skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter articles are popular here, as in other social news sites and blogs, because of selection bias. Who likes twitter? People who always have something to write. Who posts stuff on the web? People who always have something to write. It's the same reason most of the people who apply for a job are idiots, because they just have to do it over and over.

Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A small circle of people dominate the crowd's attention, largely by talking voluminously among themselves. You might be able to learn something new, but you'll have to filter out a lot of noise. And you're probably better served by finding a person or two and having an actual conversation, or writing an essay, or actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.
I met the guy in the article at SXSW, and he is starting a co-working company, which is essentially a group of people who split the cost of a working space. This is nothing like YCombinator. They aren't giving seed money, etc.

This is more like what IndyHall does in Philly:

http://www.indyhall.org/

His second goal is to network together the various startups around Austin. Austin is always mentioned as a "startup hub", but living here it doesn't really feel that way. Maybe that can change. We tend to take more pride in our live music scene, which is great :).

I think Austin is awesome and there are very smart and creative folks here, but there aren't gigantic conferences every other weekend or a huge concentration of VC's. I do see plenty of folks in coffee shops with TextMate, vi, or Photoshop open. They are usually working on something cool, it's just not hyped up on TechCrunch and such.
There are many things that make Twitter special, but the main ones for me are:

1) The asynchronous nature of Twitter networks models real life quite well - you might be interested in everything a person has to say, but they don't even know/care about you. This works with Twitter, because following is a one-way concept.

2) This makes it hard to get spammers onto Twitter, because the only way for spammers to get their posts listened to is by having people follow them. Also, services like the Twitter Black list exist to help people sort the wheat from the chaff.

3) The best "feature" of Twitter is its tabula rasa attitude to what you post - as long as it fits in 140 characters, Twitter doesn't care. This has allowed people to build fun minigames (@lyricbot), query/response info bots (@weatherbot), and plug Twitter into their external apps (Remember the Milk, Buxfer, etc). This sets Twitter apart from something like Pownce, which had a similar idea (complete with the asynchronous fan/friend model). The difference (IMO) was that Pownce tried to impose some sort of order on its users, which limited the way it could be used.
Performance Research: What the 80/20 rule tells us about reducing http requests
Are people upvoting because they are avid users of twitter?

Yes, sometimes.

Or because the stories of scaling have potential lessons?

Yes.

Let me add a few observations of my own:

Are people upvoting because Twitter is a genuinely new and popular service, and hence very fashionable at this moment? Yes.

Are people upvoting because Twitter's design has just been sitting there, right in front of our faces, for years, and yet we plugged away on email and IM and static HTML sites and blogs and Facebook and never even thought of trying something like this, so we're fascinated to discover it in the same way that biologists were fascinated to discover the platypus? Yes.

Are people upvoting because they're still trying to understand what Twitter is, and how to build something like it themselves, but they're confused because it isn't really email, or IM, or a microblog, or Facebook? Yes.

Do half the folks on news.yc look at Twitter and see something that they simultaneously crave (a startup with a viral app) and fear (a startup with a viral app that is pissing off its customers) and envy (because the customers moan, and they complain, but they don't abandon Twitter for the alternatives, at least not yet)? So, try as they might, the entrepreneurs can't possibly look away?

Yes.
> Then what would you do when you got to version 11?

0.XI?
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see the domains listed anywhere.
All this talk of following one's dreams is really making me want to finish The Alchemist, which I started last night.
SemTech Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls
actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.

Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is very very short by necessity.

Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent -- we should all stop writing paragraphs and concentrate all our energy on writing decent titles and headlines. Well, Twitter is a machine for forcing people to write good headlines and nothing else. As a result, I find it wastes far less of the reader's time than any other web technology to date.
Fasting may fend off jet lag
Well I at least assumed you were being ironic, regarding the word 'cunt' and the gist of the original article.

Sadly the irony was probably too dry, and resulted in getting modded into oblivion, which is why I said it went wrong.
Directly under the first graph it says "Download the complete spreadsheet here:". I can see how if you were skimming that would be confusing.
ComScore Releases April 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings
Large companies paying workers to read employee e-mail
It's quite popular among some hacker circles. It's generally a useful service.

I'd say the majority of people aren't devoted fanatically to it like the fame-on-a-budget blogger2.0 crowd is. People like Arrington are so frantic about Twitter because it's become of their better platforms for building a user base. When it goes down, their business actually suffers, crazy as that seems.

For me, it's just a sidechannel to organize meetings (like at a conference) or a place to find/report interesting papers/posts/manuals/libraries. I think the majority of twitter users are like me in this regard: we aren't defining a metric of success by how many Twitter followers we have. In this capacity I find it acceptable, and the downtime is only a minor nuisance that I often don't notice because I just don't tweet that often.
FF3, which I have been using for a while, has been great so far. So, even though this is later than expected, I'd still like to thank the Firefox team for making a web browser I like. Good luck on 3.1!
I don't count all these people not getting it as it having gone wrong. It amused me. And, hey, you noticed too. And I like x1nt's reply.

