skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It failed because it was completely invisible.

Facebook spams your inbox. They make sure you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc).

With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out now. What kind of a communication tool is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring.

The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had actually notified users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.

Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.
There's an option on every blip in every wave that says "Delete This".

You can even delete other people's blips!

People can only see your mistakes if they're in the wave and looking while you type (ie, "Chat Mode"). If it's used like email (that is, checking it a few times per day), they see only the snapshots of what happened when the "Done" button was pressed.

You can add pictures. You can embed YouTube videos. You can have links.

Honestly, yeah, it takes some getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's no more complicated than Outlook. Personally, I think using Outlook to set up a meeting notice is harder than using Wave.
You're right on the money, the game takes place on the local network- the only reason the internet is required is so you can log in to bnet.
This really makes me sad. I work in media, and I have found that the collaborative aspects of Wave really made that process easier. I scored an entire film earlier this year, and the producers and I only used Wave as our collaboration space. It was beautiful. Keeping track of various versions of each cue was easily 10x easier than my usual mode (email/FTP/Skype/Phone/etc).

We started off with a collaborative list of every cue needed during the first run through, and then let that list grow bigger and bigger with inline replys. Wave's built-in media features meant that I could paste mp3's into the space and let the filmmakers hear my work immediately, and then download the file to put into the project. This meant that when it came time to FTP the big, uncompressed files, it was only the finals, which made things a lot easier.

Likewise, collaborating with temp music was a breeze-- the filmmakers even scored a few sections of the film with temp music and then put the video right into the conversation. (No more folders full of giant quicktime files with different scores).

I know that I'm going to miss that experience. Oh well. Perhaps someone will take the open-source'd code from Google and build a better product.

I'm not holding my breath.
It was time. That´s true that "You can't make people solve problems they don't have". But the idea was excellent,maybe later can work.
Bob Cringley
Krugman says that we're in a depression and that the one economic climate where you should run a temporary deficit is in severe recession or depression.

Now, you can say that after 8 years of castigating Bush for deficits, he's all of a sudden ok with them under Obama. And you'd be right.

But it's also true that Bush took inherited a surplus and doubled the national debt in a "boom" economy, while Obama inherited an already-massive deficit while in the most severe economic crisis we've seen in decades.
One of the reasons for that is that civil service selects for people who are ultra conservative and sensitive about job security, and therefore are unlikely to allow a failed project to actually fail.
We use it exclusively for our meeting status reports, etc.

It's just a wicked solid tool for meetings and out-of-band document collaboration. I'd love to see it continue. I'm sad it didn't get the adoption they wanted, but I also wonder what they expected when they didn't even really try to integrate it with GMail.

If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have better success for it.
The problem with useradoption of wave largely came from their invite-only strategy. It's a social tool that requires my friends to have an account for it to be of any use. If they don't have invites and can't join it's useless.

It's amazing that Google didn't see this.
To me, the big problem was indeed the lack of a product. I have tried Google Wave and I don't know what "product" they're talking about. It seemed to be an interesting technological experiment but I wouldn't be able to tell you what it's for, what problem it solves, or anything besides the fact that technologically, it was interesting.

In fact, I'm kind of surprised that they're killing it, because it felt like a first step with the technology part, with an upcoming second step where they would use said technology. I'm surprised that that was it. I would have expected Google to have plans beyond what Wave is today.
Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders?
That sucks, we left basecamp/campfire for Google Wave and it was a really good fit for us (collaborative work with a distributed team).
I am an ardent supporter and promoter of freedom, civil liberty. I've found that most computer geeks are, way out of proportion to the population at large.
Are there any non-religious anti-gay-marriage arguments?
Single founder startup StatSheet raises $1.3M
They should really reprint this shirt, in light of this announcement, for hipsters to wear.

http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts...
The dirt is definately more noticable -- I am just depressed at how dirty things are in those pictures. Of course, it isn't really any cleaner in rural/industrial settings today...
It seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that campaign donations from millimeter wave vendors will exert anything resembling the force that game theory does; to wit, "voting yes to anything that might improve airport security, and avoiding at all costs voting no on something that might later be tied to some catastrophe".
All of these issues could be fixed with better process, better people (that grumbling about 12% extra load sounds like bullshit, its not like they are serving the page themselves) and better alignment of the dev/ops team.

