skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh boy. So just because music is intangible it should be free?

I'm no musician, but I love music and the people who spend 100% of their time creating it.

Saying music should be free is like saying the work of a graphic designer, visual artist, or other artist should be free too.

It's easy to sit in front of your pc and spout off about music being free when you don't value the work of artists.
Their original plan might well have been to release a ‘iPhone 4S’ next, i.e. unchanged exterior design and a speed/storage bump. I don’t think they can do that now, they will have to change something about the antenna. Which means that everything just got quite a bit more complicated for them.
And most especially of having to keep connected all the time. Twitter is somewhat similar to web based IRC "in the cloud" but it also fills an important niche that IRC doesn't. IRC is an N to N broadcast medium with a finite number of channels. Twitter is an N to M broadcast medium with an effectively limitless number of channels.
Ask HN: What is the future of Twitter?
1) Profitable and growing to be everyone's social network?
2) Acquired by Google?
3) Something else?
From: http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.

We could try to draw a small excerpt of this 'periodic table':

LONG SHORT
ONE:ONE email im/sms
ONE:PUBLIC blogs twitter

Of course, the axes aren't exact. You can write arbitrarily short emails and blogposts, and lengthy IMs. Twitter is usually 'public' but only viewed by some set of friends/acquaintances/fans, and interactions range from chatty conversations to long lagged correspondences. Each box bleeds into the others with crossover communications.

But you get the idea; the signature modes of each big success are variations on a theme, nailing a new permutation. And it shouldn't be surprising that blogging pioneers happened upon the adjacent twitter opportunity at the right time.

You could build similar tables where an axis-of-contrast is EPHEMERAL/ARCHIVED, or BUSINESS/PLEASURE, or TEXT/AUDIOVISUAL, or REALTIME/TIME-LAGGED, or SIMPLE/POWERFUL, and see some of the same things appear in the quadrants, or other familiar services, or gaping holes -- where there may be Twitter-sized opportunity waiting.
Did I just play a Flash game created by David Lynch?
What's sad is that the longest comment thread in that post was about Java vs other languages. Not getting into analysis paralysis about technology is probably another lesson to insert into that post.
I'm currently playing with the XML stream from my currentcost meter [1]. Within a week I've reduced about 20% of my electricity use. I wish I could track my Gas usage with such ease.

[1] - http://www.currentcost.com/
I nearly didn't give the guy the upvote he deserves when I saw the comment sitting at 666 karma. Sad to be #667. :-(

I've heard LOIs discussed before, but primarily in the context of building & selling big-ticket systems. Do investors care at all about that kind of thing for smaller systems (say along the lines of GitHub/BaseCamp/Freckle/etc)?
Yes, but the core aspect is the same, no matter the incarnation or revision: People like chatting with other people. The marketers couldn't quite understand that.
Just read the comment you made re: RescueTime. I guess that's the MVP/dry testing tactic. I recently learned about it and am fascinated as well. Getting customers before writing code - a simple, yet brilliant idea that a lot of hackers aren't used to, myself included. The dry testing approach can even be applied to free consumer apps. "Launch" with mockups and screenshots and invite users to sign up for a beta test.

The biggest question I'm struggling with these days is how to even drive users to your barebones landing page in the first place. For pay-to-use consumer apps or B2B apps, you can often seek out direct leads or use advertisments. For general consumer apps, it's much harder to generate a buzz. How do you even get started on driving traffic to something like that?
Good point. Maybe jasonlbaptiste's next article would be a list BIG problems still waiting for good solutions. Here are a few I can think of:

- Email 2.0 (Wave was a good experiment but we need more)

- Online Dating (still broken)

- Online job search (could be improved a lot)

- Search 2.0: A Knowledge Engine that understands the question and finds you the answer.
"[T]he paper concludes that "current private browsing implementations provide privacy against some local and Web attackers, but can be defeated by determined attackers."

This doesn't live up to the earlier claim that "The private browsing options provided by the four major Web browser publishers aren't as anonymous and secure as most users might think." What most users think about porn mode is that they can surf for porn (or birthday gifts, for that matter) without their significant other (or children) finding traces the browser history. If that's the case, most users are getting what they want. (People who are worried about TOR are a whole different category.)
What I would ask about these "power law" situations: Do we have any idea what moves someone from bad cop to really bad cop or homeless to homeless-and-totally-down-and-out?

While only a small number reach the "really bad" level, it seems plausible that there's a larger population who could move into that level if the competition or bad examples or whatever other restraining factors were removed?

