blanket ip agreement as a contractor, modify it to only agree to the created ip during working hours.

Rules are:
Not on company equipment
Not on company time
Work on projects not related to your day job

Being employee status is trickier than a independent consultant though.
Depends what that $13M costs them. CAC and burn are critical factors in an acquisition.
There was a paid version of something like this called Digital Lifeboat. IIRC it ran on top of the BitTorrent protocol, and users would store some pieces of other users backups. It didn't really catch on and shutdown a few years ago.
WYSIWYG seems to work well for HTML/CSS if you're working in a specific, fixed domain.

Wix.com, for example, does a nice job with this. If you play around with it, though, you can see why it would be difficult to extend it for general purpose use on any type of website. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgkkiKdPibg for an idea of how it works.
The problem with that is Facebook doesn't always show you everything from everyone you follow.
Why Elasticsearch when Postgres has full-text search built in? It's one of my favorite Postgres features, I basically never have to bother with Elasticsearch/Solr/etc.
Screw the advertisers. Twitter is an information portal for ppl who don't do FB and other heavier such-like social media sites. I'd like to see Twitter commoditized in some 'nice' way.
Carmack uses Twitter a lot. But he uses Facebook for longer posts.
at what point do we all wake up from the momentary lapse of reason and admit that Twitter is not a good idea? it's not a good way to communicate (unless propaganda and vicious harrassment is what you're going for). it's not a good way to make money. it's not a good way to advertise. it's not good for anything really.
Is there a service that can aggregate posts from people in Google+, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, patreon, etc?
> I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.

Huh? On Android I have three accounts and at least that works fine (given various exceptions, but generally it's OK). Not sure about iPhone client.

> Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.

TweetDeck is a horrible mess for multiple accounts, from a UX perspective...
You're wrong about Idaho. Here's a PDF source[1] of the official driving manual. Check out Turning At a Red Light on page 35.

[1] http://itd.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/driver_manua...
Now I understand :)) you're a 12 year old, and what you do is awesome so keep up the good work, just don't expect wide adoption of your libraries yet :) So keep on hacking on! I guess you'll have a future in web development.

I wish there'd been all the technology and fast internet connections we have today when I was 12 years old, instead I was trying to learn Basic on an old C64 in isolation, cause none of my friends were interested in computers at all. Nowadays it's so much easier to get started coding and get connected with other people.
Hard to tell (on my mobile screen anyway), but this was written by John Perry, philosophy professor at Stanford [1]. I've been a huge fan of his ideas on this for ~20 years. He has a number of other light essays. His website appears down at the moment though.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_(philosopher)
I worked on some small pieces of things mentioned in the article, specifically around the maintenance and reliability of the underground network in Manhattan.

There is a mix of submersible transformers and those that can handle water but can't be submersed in the city. The former are usually placed in areas that are prone to flooding, they are much more expensive than a regular transformer since they are basically waterproof and have a number of extra features built into them so they require less maintenance.

In Manhattan proper, the worst enemies of the underground network are salt + water and the build up of gases. Salt and water + eletricity = corrosion which leads to burnouts. There has been a significant move to try and preemptively visit underground vaults and clear them of the salty water after a snow melt.

Most underground cabling is enclosed in an oil filled casing. Over time these wear and leak. Those gases can fill the underground transformer vaults and lead to explosions. These events are usually pretty well documented and again, ConEdison has been putting procedures and inspection routines that help prevent these.

What is amazing about the Manhattan and Brooklyn networks is how resilient they are simply by the simplicity of design. A transformer outage in a certain area can go almost completely unnoticed by citizens because of the control centers around the city and how they will reroute power. It's something that doesn't exist just about anywhere else and allows crews to isolate issues and perform maintenance when needed.
User-space networking with Snabb
Or we live in a game and 'avatars' are moderators. Perhaps some of the people in the game are PCs with no awareness of their being in the game and the rest are sentient NPCs.
An Intern at Vertica Optimized a bug and got a patent out of it
Crosswalk is dead, is there any alternative?
How to turn your photography passion into a profession
Platform API Issues
I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.
I think "doing more harm than good" came from a different post... I don't see anything wrong with comparing an open source and commercial product. We'd still be using IRC if Slack didn't come around.