These problems are not intractable. What you've described is a giant management failure.
Release something ASAP and things will fallow. Or not. Less thinking about it, more time spent working on that first release. User response(or lack of it) will determine next steps.
If you want to, I'd love to move this to email, as I would love to get to the bottom of it, and you've already pointed out gaps in my understanding of the problem.

I can't find any language that expressly prohibits hiring lobbyists to make donations, and I'm not sure how enforceable such a law would be. Are you referring to chapter 2, section 6, "General Treasury Funds"?
Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did.

So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers.

I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.
> When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it.

Slow? I can only assume people who said this weren't using the latest FF or Chrome. I've never considered Wave slow at all.
I haven't found many. A vast majority are "natural law" arguments, which I think are exceedingly weak.

A better approach (from a conservative/libertarian side) is to just ask the question why government is defining marriage in the first place.
Most of it is ad spend, essentially insulating the company from challengers by creating an artificial barrier to entry. It's now nearly impossible to compete in the space unless you're very well funded or cater to a niche.
My mom may have meant ASA rating instead of shutter speed. Actually, both, right? If you have slow ASA film, you'd need to keep the shutter open longer to expose it, right?
I think it was grievously hurt by google's slow-start "invite" thing.

It was a catch-22. You needed people to collaborate with for it to catch on, but you needed to wait a long time to invite people.
That is dead-on the reason I stopped using it.

Woot! I got an invite.

Dang, none of my friends did.

Well... when can I get them one.

Forget about this. Meh. Back to email, IM, IRC and Twitter.
Solving protein folding by playing a computer game
Excellent. Wave was made using obsolete technology and some wrong choices made it in regarding push vs. pull, distribution, modularity, "social mediafication" and encryption among other things.

There were some good things about it, and Hopefully we will now see some real contenders rise up to tackle the Future of Communication(tm).

Preferrably not from Google. Sorry.
When the kernel calls poll, poll will access memory in the kernel address space because that's where it is running. All the addresses accessed in any system call are in the kernel address space. They don't go back and forth and swap vm pointers to fetch data from other processes. That's not how kernels work.
And no you cannot change poll().. You write epoll/kqueue
That may be a good thing though. If your product/service is so good that people use it despite not having a super pretty surface/UI, you can still get traction, still make money, and perhaps later give it a reskin. There are some startups which take off and become successful without doing any advertising or significant self-promotion -- they succeed through word of mouth because their product/service is just that good that people talk about it.
That feature was so confusing I had to explain to my computer-literate-but-confused-by-Wave friends.

Hard to edit your preferences, hard to get other people into it, hard to get reminders set up. If they could relaunch and make all those things better, Wave would be stellar. I almost wish they'd break backwards compatibility for people who loved the interface because it just went in the wrong direction.
Did they launch with these features? I distinctly recall thinking "how do I know who's on this thing?" and repeatedly going back to the site in hope that someone else I knew finally used the site and sent me a message.

The technology might be great but the launch and execution were really, really weird.
no it didn't. The people lost.
I used Google wave for feature/ticket tracking. The only thing I could fault it for was the wacky interface which didn't always work correctly. It was nice to have a hosted, free ticket tracking app that did just enough to get by for that purpose (for personal use I don't need anything as complicated as Redmine, Trak, or Bugzilla; don't have much desire to host my own app; and I'm too cheap to pay someone to host something I could do myself).

Now I'll have to move all of that state somewhere else.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html
I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the only provider.
I think you wanted to say "complement".
Hacker News doesn't exactly make millions (at least not directly, and not in the short term).
Everything that distracts from Google Me is obviously being shut down.
Amazon has one of the most cluttered web UI's I've seen and yet they succeed because they deliver something real that people want: you can buy stuff there and they mail it to you, and the web functionality at least allows you to do that. Ugly and busy as heck UI though.
Whoa. Larry Ellison is on this list. I honestly did not expect that whatsoever.
Thank you. I love these.
Does anyone else here think that Etherpad could have been more successful than Google Wave?
Fuck that. the people have no right to vote on individual freedoms
If Wave was launched with the Gmail integration of Buzz I think we would be discussing a completely different outcome.
That's a shame. I'd have used it if other friends and colleagues adopted it, it was pretty good at what it did. I think the issue was that it didn't solve any big enough problems for people to encourage them to get on.
None with much plausibility. There are a lot of secular anti-gay-marriage arguments put forth by religious people, but they are, without fail, far less rational than the religious arguments.
It had an invite system like Gmail, millions of users were in before it was "public". I signed up in November 2009 (and last logged in then too).
Yes, you're right, but "albeit" is the word you're looking for, not "all be it".
Anyone seeing 500 errors - S3 has all but died in the last few minutes. We are working with them to get things back up and running.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

