skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand why people are so upset about this. It's simple: Twitter Inc. doesn't like apps which are the same as Twitter, or worse. (I don't mean to say that Twitter is bad already: just that Twitter Inc. doesn't like 1. apps recreating Twitter and 2. apps which give a low-quality UI.)

In other words: they urge devs to develop a client with added value. Wether that's apps for "Company Tweeting" or Real-Time Data, it's adding something to the core experience of Twitter.

Most importantly, I think Twitter Inc. still likes "normal" Twitter apps, as long as they have added value: a superior UI. So get devving, and make the new and better Tweetie!
I read it this way:

There's now 75k registered Twitter apps. You're not going to be successful making a generic client. Think bigger: there's plenty of room for success in other Twitter verticals.

(and boooo for the fake FUD headline)
From the announcement:

- Display of tweets in 3rd-party services. We need to ensure that tweets, and tweet actions, are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter where they are. For example, some developers display “comment”, “like”, or other terms with tweets instead of “follow, favorite, retweet, reply” - thus changing the core functions of a tweet.

While I don't like the idea of 3rd-party services treating Twitter as a white-label medium, it's hard to believe this is coming from the same service that is famous for letting its users establish convention, and then supporting that convention. (@, #, etc)

(Edit: s/email/announcement/)
Ugh, that tears it. I'm not doing any more Twitter development unless Twitter acquires me. Not hires me, acquires me.

I love Twitter and have several friends that work there, but I am losing all confidence in developing on the platform when I am not a big-name company with an official partnership.

Signed,
A 3rd party twitter dev since 2007
Is Windows going to get secure enough to prevent all crappiness that results from malware? If that's the case, then this means Windows already has the right kind of security infrastructure. I don't think it's quite there yet.
Urgh.

I personally think one of the underlying tenets of his argument is false -- there is NO ambiguity over what Computer Science is, at least not in the way that he's suggesting. CS is and should be an academic pursuit coupled with a strong mathematical background. CS is about understanding the underlying principles of the what, why and how of computation. A couple of kids from Stanford didn't create Google because they blindly hacked something together. Seriously, check out their paper on PageRank.

A well-understood analogy is the difference between physics and mechanical engineering: the physicist seeks to advance knowledge of the principles that govern our universe, the ME applies that knowledge in practical applications.

A direct comparison should be drawn between Computer Science and Software Engineering.

I've always maintained that students solely interested in learning how to program should be enrolled in a Software Engineering associate's degree program, not 4-year Computer Science. It would be a practical rather than theoretical education.
How to Excel at your Job and Guarantee that Promotion
Whether a choice position is about to be offered at your work or if you just want to set yourself up to be the prime candidate for when a promotion becomes available, take steps now to make sure that your name is the first one mentioned when the Higher Ups start looking for someone to promote.
They should yes, but the western countries are not willing to do what has to be done - they are too skirmish of violence, and some are floating ideas of economical development or foreign aid.

They have entirely forgotten why their boats have weapons.
Transmission efficiency / meter is one of the specs that come with the base fiber. You'll want one that is most efficient in the IR band. Note that you do lose power to bends in the fiber.

All of the laser power records set over the last few years have been with lasers that combine many smaller lasers into a single beam. Not easy but its a solved problem.

