skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Because they have better, more mature code-bases and more experienced programmers developing them.

So then maybe they should divert some of their attention to getting the word out.

> Other than publicity, what does Diaspora have going for it, and why do they deserve attention just because of their marketing?

A great story, good timing and the ability to engage the community.

> This is open source we're talking about, not startup companies, and open source works best when it's meritocratic.

In an ideal world, yes. But in this one, no, not really. Open source works best when there is momentum behind a project, not because it is 'the best project' or has 'the most qualified people' working on it. See PHP.

> And if we're talking about which open source project to build a startup with, then we're talking about merit, nothing else.

Open source projects have to market themselves just as much as commercial entities do.

We wouldn't be having this conversation if that were not the case.
The railways the Empire built in India are a damn sight better than the ones BR built here!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "why do we need Twitter?". While I consider it a useless service there are obviously a huge amount of people in disagreement with me, which would imply that it serves some purpose. What I am saying is "Why would we need a decentralized, open Twitter?"

As far as RSS being to complicated goes, that (in my eyes) is a failure of browser authors then. Excuse my disconnect from the mainstream browsers, since I've been using Opera exclusively for about 10 years now. But for me subscribing to an RSS feed is a matter of pressing the orange RSS icon in my URL bar, which shows me a clear overview of the history of the feed with a very large subscribe button at the top. The end result is that the feed shows up in a list under (and looking exactly like) my mail filters (sort of like the folders in most common mail clients) including an unread count and notification for new ones, which seems about as simple as it gets.
"This is the search design for the people who use google to get to their facebook login"

Do you personally even encounter 'Google Instant'?

If I'm not using my browser's search bar, I've got my personalized iGoogle page open.

They've made changes to the vanilla Google homepage which is most likely, predominantly visited by the sort of people who use Google to get to their facebook login anyway.
I'm really disappointed to see that the team has decided that instead of learning about an existing standard (XMPP) which fits the purpose perfectly, they've decided to begin defining their own protocol, which will go down the same path but with less rigour and a whole lot of wasted time. Eventually it will have to be trashed in favour of something more robust.

If that's what they've spent the last three months working on, they've had some bad advice. I thought Pivotal were all about "just get the damn thing done" and so would have encouraged them not to waste their time.
I've wanted to expel this rant for a while: when you pick it apart, iTunes is basically as great as it can be while still running on Windows as well as OSX (not to say that it's great in any absolute sense.) It has to be monolithic to be multi-platform, and it has to be multi-platform to serve as a life-support system for all the iConsumerElectronics on Windows.

If iTunes was OSX-only, it could spray itself all around OSX as a bunch of cute one-screen utilities with clever integration hooks:

1. The App Store would become part of Software Update (which would thus become a general Mac App Store and App Update manager—hopefully buying out AppFresh and giving MacPorts a GUI);

2. Contacts, Bookmarks, Notes, etc., and the transfer of media to the iConsumerElectronics in a friendly, GUIful manner, would all be a part of the iSync utility (yes, that exists—it's the ghetto for synching phones that aren't made by Apple);

3. Podcasts would just be a client program that relies on the same background-downloading daemon that System Updates do, with a modification to read arbitrary feeds, and extract enclosed media files (or torrents!); once downloaded, iSync would just see them and sync them;

4. iTMS would just be a website, which would expose special content types that Safari would know what to do with (audio/x-apple-ringtone = save to the Music/Ringtones folder, etc.);

5. and iTunes would be left to be a music library, consisting in its entirety of Playlists, Genius, and perhaps the Radio (and hooks to send events to Ping, if it likes.)

If iTunes was OSX-only, it wouldn't need to know how to burn CDs; it could just allow you to export a playlist as a folder of MP3s, and then integrate audio-CD burning as an option in the OSX Burn Folder menu.

If iTunes was OSX-only, it wouldn't need to have sections for TV Shows, Movies, Books, Ringtones; those would just be folders on your hard drive, which iTMS (through Safari) would write to, and iSync would read from.

There's a thousand other ways it could be better and slimmer—but, if you'll notice, none of these things could work given the restriction that they have to work on Windows as well.
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Gem was Atari and C64, not Amiga. The Amiga used Workbench, so there was no need for Gem.
I'm sorry, but that isn't what RESTful means at all. Structured URIs like you mention can be pretty, but are completely unrelated to REST. In the real world they are often used in an anti-REST way, specified in advance instead of linked via hypermedia. If the client needs to use foreknowledge to construct URI strings, that goes against everything REST stands for.