Sure, only a tiny minority is flagrantly offending at a given point but if one doesn't understand how this minority arises, one doesn't really understand the situation.
To me, single-player minecraft is "meh, neat" whereas multiplayer is one of the defining examples of emergent gameplay. Definitely worth giving the free version a shot.
I always thought it was a little bit because the founders had quite a bit of pull in the hacker/startup community. What if Joe Blow had started a better Twitter a week earlier? How would he have advertised it and got penetration?

I'm not detracting from their success in building a valuable site, but I bet a lot depended on their connections in getting it adopted.
Although this is true, I think it is missing the point. What was the problem text messages was trying to solve?

Responding to a phone call on a train during rush hour. Saying "I'm almost there", or "Ill be 5 minutes late" without getting dragged into a conversation in a crowded public space.
KarmaList wishlist?
Sure, I'll try to add RSS in the weekend. Thanks for your kind words !
One thing that no one has mentioned yet.

The API.

Twitter embedded their product and users in hundreds (thousands?) of other applications. Without this coverage I doubt it would have been so successful.

Edit: I do recognise that there is a chicken / egg situation here. But I still stick with point.
Wha…? I always assumed (and assumed that everyone else also assumed) that private browsing’s sole purpose is in me being able to hand my laptop to anyone I want without having to worry about my browser history. Nothing more.
I am registered :)
No. Sketch of counter-example in the binary case: Consider the irrational number 0.10110011100011110000... (proof of irrationality left to the reader). Each number shows up in equal proportions, but certainly you will never find the string '1010101'..
Why not? GB's empire seems like mostly the same thing, and it arguably [1] resulted in a reduction of poverty.

[1] I'm not making a claim of fact here, just saying that there's an intelligent debate about the issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact
Ask HN: How to get a list of all submissions on Hacker News?
Hi, does anyone know how I could get a list of all the submissions ever posted to Hacker News or how I would go about crawling ycombinator.com? I have some time on my hands and would like to expand my skills, and the HN archives seem like a good place to start.
Because I can @famousPerson and sometimes they will RT me or @meBack.

More philosophically, it is a low-commitment communication protocol. Everything is expected to be a quick, throwaway 140 char response. So celebrities are willing to read your tweets and tweet you back, but they might not be willing to email you or take your phone call.
I also once took the course on which this book is based at MIT. A programmer by trade at the time, I found out a bit more about my learning style. Namely, I was able to relatively easily complete the assignments without developing a very deep understanding of classical mechanics along the way. It was only later in physics graduate school, and after semesters of doing calculations by hand, that I was able to put my previous work in a larger context. I'd love to revisit the course with that new perspective and a bit more time than that haggered MIT student of yore. In summary I'd echo another poster's comment that "it's liberating to have unambiguous notation but it doesn't replace intuition".
If I tell you "play me [X song you've never heard of] within the next five seconds", what will you open?
Great idea, I would contribute (or try - I have no actual Drupal experience).

I'd love to see a sorted list of the top N followed people. I imagine pg would be #1, but it very well could be patio11. Seeing #3-10 would be very interesting.
True. The point is how easy is on the programmer.
That's excellent Pedro. My good friend Daniel is from Niteroi and his buddy Raph is a few hours north. He's computer friendly although pursuing a life in mathematics.

I think you good folks can convince him there's too much fun to be had in hacking on fun coding projects :D
That doesn't mean iTunes is a failure.

And I'd probably open Spotify for a song.
It's a near 100% chance to see peoples' genitalia or other parts if you play for a half hour.

Think chatroulette, but more surprising.
Grooveshark.

Also, there is a difference between on-demand playing a song that I have never heard of within 5 seconds and typical listening patterns (at least for me - YMMV).
What skills do you have?
Another problem is that statically typed languages can have long compile cycles.

That only applies if you compile all classes at once. Netbeans (and probably others as well) compile Java classes instantly because they only compile what's changed.

there didn't seem to be a way to reload new DLLs without restarting the development server.

I have seen environments for Java that could reload JAR-files. Perhaps DLLs are different, but that has little to do with a statically typed language.
Your description of those monopoly strategies reminds me of the resource curse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Or others. A lot of people seem to think of Java when they immediately think that static typed code has to be very verbose. Much of the verbosity of Java comes out of design decisions that were made by choice-Java does a lot to limit the programmer's power, for better or worse (Pretty much entirely worse when working with competent programmers)
An MBA is a strange, multipurpose animal. While it is a gateway into Wall Street firms, it is also a gateway into various consumer product companies, large conglomerates, management consulting companies, and many others.