Free Electron Lasers are new big thing, you can pump them with an unlicensed proton accelerator backpack :-)
Ok, thanks. That's good feedback. I'll have a think about how to solve that in future posts!
But that doesn't disprove the grandparent's post in any way. It doesn't explain why people have trouble working hard or smart enough. It doesn't explain why some (many) people may work hard, or smart, or both, and not get rich. All it really says is "if you do all the things necessary to get rich, you'll get rich", without really adding any information.
I never said you said. I just think it's amusing that following the advice is now a new trend.
Specialized Functional Teams
By enabling the buying and selling of information in real-time with human translation and complete anonymity.
The thing is, if you look at the new terms of service, they aren't prohibiting new clients, nor are they shutting down old ones without cause. They just think that this particular niche is already filled, and suggesting that developers pursue other areas. It's perhaps not the friendliest thing to do, but I don't see it as a kick in the teeth.
That is a good question: https://encrypted.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=U...
You answered a question with a question, its a QA site, not a philosophy course.
It's a bit philosophical too. D3D is an abstraction of graphics hardware with enough high-level constructs to make it useful to real programmers. OGL is an abstraction of 3D principles, with enough low-level constructs to make it perform on real hardware. You can't "unplumb" that overnight; it's how you think.
I just got Garageband and it's incredible - especially for $5. It runs a little slow on the original so I'm tempted to Gazelle my current iPad for a new one. If you're into music creation at all, then it's a no-brainer.
My comment was aimed at seiji, not at the article - I completely agree with your point.
A Sneak Peek At Calxeda’s ARM-Based Servers
Why was the direct link story from earlier today deleted?
After all, he thinks it's a blogging platform...
Ted talk on Khan Academy and their education technologies.
How about a nuclear reactor technology that doesn't require active cooling to be safe? That'd be a better solution.
Twitter's new developer roadmap
Totally agree. I think that's the danger Twitter faces with these kind of moves.

Since the nerds founded the Twitter community, I wouldn't be surprised to see the next move be some sort of open, distributed, federated Twitter-clone that mirrors the existing APIs. Easy win for the client developers, no one to be a buzzkill, and it's not like spam can be any worse than it is now anyway.
Unlike us Commonwegians, (some) Americans pronounce them identically. Hence they're more likely to interchange them in writing, either if they really can't spell or if they're half-asleep.
Got the same vibe from the article: the whiny quitter.It's not constructive and not even interesting (who are you and why does your opinion on Quora even matter?). All-in-all HN is lot more unwelcoming to users than Quora is. Here people downvote because they don't agree, even if it is a thoughtful quality reply.

What struck me the most was your wish to delete all your content. Taking your ball, and going home. That shows how you approach the community: with ego over sharing knowledge.
I have an American accent and pronounce the two words similarly (almost identically). So it is somewhat easy to mix the two when spelling them.
Internet Cliché… Got it, I’d been assuming it was largely a Stack Overflow thing.
Did Yahoo just sell Delicious for $5 million?
ya, well, factors external to the merits of the two tools is irrelevant to the question I intended to pose. My question could have been worded better, sorry for the confusion. loup-vaillant's explanation is clearer. ;)
But you're neither an MCS or MBA. Instead, I feel you should be looking at this from an ROI mindset. If you take the time to scrap together a crap prototype... just so the basic features work, just enough.. you'll have a much more thorough understanding of not only your product, but how prototyping works, how to communicate with your tech personnel when you find them, and an enhanced ability to manage them.

They will also respect you more, see that you're serious, that you have at least some knowledge of what you're talking about as opposed to barking out orders with no concept of what is required to execute.

If you read my submissions, this is coming from a business guy with an idea and the realization that it will most likely go no where unless I create my own traction.
Carmack said that a port of Rage to WP7 is unlikely due to its lack of support for native code. It's .NET only for now.
The breakout thing was being featured in UK iTunes store. They claim it was due to being popular in smaller markets first, Apple did take a notice of that and put them to "feature list" in UK (http://onsoftware.en.softonic.com/interview-angry-birds-vill...)
@raganwald -

I commend you for your decision. Quora should not even have a down-vote button -- the best answers will go to the top anyway through up-votes. Also, I think there is just as much (if not more) intellectual value in answers that are funny or slightly off-topic. If I wanted purely factual answers, I would ask Google.
It devalued your contribution ... The way I look at it, your answer was helpful.

It's more useful to think in terms of signal to noise ratio rather than a binary helpful/unhelpful. It may have been helpful when considered in isolation but was it helpful enough to be valuable?