I suppose no one noticed that the "get a life" and "go die" contradiction was intentional also. Except, again, I did, so it worked out OK.

edit: oh and i lost over 60 karma in one thread. is that a record? it's certainly my record.
> You're talking entirely about a different computer and a different time

I know, just as it'll change again in the next 3 years.

> A new Macbook Pro (such as one he might buy) comes with...

Most of these things come with a standard MacBook, too, so why not buy a MacBook?

Some of the things that MacBook doesn't have that the MBP does:

> $1599 with Student Developer discount

Actually, it's $1799, but that doesn't factor in taxes, which bring it to about retail, or $2000, and that's without any configuration options (the one I bought, spec'ed out again, is still $3000).

(By the way, If you're looking to buy a Mac, look at the Amazon discount over Apple's store: with free shipping and no taxes, it's almost always cheaper.)

> LED Glossy options versus fluorescent matte

True.

> All of this means that his computer might last for more years than before, since the hardware is already top of the line compared not just to mac machines released a year prior, but to high end pc laptops, as well

I guess it's whether or not you're willing to make that bet or not.

> which means he might as well get the MacBook Pro.

Or, he could save a lot of money, get an equivalent machine for his needs, and buy a new one every year and still not spend as much.
The article author is learning to program. Not learn to program in something, learning to program. I doubt it would be a good idea to tell us that, since it would be, in effect, limiting options for exploration. (Well, or just giving us false data, which wouldn't be as bad.)
Is this a vote-bait title? Come on.
There is no right to free speech in forums. The forum or a service like twitter are some one else's property. While you have the right to say what you want in public, I don't have to let you stand on MY front lawn if you want to spout hate speech. But if you stand in the street there is nothing I can do about it. Same thing here, Twitter is under no obligation to allow you to say what you want, they own the sand box and they set the rules. Apparently they just don't the gumption to enforce them.
I haven't tried the Trait's gui, but I highly recommend the rest of the library. It lets you do all sorts of OOP tricks; validation of assignments, delegation, etc. Very much worth checking out.
1- The name sounds cool to people.
2- Evan Williams.
3- Technology problems with an unproven but popular Web 2.0-ish (2nd Wave, if you prefer) add drama.
4- It has a clever, if undeveloped, idea.
I agree. A very respectful way of saying "stfu, we know what we're doing". I'm glad the devs came out with this in the fashion that they did.
This task does seem to have Erlang written all over it, but of course we're not intimately familiar with all the details.

The mindset for selecting tools to build apps which need to scale seems be similar to the one we all had back in early dos days, when the company programmers were having to write all the internal software. We were either unaware of better solutions or we simply felt compelled to write all the stuff ourselves, from spreadsheets to a GL module. Now, with all the customizable apps around, why would anyone want to write a custom GL module?

By extension, why try to reinvent solutions for scaling problems when Erlang already does a bunch of the work for you?
Poor twitter. They can't get a break. I'm surprised that most commenters on the various sites seem to automatically assume that harassment did occur and the offending user should be banned. The complaint was lodged by Pownce's community manager and in no blog post were any of the offending "Tweets" reposted, so everything seemed a bit fishy to me. I assumed I could just go view her timeline to judge for myself, but when I tried to do that, twitter broke.

I hope that chronically broken sites populated by censorship proponents aren't really the future of the internet. It makes me think sites like YTMND are actually performing a noble service to humanity.
Kinda related and a bit more pithy is John Lennon's one from Beautiful Boy: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
A History of Macro Systems
Why blog? You can launch an entire media empire by calling celebrities fat.
You should really use ssh with that. Not much more complex:

rsync -azP local_dir -e ssh user@host.com:remote_dir
I've had a T60 for about 16 months now. What exactly do you like about the keyboard? I've found that the keys have a tendency for things to get stuck in their movement, and the ] key had even fallen off of my keyboard. Then the whole keyboard stopped working, so they sent me a new one. I've also gotten a new power adapter (insufficient strain relief).

I personally like going with the three year warranty (but in a bundle rather than explicitly adding it on). I previously had a T22 that I ran into the ground, and over the course of its life had the motherboard, drive, and power cord replaced.
There is a lot of noise around the subject, but if you boil it down I don't think it's much of mystery: Twitter represents an important new way to communicate. People like communicating. Some people also like tech/startups, so for them it's double the fun.
Umm. It's twitter's decision. Twitter decided. This person -- who has a problem with free expression -- thinks twitter decided wrong. And then misleads about what happened -- e.g., saying twitter won't enforce ToS when actually they just don't want free speech banned on their site.
>> LED Glossy options versus fluorescent matte

>True.