Time is not free so in the end you have to compare the total cost and productivity and choose the best tool for yourself.
Golden Signals of application monitoring
What about Azure as well? I work for MSFT under the Azure umbrella so feel free to ask questions. I'm a no BS guy who was a long time AWS guy and know where Azure falls short and where it might be better.
thank you. I was astonished while reading this that there was no mention whatever of debt financing as an underlying cause for cost disease(s).

every single one of those cost growth curves is a close match for the early part of the exponential growth curves of compound interest on debt. well, it's exponential growth, we know what shape the later part of the curve has.
Calvin – a minimalistic ClojureScript build tool (no JVM requirement)
Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~deep concern~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable software is built in it. Engineering and testing practices are more important than bikeshedding the language itself.
I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time.

I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.

As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
It fooled me initially, until I saw the pricing. $299 a month for what the simplest of spreadsheets could track.
We're hiring at Momentum and use Vue: https://momentumdash.com/careers
Seconded. Premature design is worse than premature optimisation.

http://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt
Oh I care about the power of FB posting and indeed instagram. I think you're seriously underestimating the reach and popularity of those platforms.
There is no exclusively visual side of things for web design. Sure you do the initial design in Photoshop but once you need to add interactivity it's no longer purely visual. You've sliced it up and you can't put it back together.

Xcode works because even on mobile/desktop there is more separation between design and functionality than the web. The web is both more primitive and more flexible.
> The incentive to lower the cost should still be there.

the incentive is for the buyer. the seller has no incentive. seller's incentive is to raise the price as high as possible before it begins to curtail demand. if demand is held constant (or even stimulated to new growth) by supplying debt financing, then the seller will just keep raising costs.
This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment.

I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
"Not everyone can go to the right school, learn the right languages and get accepted to companies that pay $100k with perks."

Getting employed at these companies has nothing to do with "going to the right school and learning the right language".
Like Micro.Blog?

http://micro.blog/about
Broken pebbles offer clues to Paleolithic funeral rituals
Screenster support for timeouts is much more extensive. It automatically determines the time it takes for the server to process each user action, it uses the visual baseline to wait for the right state instead of timing out or waiting too long.

Obviously you can do everything with WebDriver, Screenster uses it too. The point is that you can get a lot of benefits out of the box when you are using a highler level platform like Screenster vs hand coding to a low level API like WebDriver.

There's some description of Screenster features here http://screenster.io/selenium-alternatives-for-testing-autom...
Please, what are "subs" and "$/sub"? I haven't heard of these. Thank you.
Regardless of how audited the code is, the DAO fiasco showed that the Ethereum miners will modify the "immutable" blockchain if it reaches an unpopular result, even when the bug is in a contract and not Ethereum itself.
updated the question
I've never seen a company in such an advantageous market position as Twitter, do so little with so many employees. They benefit from so much free advertising through self-promotion where people proudly display their twitter handle on TV or at the end of news stories and articles yet they're still unable to achieve any growth or noticeably improve their product.

From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.

Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.

I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
There's a great business opportunity hidden here. This kid (or anyone else) could set up a web site where people go to scan their own network for IoT vulnerabilities. Make it like the Qualys SSL testing service: let people test for free without installing anything, but charge for additional services like repairs, enterprise service, deeper inspection, etc. If there really are so many IoT vulnerabilities out there, this should be a slam-dunk business.
Yeah, I remember discovering the select glitch too.

One other thing, that wasn't a glitch but was a hidden feature, if you equipped the bow and arrow and bombs at the same time you could make arrows that exploded on impact. Oh and the thing where you could steal from the shop, I don't remember how I found out about that, probably from a friend showing me.
My point is that abstractness and imperativeness are orthogonal. For instance, Bash and C are both imperative in that they both structure programs as a sequence of commands. However; Bash operates at a much higher level of abstraction because each command "does more work" (by which I mean roughly translates to more machine instructions).

Prolog is both abstract and declarative. Prolog programs are structured as a set of propositions (i.e. declarations). The difference between Prolog and Bash is greater than the difference between Bash and C, because the nature of Prolog implies a fundamentally different way of designing programs.
What You Should Know About Numbers in ES6 JavaScript
or someone who comes from your front mau turn left?

so I guess you're right in the scenario that one direction has a green light with no green arrow and the opposite direction has a red light, but how often does that scenario exist?