http://status.aws.amazon.com/
Why not? Not to sound mean, but there are plenty of places online where people could discuss this news; why does HN have to be one of them? Does this community have unique insights into Californian law or gay rights that other communities don't? Does this same news item really need to appear on every online social news site, everywhere, no matter the focus?

I guess it's possible that there are people who only read HN, and don't have any other news source whatsoever, and that those people would otherwise miss out on this bit of news—but then, I think those people have chosen to filter out other news sources for a reason :)

Edit: I'm just asking for a justification here—if it explicitly isn't Hacker News, what made you want to post it?
I wonder if part of the reason for the differing conclusions is differing expectations for Mongrel2? you seem very focused on 'expected real-life scenarios for existing websites', but I do have the feeling that Zed is anticipating/hoping/expecting that Mongrel2 will have a broader set of uses and be used in other ways in addition to the standard webserver.

I can't speak for him of course, and I may have misunderstood some of the details of these posts[1], but it seems like jacquesm is saying that the cases in which poll beats epoll turn out to not actually be high-scale use cases in any interesting sense (and his arguments seem compelling to me). In which case it does seem safe to not bother optimizing them.

I certainly wouldn't discourage Zed from trying though. Who knows what might come of it?

[1] I write a lot of Twisted code that uses epoll - I wrote the justin.tv chat server for example, which has scaled to half a million concurrents, and I believe I get the basic concepts of epoll/poll/kqueue, but I've never actually tinkered with the details.
Like the Bucaneers did with their debut season, no one scores with a golden football.

I like the framing of the problem. For SMBs, their path to happiness is determined as either an economics or a marketing problem. And frankly, most business owners just aren't that savvy and they don't know what they want but desperation, and no layers of bureaucracy, lets them try crazy things.

Your product or service is valued accordingly, if it's not garnering as much demand then change the pricing. That's economics.

If you want more people to buy your products at your price then you spend more money research capture that top happiness triangle. That's a marketing problem.

Companies will pitch to SMBs and conflate the two problems. Their ad copy and sales team will tell you all the tantalizing promises of success in the far off mountains, if only you are hardened and wise enough to climb it.

MacHeist came along and tried to solve the economics problem for developers. People clamored that it's good to sell $500 software packages for $49 but don't consider the additional 2,000 low-end customers--customers that wouldn't try the software anyways--indie studios have to support. Not all customers are the same.

Foursquare came along and is trying to solve the marketing problem for SMBs but where's the value proposition? What do you advertise to people that have already checked in to somewhere?

Groupon is the Digg of foot traffic.
The incredibly powerful, federated, open protocol/platform was what excited us geeks.

The client always sucked and was, at the most generous, a tech demo of things the protocol/platform was capable of.
Affluence and Autism: Cause and Effect? Or not?
Except Microsoft is willing to sell you Exchange Server but Google wasn't willing to sell you a Wave server. Writing your own is very difficult; no one has managed to match Google's implementation.
To be fair, Google did the same thing in the same time frame with the Nexus One, minus the ad budget.

Sometimes disrupting existing markets and paradigms takes time, patience, and several iterations.

(I'm still disappointed at how quickly they stopped the direct-sale idea with the Nexus One)
Use the flag button then.
I think it may be HN material if you actually read the brief. Very interesting (if you can spare the time to read ~130 pages), especially the back and forth in the "expert" testimony (the opposing council's expert was eventually deemed to be unqualified to offer any relevant testimony and mostly selectively quoted texts during trial).
…a right to discriminate a minority just because they want to. Shocking.
Cloud Adoption Picking Up
Ask HN: Examples of Great Getting Started Wizards
What examples do you have for great "getting started" wizards, preferably in web applications?