False. The matte screen is LED and its unclear from the specs whether the glossy is LED or fluorescent.

From apple.com:
"15.4-inch (diagonal) antiglare widescreen TFT LED backlit display with support for millions of colors; optional glossy widescreen display"
You don't need anything fancy, save as much as you can, and buy additional ram (possibly from a 3rd party site for much cheaper rates).

I have 2 gigs and frequently go to the limit with the number of apps I have open. Slowdowns due to lack of ram can really kill your flow.

I have a regular macbook, mainly because of OS X, which gives me unix tools with an OS that just works. Apple's hardware is ok, not great. I've had issues with 3 out of 3 notebooks. That said, the issues have become smaller (so Apple's QC seems to have improved).

If I could run OS X on cheaper hardware, I would do it in an instance. I don't need to show off at the coffee shop. :)
The money I make off referrals is insignificant. What I do is take it as gift certificates, which I spend on books and music.

I'm grateful for those, in a way that's a lot better than cash. If it were cash, I might be tempted to ask whether writing really pays. The answer is definitely it does not pay compared to just about anything. I could make more money doing menial labour building Koi ponds and have lots of fun.

However, the buzz of getting a book or CD is way higher than the equivalent cash value. It's very irrational: If I take two hours to write a post, and I earned $14.00 from it, I would be devastated to earn $7 an hour.

But if I get a copy of The Goldberg Variations that I'd never heard before from that article, and I get hours of enjoyment from it... It feels like a terrific bargain to work for two hours and then enjoy a wonderful piece of music.

(I am not getting into the other rewards of writing. I am strictly responding to the question about referrals.)
YTMND, as much of a depressing window into humanity, also has some good artistic content.

Look at http://ytmnd.com/users/Click/sites.

Also, YTMND is as "indy" and "legitimate" as a website can be: just some kid who got lucky making something people liked. This is much unlike the SF echo chamber.
Despite some of its unpythonic style, I like wxPython, because it uses native widgets everywhere. This is a huge advantage over every other toolkit, in my opinion.

Right now I'm experimenting with on an alternative to wxPython called wxpy using a forked version of the SIP bindings generator, instead of SWIG, to see if I can eek out more performance and bring down the memory usage:

http://github.com/kevinw/wxpy/wikis
The best Unix machine you can get (things just work, no driver issues) is a MacBook Pro. It also allows you to develop for iPhone, and for Windows if you use Parallels or VMware. If cost (comparing with crappy Dells that come with Vista, egads) is an issue, I invite you to check your wallet for this amazing device called a credit card. It's worked wonders for me.
They haven't updated this site in a while!
Ah, thanks. Well then I guess I can't give that one to him.
I bought the lowest model Macbook (not pro) for ~1000 bucks and then bought 4G of ram at Fry's for $60. Its worked great for a year now. Most of my friends have pro's but mine has worked just as good for me. I like the smaller size as well.

Another great thing about the macbooks is their high resale value. Factor that into the cost.
Almost every analysis I read, including this one, points to Rails as the major bottleneck but then can't say anything concrete to justify it. This article says that Rails is no good for processing intensive tasks and that you should use C. Rails is a framework for serving web pages, it isn't doing any of the processing or message queueing. I'm sure that Rails won't work out of the box with whatever backend you would need for a stable twitter, but I haven't heard anyone address the actual technical issues. Is it just a matter of having to tweak Rails or is there a reason that Rails is the wrong architecture?

I agree, I see a lot of confusion about this. Some just seem to blame it on the language, others on the framework, many can't seem to tell the difference (FTA: "Rails would do itself no harm by conceding that it isn’t a platform that can compete with Java or C when it comes to intensive tasks.")

It doesn't make any kind of sense to blame the language. Within reasonable limits, the speed of the language is only relevant if you're trying to run everything off one box. If you're running more than one server, a slower language just means more servers. I can't think of any exception to this.

What about blaming the framework? I wouldn't expect it to scale out of the box, fair enough. But are there any frameworks out there which can scale perfectly, out of the box, without any a priori knowledge of what the system actually does or needs? If there is a specific crippling flaw in Rails which makes it unable to scale, it should be possible to pinpoint it.

In the meanwhile, very little is said about the architecture and the database. Is there really any problem Twitter needs to solve that is more difficult than those solved by Facebook (friend newsfeeds) or by any chat system (online status updates)?
Hype.

Twitter, by definition, appeals most to the people who are somewhat extrovert, like to talk/write a lot about themselves (see Michael Arrington complaining recently that Twitter's downtime denied him from broadcasting, live, his food poisoning. I Am Not Making This Up)

Therefore, these people tend to talk a lot about what they are doing - and thus talk about Twitter, which makes Twitter more well known in our circles than much bigger websites.