REST is Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State — the default modus of ActionController::Routing::Routes has nothing to do with it.

A design that uses only opaque UUIDs as names for resources and reveals them to the client via links in the responses is perfect REST. Clean-looking URIs are a distraction, except that they tend to be easier to preserve across software rewrites.
If their intent is to woo Facebook users, then creating an interface familiar to Facebook users is not a bad approach.

An interface can look similar superficially, while performing completely differently at the next level.
Yes, that's clear. The clever title "Illiquidity premium" is OK.
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Maybe 'No registration required' is what you're looking for?
We are using RBS WordPay at the moment (purely because our bank account is with RBS), but to be honest, the interface is crap, the hosted payment page is crap and the support via the phone is far from brilliant.

I'm actually investigating using Chargify myself even though it means signing up for a new IPSP and getting a new business bank account with Barclays (the only one they support).
I agree, but this also solves his paying for bandwidth problem.
I meant EAGAIN, not EINTR.
PHP caught on because it was the right hammer for all the nails people had. It wasn't marketing and hype, but momentum.

Open source projects may have to market themselves as well, but that doesn't mean the more savvy amongst us have to get swept up with the crowd.
You could be really deceptive and rewrite affilliate links on the page the widget's on. I wouldn't do it though.
Sorry, terrible wording, customer development process / methodology / idea etc.
That's not really the mystery, tho': rather why they suddenly decided to go ahead with that plan, given that it was obviously reckless. And if anyone else was onboard.

As an aside, it's fascinating that the economics of diamond mining are such that you fly fuel to the mines.
Thanks for that link. This really, really hit home with me.
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If IE9 can handle multiple tabs better, I am all for it.

IE8 chokes on 20-30 tabs (mostly HN...) while I've have not had the same problem in Firefox, Chrome or Opera, IE just feels sluggish.

I should clarify, that I can crash or slow down to crawl Firefox (I am looking at you Reddit), but then it is obvious something has gone wrong.

The way IE slows down is less obvious, that is you can still use it but it is slow.

IE8 is trying to degrade gracefully and failing.
drag and drop uploading is like 10 lines of code for the usual suspects.

Not taking anything away from the diaspora guys, I havent tried the application, just mentioning in case anyone thought drag and drop was too much of a hassle to add to their app, it can be done in a few minutes.
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I agree with you, but there's a politer way to express your frustrations-
All the entries were really high quality, there were some that really felt like properly polished apps, so well done to all.

I must say I am a bit disappointed that all the top four winners were games though. I just feel like a little variation would have helped a lot. And with no explanation as to why the winners were chosen, you can't help but feel that "hey this is great fun to play" might have won over "hey this is a great app"
My question was, does Diaspora actually have such a process?

It seems to me their approach is to get power-users like HN folks on-board first. Conveniently, we are also the users who would run servers for our friends or do a startup that would do Diaspora hosting. But that's my point. If we keep seeing these alpha releases, it will loose the buzz, and it'll never reach critical mass / momentum. Eg. this release is so minimal, I really don't care. Tell me when it's 1.0.
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If you read right until the end you'll see it was just a PR stunt. They knew we were going to cut their aid anyway...
You can probably enjoy testing in the same way you enjoy programming.
If you're looking at the keys, you're doing it wrong.

The only reason to switch to Dvorak is if you're going to touch type as well. If you're touch typing you don't need to know what the keys are and the temptation to cheat by looking down will only slow down your learning.
I abandoned it at the point I was going to have to globally install specific versions of stuff from source. There might be ways to avoid that but as a ruby n00b I don't know them.
Firefox has a similar feature.

I don't think that is the problem. It's more a problem of explaining the concept and having good readers. Even I, when I started reading feeds, spent a long time trying to find a reader and setting it up (Google Reader, by the way).

Contrast with Twitter - easy to explain the concept, 5 seconds to sign up and get started.
I'm fairly certain this is explicitly against the new iTunes developer agreement.
> Using regular expressions for anything but processing lines of text means you're probably doing it wrong

Depends. The theory of regular expression works for all semirings (http://sebfisch.github.com/haskell-regexp/regexp-play.pdf).

