skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Militarily, I think a large commercial ship with existing radar and maybe cheap UAV support, and small arms, would be capable of defending itself from the pirates -- they generally raid in small craft, using AK-47s and RPGs, and rely on speed and the lack of resistance.

A small sailboat is probably too small to be defensible.
Just introducing myself to the community
Just joined this forum and wanted to say hello
It seems like Ryan Sarver, along with the senior and/or PR people who most likely collaborated with him, is trying to channel the tone of Steve Jobs’s “we don't need any more fart apps” speech.

If nothing else, I think it’s advice developers should seriously consider heeding if they want to create value (and generate revenue) using the Twitter ecosystem.

Regarding whether the tone is “hostile” or the message represents “a kick in the teeth,” I think people need to keep some perspective: A hundred and how many million tweets a day?! That's a lot! If I were responsible for the big picture at Twitter, supporting your junior high science fair project Twitter client would not be at the top of my to-do list.
An easy API to learn tags for any page
Earthquake Turns TV Networks into Print
Use Ratings to Improve Real Satisfaction
Scoble agrees that "not helpful" is not helpful:
http://www.quora.com/Robert-Scoble-1/Youre-not-helpful-Quora...
Hiya - Aquarin... ICQ, Skype et al, log everything. We don't. The privacy policy is simple: end conversation, end all data about it as well.

Additionally, I encourage you to try the service in "Sudden Death" mode with someone you know - whoever is in one of those conversations can terminate it at any time resulting in everyone losing the conversation simultaneously.

This is very different from a user simply exiting IRC or leaving an ICQ chat or having a pseudo-offline conversation on GTalk!
That is the deafening thud of the other shoe dropping
Agreed that the argument shouldn't be dismissed just because of who's advocating. There was a great discussion about this at the Twitter privacy chat a few years ago, and quite a few others so things the same way.

That said the "right to be forgotten" argument makes sense to a lot of people in Europe. Characterizing this as wrong or misguided which doesn't come across as very respectful. During the privacy chat, I wound up saying something like "Wait a second, doesn't Spain's law count?" Most Americans on the chat basically said no, it shouldn't count, because that's not how we look at the world. Google comes across as similarly disdainful of other cultures.
This is non-sensical: a similar response to a similar question was up-voted to the roof. It could be Not helpful because it wasn't as cheeky as expected (a hacker over-estimating his tact isn't exactly new), or because that question was trapped in a cluster of users that had negative feelings toward its answers.

I've been trying to make sense of the Question/Follower bi-graph on Quora. Based on very different reactions to similar, but unconnected questions it appears strongly clustered by normative takes, from narrow political frameworks to attitude to entrepreneurship, food, etc. I can't seem to have access to relevant data from outside, though.
I think what we are seeing is quite a bit of chasm crossing from the platforms. When that happens, the early technical users (who they don't make much money from, btw) get pushed out or at least _feel_ pushed out.

Yes, we helped build the ecosystem and make it a viable company...but if you read "Crossing the Chasm", it is almost a blueprint for what these platforms are going through and doing...they rely on early technical folks to build a base...but eventually need to reject those early users or marginalize them for sake of profit...very interesting read.
I hate that people use Q&A sites as forums. If I ask a question on StackOverflow.com such as "how do i do x on the iphone", I'm pretty much guaranteed to get responses (in the "answers" section) which state that i shouldn't do that. Q&A sites are for questions and answers. How is "it won't get approved for the appstore" a relevant answer? Maybe I don't even care about the appstore. If you think this is a concern, but still have an answer, include it as a footnote. Or just list it as a comment, but it's not an answer.

This actually drove me away from heavily contributing on SO recently.
I wouldn't go to Scoble for an insightful take on Quora.
Firefox 4 + Sync (Slurp to get the bookmarks out of delicious). Additionally, use Dropbox or SugarSync to backup bookmarks folder. With 5 copies of backed up bookmarks, you'll be covered from all sides.
Social Fail Whales
Hey! Thanks for trying out the extensions...

"go private" does two things:

it launches a 1-hour conversation that allows anyone you @mention in the tweet and from that point on you are in SecretSocial-land having real-time conversations...

there is still a 140 char limit but you can post as many times as you like, it is all kept in context!
Until I think of one from my own life - those guys that were making the phone app for nearby people at tech events to view each others 'profiles' (with a view to striking up conversations with the right people), but had to figure out a way to get into these tech events/conferences and use the crowd to test their app. Their solution was a cracker (and eventually a spin-off business):

Once live, we got like 5 users, since no one really knew about it. To promote this product, we decided to target events, since we thought that events is where people would like to meet each other. We locked ourselves in a room and asked this question over and over: “What is something valuable we can provide to event organizers so that they can promote our product?”

Zac finally came up with an idea. He proposed that we could build a kiosk where attendees can type in their name, and a name badge would instantly print. (& while they're there, register for the phone app)
A healthy third-party client ecosystem is the only reliable hedge against future dickbar offenses. It makes sense that they'd want to shut it down. But this move is about what's best for Twitter's business, not the users.

That's why it feels so wrong.
Well said. Twitter's got a lot of goodwill but seems intent on running it down.
I've been a member of Quora for a while, but I never got around to participating. There was always something about it that struck me as strange.

I think the problem is that there is an assumption that asking a question and receiving an answer is somehow a valuable experience in itself, and for basic bits of factual information it is. But much of what constitutes "interesting" questions, like the one in this article, do not fit that pattern.

I teach teams how to be agile. For many, an honest question they have is: why do we need you? Can't we just read the book and know all we need to know?