Having an MBA has proven to be valuable for many people, and I have seen it open doors. As you point out, the school does matter, as companies typically target recruiting efforts to a few select schools, and getting in at these companies outside of the school recruiting channels is much more difficult. Whether an MBA is applicable to you depends on your goals. The goals of the YC community member are likely not aligned with what an MBA can offer.
But Will it Make You Happy?
Pending Changes in the World of Work According to Gartner
I don't agree. There will always be debate, as there will always be some historian out protecting British Imperialism but I think and honest examination does not show that GB improved the lot of their imperial subjects except in some very specific and limited circumstances.
Gotcha. It's been a while!
I don't know the details of what you are doing, but the other possibility you may consider is the use of a immutable-functional language, which can share immutable values without duplication but doesn't let you get into too much trouble. (Of course you're probably on top of things now, but when I need to write a new program like this I reach for the immutable-functional languages now unless I absolutely can't use them. Fortunately, Erlang is an option at work for me.)
(Stupid anecdote but since the linked article provided no data, only opinion, I have no bad feelings about telling it here:) I like iTunes because it lets me actually own music and build my collection. Sure, I will head over to YouTube if someone tells me about an awesome song but if that song really is awesome I will just buy it. Free music I cannot own and which would be reliably available would be awesome but I still would buy music from iTunes. It wouldn’t matter.
Unfortunately, InformationIsBeautiful.net basically exists to be an advertisement for the author's book, The Visual Miscellaneum. Which is a very pretty book--I own it--but not really full of informative infographics. There's some original content in the blog, but far too much of it is reposts of graphics from the book.

For a better (or at least more varied) selection of infographics I like:

* Chart Porn (http://chartporn.org/)

* Flowing Data (http://flowingdata.com/) which also covers datavis software

* Information Aesthetics (http://infosthetics.com/)

* We Love DataVis (http://datavis.tumblr.com/)

(edit: formatting)
Grooveshark.
I started to tweet in 2006 when it was being pitched almost entirely as a "way to text lots of people" service. I thought that was a stupid idea but saw a lot of value in leaving lots of small messages over time to a) share what I'm doing in a "quicker than blogging" way, b) to use as a sort of diary later on in life, keeping track of where my days were going, and c) to publicly share tidbits of info too minor to blog about (like my travel arrangements, etc).

It turned out to be a lot more than that, but that's the promise I saw in it back then. People who like to rant on about never seeing the point of Twitter aren't "wrong" IMHO but they're clearly not ardent public communicators and don't see the value in being such.
Wish I could upvote you more. I love scala (a lot more than python/ruby), but it means slow prototyping since you have to put good thought into the type system before you write a library. (If done correctly however, you won't need to put any thought into using said library).
minor scripting skills; I was hoping to find an open source crawler, or a way to download an entire website.
The Graphing Calculator Story - a developer who refused to leave
the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.
wait. It's still not clear to me that Twitter has succeeded as a business. Are they making money? It's not clear to me yet that they are.
Who can say but starting a fight with any entity is dicey proposition. They might have no cash or be adept of leaving in the dead of night. They might turn out to have more lawyers than you and your costs would be huge.
> When it comes to prototyping nothing beats Ruby or Python.

Have you ever tried Prolog? While it has a lot of quirks* , it's an excellent prototyping language. (It's also usually dynamically typed, though some implementations have type annotations.)

Instead of a usual function(arguments) -> result model, it treats everything like a search query, incrementally suggesting every possible variable instances that fit known rules. Since search, backtracking, and unification are built in, a lot of code becomes implicit, and you can prototype things quite rapidly.

* Briefly: I think it would be better as an embedded library (like, say, SQLite or Lua) rather than a standalone language. It's excellent for some things, but IO / side-effects are awkward in its model.
If those 50,793 purchases were mostly at the current price of 10 euros, that's pretty good revenue for a one-man operation that's still in alpha.
Ask HN: Would you use a cloud based IDE to develop and deploy websites?
I'm currently working on a cloud based IDE. The ultimate goal is to have a Coda like inspired editor in the cloud with everything from built-in source control to FTP support. What do you think? Would you use this?
Great idea. Do you mind asking this - How are you managing your email delivery ? Are you using any email delivery networks or managing yourself. Congratulations on the launch.
The problem with 'music I own' is that then you have to organize and manage it. I have many multiple gigabytes of music on my hard drives, but I rarely bother with that anymore when I can just click open Pandora and it plays music I like without me having to think about it.
I have no idea what this game is, but the numbers are impressive:

"In the last 24 hours, 3121 people registered, and 1298 people bought the game."

The price is about 13 USD, so that's roughly $17,000 in sales today, or $700 an hour...
Spotify’s got it right. A perfect interface with free streaming and a paid for mobile app that allows thousands of tracks to live on your handset as if you owned them.