On the other hand, if you are using backreferences or something crazy like that, you have left regular expressions.
I think there are not enough templates yet if you wish to make this big enough to be profitable, so perhaps an advanced mode that allows you to tweak css would be good.
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I remember a few years back it was around 230k average per employee of a public company (according to Forbes).

That number must be higher now.

As others noted, this number can range greatly depending on industry.
> Just as locking down devices and forcing apps through the App Store, although beneficial to Apple, doesn't make it good for consumers.

Nonsense. Consumers don't want to have to know all kinds of useless details just to be able to use their device. Personally I hate installing software on windows. There is a vast amount of it, but there is no one there making sure it's not going to damage my system (for the most part, of course you can restrict yourself to only software that has the MS seal). On OSX this is slightly better, but I still hate it when that little box opens up asking me to grant access.

On iOS however, I install without much thought. I know that anything I download there has been vetted by someone with a strong interest in making sure their platform doesn't look bad (among some other interests that are less to my benefit). For me the trade off of not ever having to think about this stuff is worth missing out on things like Google Voice.

I don't think the reason Android has been doing well in the US has anything what so ever to do with silly "open" dogma, but rather that it's cheaper and isn't tied to AT&T.
Yes, but I also use Mutt, and my phones email client, and I have several installations of Thunderbird on different machines. Gating to email makes much more sense.
Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. If you are going to have similar features and interface your only advantage left is The Fear of Privacy. And frankly, it's getting a bit old. It's the Facebook and Google that will change people's expectations and habits. You can create something that will work better but I see it as those auto-destructing emails. No privacy is better than false privacy.
There is this famous story about a consultant who is called in to find the error in an expensive machine. After a while he marks a place on the machine with a cross. The bill is 100000$: 0.01 for the chalk used to make the cross, 99,999.99$ for "knowing where to put it".
As an aside, it's fascinating that the economics of diamond mining are such that you fly fuel to the mines.

They tend to be in the middle of the desert or other rough terrain, and the distances are enormous. In many cases there aren't any public roads they can (reliably) use for heavy freight, and maintaining their own would be costly. Staff are flown in anyway, so they already maintain regularly used airfields. (my dad used to be an engineer working at various African diamond mines, and my first cousin once removed still consults for them after retiring)
I wrote a flash->HTML shim for webcams. Works ok on Firefox, Webkit has a memory leak. Details: http://nicklothian.com/blog/2009/12/15/using-flash-to-shim-a...
Yeah, sysadmins should be like doctors or priests :-)
I've seen DJs use a kind of binary search to beatmatch tracks:

If the track they're bringing in is too slow, they speed it up a few percent.

When it starts getting ahead of the track they then slow it down a few percent.

When that setting then causes the track to be too slow they speed it up a little (but not back to the starting speed).

This process is repeated until the tracks are beatmatched, with smaller and smaller changes being made each time.

Each time you make an adjustment and listen to the effect you eliminate another range of the pitch slider and so improve accuracy and time taken to synchronise the tracks.

This is very useful if you have a cheap turntable or happen to use CDJs.
I think two World Wars and the collapse of multiple empires might have had something to do with much of what you said above.
> The project also faces the hurdle of trying to popularize an open source project — these projects often sound great on paper, but doesn’t work too well in practice.

If I read correctly, they are suggesting that if Diaspora were proprietary, it would have been easier to market. That sounds so impossible that I'm wondering if they really wanted to say that.

I'm also wondering about their second statement : are they saying that open source projects actually "don't work too well in practice", or is this a statement about the general perception of open source projects?
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...?
actually, for most south asians, the "diaspora" just refers to the extended south asian community who have moved to the west in search of better jobs etc. there are no negative connotations to the term.
Both were my mains points, but I see the "http:// problem bigger. It's too unpronounceable prefix for every-day use (because of combination of letters h+t+t+p and three punctuation marks after that!), so people simply skip it. Because normal people still need some standard identification string to recognize a website address, the site owners configure the "www." subdomain for that purpose, although it's totally unnecessary component (but made sense historically when the www was just one marginal service among others).
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Good article and a pretty interesting project.

It took me a while to realise that this was about plugins not extensions. You don't hear much about people making browser plugins so my brain immediately translated plugins==extensions.

http://colonelpanic.net/2010/08/browser-plugins-vs-extension...