Raganwald nails it with: This type of answer is an Internet Cliché

When the ratio of advice and/or opinions and/or theories is 10:1 relative to actual answers to the question being asked (which is common) it's not enough to say those non-answers might be helpful. They have to meet a higher standard. Because they have a built in noise-cost they need to have a signal-value that is very very high.

A individually helpful answer can have a negative value when viewed in the context of the whole system.
Does anyone think this could rejuvenate something like Status.net (http://status.net/) or any other open system for status updates? (I always hopeful about that)
Not all twitter apps are clients. I would guess that most are not clients.
what is ACM? :)

Personally, the most interesting, for me at least, articles of the last decade - the ones of Perelman's - i read from the arXiv.

Until the last couple of years, having free access to IEEE, i was checking my former branch of science there as well - nothing new or interesting, just minor variations, improvements and recombinations of previous results. Nothing that i'd pay money to read.
I've been running social bookmarking service Faves.com for a couple of years. We had to cut our team as we were not making enough money to support it.

This year we've actually been cutting features to emphasize performance. I'd like to transition to a subscription model, myself. Prior to pinboard I wouldn't have thought that was an option.
Anyone want to come hiking with me through Iran?
Why the B2B viral video is a hoax
Open source is fine but internships (free), for example in the state of California, are restricted to work that does not get added to an employer's profits. If it does, it violates the law.

Paid internships of course are treated differently. Again, depends on the area.
Im always puzzled by the superiority complex people harbour about their 'traditional' pasttimes, especially reading newspapers, watching the 6 o'clock news as if it's important, watching wildlife documentaries, going for runs, etc.

Anyway, in one of those half asleep dazes the other day, I swear I caught my brain 'compiling' or 'defragging' or something. I could feel my eyes doing REM, and I could see or sense a whole lot of information I'd been studying being chunked, parsed and filed away in a more appropriate part of memory. Of course, that itself was probably just a dream...
s/his argument/the Academic\/Applied dichotomy/

I noticed that he doesn't really present the argument as his own, just reporting what he's seeing.
probably because It was a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314791
Interesting! That's a pretty clever way to goose your CPA performance.
It's simple: Twitter Inc. doesn't like apps which are the same as Twitter, or worse.

From this announcement, it sounds like they also don't like clients which have different UIs than Twitter now.
I'm starting to track this story at http://google.com/search?q=fukushima+daiichi&tbs=nws:1

Some alternative sources:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/us-japan-quake-tep..., http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/03/11/radioactive-stea... ("sounds like a low level alert")
Twilio Powering Mobile Start-Ups at SXSW
Weekend Project: Benchmark Your Browsers on Linux
For your latter query this research from December 2010 seems to be connected - http://www.princeton.edu/~angelh/Website/Studies/Article%201...

This connects uncertain career aspirations at age 16 to wage attainment at age 26.
Speaking as someone on the autism spectrum: go to hell.

Ridiculously mild as mild Asperger's is compared to full blown autism, it has had a large mostly negative effect on my life. Even so, I wouldn't change take a pill to get rid of it. I am what I am, and there are coping strategies and niches aplenty.

Also, as a nerd hater, what are you doing on this site?
Dell: ARM Servers Could Face Software Issues
That their fame might be somewhat understated.
Funny timing considering how there's been a noticeable degradation in the Twitter app quality since Atebits got Borg-ified by them. Their plan thus far seems to be:

1. identify best client out there

2. buy it

3. ruin it

4. outlaw all other (well, new) clients

5. ...

6. profit!
In the early '90s when I was a usability specialist at Microsoft I did a laborious usability study (hired several temps to enter text using various methods for hours per day, over multiple days) comparing pen input vs. OSKs and got some counter-intuitive results. Essentially OSKs are much faster than handwriting even under optimal conditions. If it takes 10 seconds to enter a string with an OSK, it'll take ~15 seconds to write it using block letters. That's not counting any time needed to correct errors, which will tend to make the writing input even worse. When I asked participants after the study which method they thought was quicker, most assumed the pen-based writing was. Keep in mind that they spent 1/3 or more of their time correcting errors, so the writing may have taken twice as long as the OSK, yet they didn't perceive as such. Of course their statements could have been a demand effect, but it generally corroborates my main point.