Wrong. As if I owned something isn't good enough for many people. It's the same problem as streaming. If I stop paying you a monthly fee I don't own them anymore.

Spotify does allow you to buy DRM free downloads. But there's not a huge difference in price between that and any other service as far as I'm aware. Spotify hasn't really changed the long term situation. Music is still seen as more financially valuable by sellers than by buyers. While the difference in price between legal and free (illegitimately) is still perceived as too high, "piracy" will continue.

(And yes, the quote marks there are a mark of disdain for that term. If I were to call parking infringements "illegal land invasions" I'd be a laughing stock. If you can't make your case with emotive terminology, improve your case)
Thanks. I'm sorry the pictures seems to have been deleted. I don't have a mac, but will try to install Safari asap.

edit: It's back on twitpic! yay Ok ! Will have a look
I agree whole heartedly on the javascript plugin side.

On most of my projects in the last years, javascript seems to be the thing that gets bloated the fastest.

When you need something you can always find a 3rd party jquery plugin that does what you need and it's great. Then you need something else, and something else and before you know it you've included 5-6 different jquery plugins, with their corresponding css files and other dependencies.

And you tie the whole thing together with your own set of jquery code and you've got a big mess.

I still haven't found the solution to this, since most of the jquery plugins I use are of greater quality than I can produce (most of the time) or take at least much more time than I personally have.
Thanks !! I'm using a gmail account for now.
Thanks, it's in my todo list :) Will keep you updated !
CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead
Colour changing lipstick?
Frankly I never understood why people actually buy music in first place and not just listen on Youtube????
First you pay 20$ per month for the expensive 3G service and then waste a dollar per song WTF?

I wouldn't be surprised if these are the same people who took million $ mortgages and 100k$ + debt for a degree in communications and marketing.

No doubt these people require advice from people such as ramit sethi et.al.

Note: I am an FOB Indian who studies CS at a very good school, so maybe I overestimating intelligence of average Americans.
I don't know. What does that have to do with the question at hand? My telling you "Play me 'Arms So Real' off the NMH 'Shannon House Tapes' within the next five seconds" isn't the music business. The music business in "Mine" by Taylor Swift.
If you host your systems on a VPS service like linode or slicehost then you have the backup of a web based console in case you screw up royally and have a HD crash on the one machine your SSH key was on (for example).
Smart Money
> I would argue that the amazingly widespread use of Ruby and Python and the average quality of projects written in those languages is evidence to the contrary.

Projects where people are able to choose the language will probably be of higher quality than projects where they're stuck using Java, C#, etc.

To some extent, this is probably independent of the languages themselves - there are a lot of terrible Java programmers because it's a default language, rather than one sought out by curious and motivated programmers.
I haven't downloaded a single song in last 3 years!
and haven't bought one since last 10+ years (I am 22 years old. Why buy when you can listen for free on you tube!

I have spent that money wisely on lot of book and good food which is actually needed rather than mindless itunes spending.
Youtube, wait I will just search on google and I am sure i will get correct on 99.999999999% of times [even obscure songs in marathi] with first result being youtube.
Sigh... I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell & back for saying this on HN, but...

I own a Zune, and I like it.

Egads, I know, right!? The thing is: for $15/mo I can legally download almost as much as I want to multiple Zunes (one for myself, one for my wife) and we get $10/mo in credits to buy songs we are otherwise renting. Sure, everything is still locked down with draconian DRM (which is rather easily circumvented) but for my use cases of just being able to pop a few songs over onto one of our portables, or play songs from multiple computers (up to 5), or stream songs from my XBox - well, I just don't care about the DRM that much.

My wife & I both have iPhones and would gladly switch back to iTunes, if only Apple would offer a subscription service (cold day in hell and all that, I know).
"The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers: the United States, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Japan, Germany, and France.* Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese." http://www.slate.com/id/2151852
I buy about three to five albums per month. Organizing that is no big deal. I just name it consistently (I have my own capitalization rules ;) after it finished downloading. That’s what, maybe two minutes per album? Doesn’t seem like work.
Twitter has 170 employees. Assuming fully loaded cost of 150 k that is approximate $ 30 mill pee annum

The google and bing deals are worth 50mill leaving 20mill to cover other costs like iron and bandwidth.
My sense is clearly profitable.
A
http://mashable.com/2009/12/21/twitter-is-already-profitable...

According to Bloomberg, the microblogging service will make a small profit this year off of $25 million in revenue, thanks to the search deals it completed with Google and Microsoft, which were reportedly worth $15 and $10 million, respectively. Those deals pay Twitter for access to tweets that are in turn included in real-time search results on each property.
Python Arduino Serial Port Text Communication (Send:PDE; Receive:PySerial)