Still an interesting project but I think we definitely need a cross-browser extension framework right about now.
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Not really. This can be potentially converted into a one-click Heroku deploy.
Nobody likes a grammar Nazi, but second paragraph, last sentence. Perhaps they should have learned from Groupon? :)
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Companies with telecom products are generally conservative about switching Erlang versions. Most of Corelatus' production systems run R11B-5. Quite a few still run R9C-2. There's no compelling reason to upgrade them, there are thousands of those systems in dozens of countries and most run billing systems. They typically run for years at a time and only get upgraded in conjunction with a larger system upgrade.

It's not like you sit there typical 'apt-get update' a couple of times a day to see if there's anything new you might want...

On the other hand, people who are new to the language generally like to use the very latest because it contains the most features. E.g. later versions have increasingly good SMP support, which may be important if you're working on something which has to scale across many cores, but it's completely irrelevant to me because our hardware only runs Erlang on one core.

My suggestion for a starting point: if you're just developing, follow the R14 sequence, i.e. every time a new one gets release, download it, compile and install from source. If you're ready to deploy now, use R13B04 and let others find the bugs in R14.

Potential biases: I work at Corelatus. I've worked for Ericsson. I maintain the Erlang FAQ.
When do people sit there and do 50 different searches in a row? This is a strange stance to take.
Did BR actually build many railways? I thought they mostly closed existing ones that had been built by private companies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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This is exactly why I think programming should be taught in elementary school. Programmers think about problems very differently.

How can a given problem be solved reliably using a strictly defined process? Many kids don't seem to appreciate this question. Indeed, some seem to think that problems at school or in live are obscure riddles that can be solved using talent, luck or intuition (of course they believe they lack all of those). A programmer understands that there must be a way to describe the solution to a problem in such a way that anyone (even a computer!) can figure out the solution.

Conclusion: Teach programming in school, as early as possible.
The article mentions that they have gone to some length to get (permission to publish) these documents. So yes, this is very deliberate.
When searching is fast, you're more inclined to refine your search terms, hence you do more searches. Seems a pretty straightforward concept.
"cleaning up the semantics of broken JavaScript constructs"
I actually like JavaScript. So what does CoffeeScript fix?
staying stealth could benefit in that you are able to build your own product without as much of an outside influence, but for some products, advice from experts helps and could lead you to better opportunities too.
Something similar happens with realism in cartoons. Up to a certain point of realism people react favorably but then there is a point when people no longer like what they are seeing. So if you just interpolate the test results with shaving off seconds it sounds really good on paper from an engineering standpoint but in practice it is something else. Shaving off seconds after you press enter I think is a good thing but shaving off seconds while you are typing is a completely different thing. The instant thing doesn't make any sense to me and all it does is just add visual clutter. Plus I'm not entirely convinced google added instant for the benefit of the consumer. What were they trying to do, save an extra keystroke? All instant does is make ads pop up sooner and I think that was the real motivation behind implementing it.
I do follow try-catch or/and interrupt driven philosphy in my life. Do ya work assuming there is a catch-block to handle anything that might go wrong and dont think too much in the try-block, thats how i make everyday decisions. Also, dont poll on results, let them interrupt you while you are being more productive!! :)
I felt that the central point the article was trying to make, and I thought made it well, is that design is not about testing a set of obvious solutions and then declaring X the winner because it was tested well.

Firstly that often results in horrid UX experiences, as Google Instant is. It is also, weak for the following reasons:

1. No innovation happens (which is why Apple came up with the smartphone touch UI and Google just copies it)

2. People don't like change, so will favour things close to what they had before

You have fallen straight into the same odd thinking dominating Google, that UI is incremental, testable and easily measurable.

You want precise and measurable. That's not design. Jonathan Ives is worth his weight in gold for his design skills as much as Linus Torvalds is worth his weight in gold as a programmer. And we as engineers have to accept that.

Google will never come up with a great design with the way it approaches the problem. While I love their products, none of them have ever blown me away because of their elegance or coherence. They only know how to do simplicity and are beginning to forget how to do that too.
And programming is good for practising abstract reasoning.
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And don't forget "Purely Functional Data Structures".
What he did say was pretty close though:

"The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data," Mr. Schmidt said. "Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."