If both directions have a green light, left-turners yield to right-turners because of traffic behind the right-turners and stop signs are always turn based.
I actually did, but I don't think it disagrees with what I am saying - that it is a normative concept. In other words, some other form of human organization doesn't have to suffer from the same problems.

Let me put it yet differently. If you fail to utilize economies of scale, nobody will profit. However, if "diseconomies of scale" do exist, then it's because someone profits from these. From the perspective of that person, it's not "diseconomy". I mean, you cannot use the Pareto-efficiency to say that everybody would be better off without "diseconomy", and so it cannot be a positivistic claim.

And a little aside - public organizations are often inefficient because there are private companies profiting from them.
That's why you have backups.

I agree that having full control over your identity has risks as well as benefits, though. I expect that we'll eventually see security providers arise that have user-friendly account recovery tools. Due to the plug-and-play architecture of blockchains, that sort of thing will work automatically without any need for organizations like Aragon to integrate with them.
Same way you don't drag and drop conversations. UX isn't a product; it's a byproduct of UI. Good UI necessarily produces good UX, not the other way around, no matter what professional "UX engineers" post to Medium.
> As a country, we want the world's greatest minds to reside here.

I'd say, rather, that as a country we (should) want the world's greatest minds to become American, not just reside here. I don't just mean in terms of legal citizenship, but rather in terms of mindset and culture. I don't think it's good for us to import smart people whose ideals are opposed to our own.
Has anyone explored the design space that Twitter is a member of? It seems like it's just a cut-down version of publish-subscribe with a couple of eponymous channels (write, read) per user (and then the complexities of message threading).

The invention of hashtags was an attempt to add adhoc pub-sub channel support (not, as they are seemingly sometimes assumed to be, a metadata/folksonomy thing or an opportunity for a pithy closing phrase.)

All this is easy to duplicate. Is any of it even patented by Twitter?
There's not an appliance per se but you can just install it to a virtual machine. I was running a 1 CPU, 256MB instance with a 100mbs line and noticed no issues - ESX running on Core i7-920
I agree. The experiment has very limited utility.
People have mentioned a few that already exist in this thread; I found another one called Avocode.

It seems like they do exist, and it's just that developers like myself are unaware of them.
Metropolitan Museum Gives Unrestricted Access to 375,000 Images
> Prior to, I think, 2.4

2.3 (which got Strongswan), but yeah.

2.4 isn't released yet.
Azure is lacking in very basic features: I'd run away from it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13501433

---

That being said, I think for the traditional use cases they're all pretty comparable. I'd go with what's easier to learn/use and what will get better adoption in your org.
Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.
Can't tell if you're serious or just have an aptitude at this.
The cost curriculum flailing can't be understated. Eg. of school textbook is ridiculous. Not just college level, all the k-12 texts have to be updated to match the very detailed curriculum requirements - and only textbook vendors track it, and then they put out new books. But it's now not only the books, because the curriculum changes, teachers need to develop new teaching plans and because it changes so often - they often need to buy workbooks or other materials to help keep up. Then there is the add-on electronic access (which is almost always some terrible 90's tech access gateway to quasi-pdfs, or some html+proprietary multimedia gateway). Meanwhile, kids are lugging around backpacks full of textbooks which are 2x the thickness they used to be (because the efficiency of production wasn't used to reduce costs - it was used to increase pagecount...).
> federal debt is like a blank check that nobody is personally accountable to repay.

that statement is applicable to rising costs in, e.g. federally (or state or municipality) funded infrastructure programs such as the subway construction project that was one of the examples in the article.

the individually assumed debts (student loans, home mortgages) are being paid back and there is accountability there. however, the individual accountability of those debts is not a way out of the cost disease. the fact that individuals are now willing and able to take on larger and larger debts to pay for these perceived essentials is exactly the reason why those things keep going up in price: the buyer's have more money to pay for them (even if it debt and not really wealth).
Why's it a bit dated? What can't you do with Rails and Ember?
In that case Rebol is already Greenspun-compliant ;-)

(print (multiply (add 1 2) 3))

... will print an answer of 9
Should pollinating drones take over for honeybees?
New York Times, Washington Post Get 50-60% of Site Traffic from Chinese Bots
Trailblazer: A high level architecture for Ruby
There's nothing I can't do with it. I'm just considering learning something new.
Doctors get special incentives to work in rural, nonprofit, NIH and other places... All of the big academic medical centers are nonprofits and they pay well.