My latest web application, LeadNuke.com, seems to be suffering from the all-too-familiar blank canvas problem.

Potential customers seem to love the idea of LeadNuke, and indeed I have several paying companies "using" it at the moment. But I use the term "using" loosely. The biggest problem is that it's a unique kind of application with a unique setup process, and my users aren't necessarily the most web-savvy demographic.

But I digress. Point is, until you get it set up and tweaked, it's essentially useless, and I'm trying to avoid a crippling churn rate. I've already automated as much of the setup process as possible (or at least as much as is plausible for now). I think the best thing for me to do, after talking to users, is to create a simple and elegant "getting started" wizard when users first login. And this comment in another thread referring to Skype [1] has motivated me to move this task up the queue.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel. So, what web applications have already hit this out of the park?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1569147

EDIT: rmah on IRC pointed out that needing a "getting started" wizard may be an indicator that the app is too complicated. He is right, and I totally agree. In this case, it is too complicated for its target user. But I built it from need, and it does what it needs to. In the future, I plan on making it simpler.
It goes a bit deeper than that - a ticketing system by itself is just a tool, and isn't a process or a solution.

If Sysadmin just threw up a ticketing system and said "put your stuff in there and we'll get to it" - then they can't expect things to get much better than email. It's a start, but only a small one.

They need to put the proper process, SLA's (even if they are approximate) and review procedures around the system to make sure it's meeting the needs of the rest of they organisation.
http://pygowave.net/
This is going to the Supreme Court, right? So does this mean that there can be same-sex marriages in the mean time? Or that the couples that were unmarried are (at least for now) remarried?

EDIT: The NYT article on this -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/us/05prop.html -- seems to imply that this is a separate ruling that has not been made yet.
I don't know what other services you're referring to, but that was my first thought.
He's getting downvoted, but he's right. The majority voted for this, but the majority didn't get what they voted for. "The System" DID NOT work for the majority in this case (although for the record, I'm very happy with the outcome).
who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave

somehow i don't think they need your sympathies ... they probably got a decent amount of money from their acquisition, so they're probably not crying right now ;)
I wanted to like wave. It just always seemed like a solution looking for a problem.
I can't wait to set up a dozen or so Monty Python inspired commit sound bites: http://www.intriguing.com/mp/sounds.php

The perfect commit message to pipe loudly out of the speakers:
http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_sounds/lb/stupid.wav
Virtual Panel: The Node.js Ecosystem - Frameworks, Libraries and Best Practices
You're making an argument based on popular vote, but black people and white people wouldn't be able to intermarry either if our system was entirely based on the will of the masses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Much like Slashdot announcing the start of the Iraq invasion, some things are important enough to be visible elsewhere.

Restricting the rights of anyone in our country affects all of us who live here.
Happy Birthday Genelia D'Souza Today's Birthday Girl  
Happy Birthday Genelia D'Souza Today's Birthday Girl
it's not like twitter ever sends/sent an email when someone you follow tweets.
3 is an illusion, but your other two examples are certainly heavy set people. I would call neither "overweight" though.
Not all of us live there.
Not sure I understand your point.

> what makes me think I can efficiently or intelligently deploy that amount back into "society" or "the community" in far less time

It's simple to invest billions of dollars with the intention of increasing your wealth: you hire people at some well-respected financial institutions and pay them a good amount to do it for you. (let's overlook recent history here)

In the same way, there are many excellent charitable and non-profit institutions that have the infrastructure and knowledge in place to turn monetary investments into social good.
We (culturally) have thousands of years of social and legal experience with heterosexual marriage. It's a very complex institution. Making a radical change to it may have unintended consequences.
There is the issue of failing to go back to the breast once established on bottle, but like I said, not overly important in the larger picture.
Given there seems to be real demand for this product, it may well be an opportunity for a startup to build a competitor.
Although I don't disagree with that statement, I don't see how it advances a legal basis for reversing the amendment.
$22M federal program for outsourcers in South Asia to learn Enterprise Java
I really don't think the initial iPhone announcement was a "non-event" anywhere in the US, and especially in New York...
Google Wave: ahead of its time.
1. The people voted and agreed on California's definition of marriage to be one man and one women. The people's vote should count not over turned by 1 gay judge.
You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day, or have it constantly open, etc.

Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..