A classic example is Apple's products, in the pre iPod/OS X days. They had a tiny market share, but a very high mindshare. The reason, in my opinion, was that Apple's user base consisted of many creatives - designers, writers, musicians etc. If Apple computers' users were mostly biologists, civil engineers and plumbers, you wouldn't hear about it nearly as much - even if they had the same market share and the same customer loyalty.

Hype seems to be much cheaper now, though. Many Apple products truly had groundbreaking engineering and design. Many Apple users were well known because they were talented and creative. Compare this to to Twitter's technical "challenges" (I mean, seriously - it's very minimal in UI/functionality side, as it should be. They got plenty of money and can attract top talent. If not scaling, what have they been doing for the past year?), and its most well known users...
I found Capistrano a little too Rails-centric. I've had a lot of luck with a Python equivalent, Fabric. It works well with the Boto Amazon AWS library to manage EC2 instances. Capistrano has limited AWS support but it seemed immature at the time I tested it.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Fabric/

http://code.google.com/p/boto/
Sorry, but why not go right to the good stuff?

You'll find a great list in Harold Bloom's "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds".

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446691291/
Why not just do it yourself via Greasemonkey?

The bitching about xkcd is getting annoying (as is the constant speculation about "Is this the moment when HN is going to jump the shark?)
They did call out one of the many "why is it so hard to scale twitter" posts as being "one of their favorites":

http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi...
There's also fooproject.com (e.g. jingproject.com)
I use Fabric - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Fabric/ - with a series of build scripts. I can create and update several different types of EC2 servers (database, app, etc) with a single commands.

The update command does something like this:

* Check out all pertinent application files from the repository.

* Add any production specific files, for example build number or database setups

* Combine, compress, and number all Javascript and CSS files (combined.384.css can be cached forever, on update it becomes combined.385.css)

* Tar and gzip the production files

* Find all EC2 servers that need to be updated

* Upload the gzipped files

* Stop apache

* Remove old files on the server(s)

* Unzip the new files

* Start apache
We get pretty good traffic at bug.gd. But hard to tell if it would be higher without the odd suffix. It helps that we encourage them to use our Firefox extension and/or bookmark the site when they visit (since people are rarely searching for errors when they hear about us).
"Any 6 bars may not contain a free bar"

You're probably right, and I hope that you are. Still, funny to note that Mars has even put this disclaimer on the bottom of their promo site!

http://www.marsfreebars.com.au/
Probably never will? The average user may never use a Twitter like platform for banal updates or short, passionate discussion. However, simply sending mass messages to groups is powerful. For example, Pownce's calendar feature is very helpful for sending open invitation with a cal sync to large groups.
Is liveblogging something that people outside the Web2.0 group pay attention to? I think I'd rather see video and a transcript and fuller comments afterwards.
If you read TechCrunch for technical insight (or any kind of insight, for that matter) you're part of the problem! :)
Been using SCP... it's a great tool for copying files between machines... but it's a shitty tool for prod deployment... capistrano ftw!
Two ways to look at Twitter:

1) Twitter is like any other social network-- its value to you is dependent on which of your friends is on it. For most of us who have lots of friends that aren't 100% plugged-in to the hottest web trends, this severely limits twitter's value. However, the technorati get a lot of value from Twitter in that it's an elite social network (aka mutual backrubbing), and a way of getting to each other's inboxes (via @ and d messages). The electronic equivalent of TED and Davos.

2) Twitter is basically a blog platform in disguise-- where the hordes of wannabes who follow calcanis and ev and scoble really what they're doing is a fancy equivalent of subscribing to their rss feed leaving comments on their blog entries, with the added social bonus of making it seem like you're with the 'in' crowd since you're on twitter leaving @messages for loiclemeur like the big boys do (see 1 above).
Why open source? As a pro developer, the time saved (and time is often much more costly than a License) on a proprietary CMS may best serve myself and the client.

You should not limit your available tools. And of course, different tools work better for different jobs.

For most things, I prefer ExpressionEngine.
FriendFeed Blog: Get a room!
The upvotes on my comment indicate that there was some value, perhaps on par with the entertainment provided by the article. The upmods for comments serve as feedback to the article submitter helping them to adjust their future submissions.
Those are the new early adopters. Services that appeal to the blogerati and their particular quirks get endless free publicity.

Services aimed at everybody have a much higher hurdle to getting that kind of publicity, and forget entirely about services aimed at web novices. Those have to go after print publicity (oh the horror!)
Is grid relevant? Modern grid computing and today's enterprise
Do you think it would be a "good" thing if the average intelligence level was bolstered by 40 points? Can you think of any ill side effects from this possibility?
See http://friendfeed.com/rooms/friendfeed-news for all the latest news.

If you create a similar room for your startup, please post it here.