I've read a pile of published usability reports on other text entry methods, such as chording keyboards, and they all show essentially the same thing. Letting fingers extend to hit a fixed close target is hard to beat, and the optimal amount of pressure needed is very small (though perhaps not zero).

My theory is that it takes less mental effort to write than to use an OSK, so the OSK is perceived as being slower. With the OSK the level of mental effort is mostly high (mostly visual search), with periodic dips (hit the key). With pen-based writing it's the opposite -- mostly automated / low-cognitive-effort behavior with periodic thinking about what to do next.

I read a quote from Jobs somewhere recently where he said something like, "the problem with handwriting is that it's just so darned slow" so that makes me think that Apple may have done a similar usability study.

I don't think OSKs are ideal. I'm continually impressed by the steady flow of innovations in text-input methods. But pens have their own usability baggage even outside the limitations of handwriting.
Does green convert better than red? Performable seems to like red over green.
http://blog.performable.com/631526233/
Not sure how this matches up to the 90% number:

http://twittersource.info/lastweek

This is based on tweets composed.
So you think that raganwald's leaving is more valuable than allowing his highly-rated answer that a moderator didn't approve of to continue to display on the site?
Amazon’s Multi-State Sales Tax Battles are a Sideshow to Real National Solution
Django was originally created by programmers working for a newspaper in order to serve the needs of the newspaper: http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework/
Japan Quake and Social Media Reporting
Anybody who in the first place developed and designed a product around a third-party's ecosystem and API has what they have coming
"in the name of user(experience)".

Back in the Soviet Union a lot of things were happening "by request of the workers", for example an unpaid [and mandatory] additional day of work on Saturday sometimes.
Exactly. MySpace has shown that these kinds of moves can be fatal to a social network with low switching costs for users, even in the presence of network effects. Twitter's strength is not technology; from a technical standpoint, duplicating Twitter is trivial. Twitter's strength is its community, and they erode that at their own peril.
PSGL is OpenGL ES with extras but hardly anyone uses PSGL these days, preferring to use the native GPU command buffer generation library, libgcm.
> Uh, yeah. Is that really surprising?

Why yes it is. Twitter went out of their way to say how much they supported developers and considered them key to their success. That wouldn't seem to include making Titan off limits.
How fast is the new MacBook Pro? (side by side video comparison)
Let the market decide. If developers are making clients that are worse than the standard, people won't use them. What is Twitter's product here?
Your Brain at Work
Not my field, but I'll play with some numbers on a Friday afternoon. From some googling, I'm getting an estimate of about -1dB attenuation for the fiber optic and end connectors for a meter long fiber in the near IR. Which would give about 20% losses.

The linked-to gun said it did a 1MW pulse, so to match that with 20% losses you need to start with 1.25MW, giving you 0.25MW loss. But the video doesn't state a pulse time. You can use (http://www.mhi-inc.com/Converter/watt_calculator.htm) to play around with times... assuming it fires for 0.001s (I would guess it is shorter than that) and all that loss shows up as heat, it would be less than a BTU, so easily cool-able.

Assuming your backpack could carry enough energy to have it fire at that power level for a full second, that conversion page says the waste heat from the fiber would melt a 1.6 pound block of ice. Such a backpack would do well to have a top-loading ice reservoir.

However that loss percentage is probably for reasonably unbent fibers, and the whole point of the backpack-to-gun fiber is to allow bending quite a bit. For a higher power system, I'd think it better to skip the fiber optics and instead have something like the laser turrets they put on the front of planes (http://www.mda.mil/system/altb.html). Have a small version of that come up over the wearer's shoulder, with the turret sitting in front of the user so they can aim anywhere in front of them. Even with 8 mirrors in the path to get the business end somewhere comfortable, 98% efficient mirrors would have 15% losses.

I also happened upon this much lower powered backpack laser http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/backpack.php, and its bigger cousin, http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/high-power-cl-100....
Good job guys and thanks a lot to you and HN. By using Remote Jobs we filled a position which we couldn't fill via websites such as Stack Overflow Careers (for the last ~6 months)
Only the very first Call of Duty game used the Quake3 engine. Call of Duty 2 and on use DirectX.
1. Absolutely my ego is involved, it always is, even when I claim that it isn't.

2. I only answered one question, and as that one answer was flagged, I don't actually think it was still visible on the site to other users. And even if it was, everybody (especially myself) seems to agree that it was not helpful. So what would be the harm if I had the option of deleting my account?

3. Who am I and why does my opinion matter? I can't answer that. I blog. You like it, you don't like it. You upvote or you don't. There are no rules about who is and who isn't fit to opine about anything at all. That's the beauty and the hideous reality of the Internet. I would never suggest that I have any particular qualification for writing words except that I do write. The same goes for software.

4. I have no problem whining about how Quora isn't a community in my blog. And you have no problem whining about my blog post in a public forum. We seem to have a lot in common, maybe we should be friends.

UPDATE: I should make something clear: I have nothing against Quora. I am not predicting its demise. From what I have seen of SO, such sites have a lot of potential and perform a valuable service. All I am saying about Quora is that I realize that I am looking for a social experience, and Quora is looking for answers to questions. That's not a bad thing, just not the same thing.
NASA Open Source Summit 2011
Agreed. I've got a few little Python and shell scripts laying around that have talked to their API at one point. By a loose standard, each is a client. Perhaps there are 74,800 little shell scripts or integration adapters out there, but not what an ordinary person would call a client app. That I'd believe.
Important to mention StatusNet and Identi.ca, the open source, decentralized Twitter alternatives.

http://status.net/

http://identi.ca
Thanks for posting this. It's concerning that these 'treaties' are being repeatedly floated by the USTR. They're actively circumventing due process and established law. Third party liability for ISPs and other online service providers is particularly concerning to me.

Some of the more onerous/draconian highlights:

- Each Party shall establish or maintain a system that provides for pre-established damages, which shall be available upon the election of the right holder

- Requires criminal enforcement for technological measures beyond WIPO Internet Treaties, even when there is not copyright infringement (art. 5.9)

- Impose a legal regime of ISP liability beyond the DMCA standards (art. 16.3)

- Requires legal incentives for service providers to cooperate with copyright owners in deterring the unauthorized storage and transmission of copyrighted materials; (art. 16.3.b.vi.A)

- Requires identifying internet users for any ISP, going beyond U.S. case law (art. 16.3.b.xi)

- Includes the text of the controversial US/KOREA side letter on shutting dow
There are two separate algorithms - the first one is recursive.
To expect enduring openness from a privately-owned medium or enduring stability from a single point of failure is naïve.
> most of the uglier CSS box-model hacks

Wait, does someone still develop for IE5? Otherwise there is no need for any box-model hacks.
Recently, one of my Quora questions was suddenly deleted.

The moderator answer I got was "Not a serious question". End of message.

Um, okay?

I'm sure Quora will make an interesting case study, once it's dead.
While I understand Twitter's motivation for doing this -- and no, I don't believe it's about consistency -- I think they could have expressed at least some token of appreciation for the devs who helped get them to where they are now.
Ask HN: Critique my Startup BarBird
(I realized I posted this in the wrong board earlier, apologies)

Hi guys, we resigned from our jobs and started building http://www.barbird.com full time about five and a half months ago. BarBird shows a real-time picture of what is happening around you in the nightlife scene so you can make informed nightlife decisions. There is currently a free iPhone/Android app as well as the web app. Would love to hear your feedback!