It turns out the answer to that question is very interesting, because mostly no, you probably can't. At least not in the way you think. There is factual information and then there is mastery of a complex skill. I look at it this way: I can show you a movie of a great piano player, you can meet him and get his autograph, we can even read books on how to play the piano.

Will any of that make you a piano player? No, it will not. So when you ask a seemingly straightforward and honest question like "How come I can't play this Bach piece?" I'm unable to give you a straightforward answer that you are going to find helpful. It's going to sound something like "Because you don't know what you are doing. First you must do all this other stuff". Of course, you don't want to do all that other stuff, you want to play the Bach piece. And so there we are.

This touches on another problem -- not knowing what you don't know. When I learned to fly, I found a good instructor and told him about the things I would like to do.

"We're not doing any of that," he said, and then explained what we would be doing. You see, I didn't know what questions to ask first. I simply had some goal.

The worst problem I can see is folks getting answers they are not ready to process. For example, sticking with my agile coach example, somebody might ask me why a team takes so long trying to figure out what it's doing. The "answer" might be something like "Because you've restricted their machines and tools in such a way it's taking ten times longer than it should." but good luck in giving it to somebody in that direct a fashion. They'll throw you out of their office -- especially if they were the ones all along pushing for more controls and complexity. This is a case of wanting a solution to one thing, but having a second thing that cannot be touched. And of course, the second thing is directly involved in the first thing. In situations like this you have to help people figure out for themselves where their own internal model is flaky. Sometimes that takes a while. (Interesting side note: many technologists ardently refuse to believe they could be this way, saying things like "just tell me bluntly". I have found that these folks are the worst to deal with, because instead of seeing life as a journey, they are caught up in black-and-white reasoning. So they are the last people you want to treat that way, because to do so you're basically telling them their thinking is broken -- a concept many cannot process)
It was more to highlight people getting stuck in their ways and not advancing.

if you're not independently wealthy within ten years, you didn't work hard/smart enough.

Exactly.
If you're running a Rails server on Ubuntu, protecting your server is as simple as deploying your app with Moonshine, with the ssh, iptables, and denyhosts plugins.

It requires maybe 7-10 lines of configuration to have a fairly well-insulated system:

# config/moonshine.yml
:ssh:
:port: 9024
:allow_users:
- rails

# app/manifests/application_manifest.rb
configure({
:denyhosts => { :admin_email => 'admin@example.com' }
})

recipe :ssh
recipe :iptables
recipe :denyhosts
How will Japan earthquake affect Apple's iPad supply chain?
Man, TapBots just can't catch a break. First they are about to announce TweetBot[1], when Twitter for iPhone (a free, first-party alternative to competitors) is announced, and they recently announced the coming of a re-imagined TweetBot[2].

On another note, I don't understand why Twitter are so callous to throw away their community goodwill on a whim. They already have a lot - just look how they took a stand when the data for one of their users was requested by the U.S. government. And then they do something like this. (After [this](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313152).) And the dickbar!

[1]: http://tapbots.com/blog/business/say-hello-to-tweetbot

[2]: http://tapbots.com/blog/tweetbot/tweetbot-is-coming
If you can't take criticism, don't post in a public forum designed for exactly that.
I have to believe that this means that Twitter is looking at turning on the revenues and likely with in stream "sponsored tweets" or some other similar type of nonsense and they don't want third parties stripping out these ads.

Its always been strange that they'd let 3rd parties be a primary interaction model since its very hard to monetize other peoples clients.
All caps = less credible

"BeyondNuclear.org" I'm not familiar, but it's possible they are using this tradegy to push an agenda.
The boilerplate comments from moderators are kinda creepy, too, like shibboleths uttered by cult members.

Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Unhelpfulness is futile.
I'm sorry. Help me with this. I'm having difficulty understanding the mobile functionality of SecretSocial. If I own a Blackberry, why use SecretSocial for a private convo as opposed to BBM?
Well, the title is adopted from the linked article...
So, is an agregating client like seesmic still allowed?

http://seesmic.com/

Edit: I see Seesmic mentioned as favored but the description sounds a lot different than what they describe their client as doing (that is, combining tweets with other alerts, something one might imagine would stand in the way of twitter's precious user experience).
Day 1 of the 7 day fast: Flood in the bathroom and other scares
The takeaway for me wasn't so much that he was trying to rationalize wasting time instead of being productive, but rather that we all do waste time sometimes one way or another and that playing games isn't a "bad" way of wasting time.
(1) I don't know what the value of exposing any plaintext in a security cookie is.

(2) I don't know what the value in having structured data, encoded or not, in a front-end security cookie; you are virtually always better with an opaque random number token.

(3) If you are going to play thermonuclear chicken with cryptography (point me to any code you wrote to generate and verify that token), I don't know what the point of a per-app HMAC key is; you are better off with a server-side per-cookie HMAC key.

(4) You haven't protected the timestamp, and so cannot do secure cookie expiration.

(5) The random number in that design doesn't appear to do anything.
"Thanks for all your help getting us where we are. Now, get out and shut the door behind you".
Somali Pirate: I made $2.4M From Ransoms in 2010
Our application's video is 1 minute 23 seconds long, is this acceptable or is the 1 minute limit strongly enforced? We did our video in one take so that it was as natural as possible and we didn't really pay attention to the time limit until we were done talking. Thanks!
FWIW, my answer did receive many upvotes. But that is really the point of moderation: to flag or steer the process when something is popular but nevertheless not in the site's long-term best interests, just as it is my duty as a parent to moderate the amount of candy my children eat :-)
Oddly enough, I just posted a enhancement request to HN asking for comments to be required for down voting. I can tell that I said something that wasn't appreciated, but I don't know why - style, phrasing, bad phase of the moon, just "not helpful"?

Getting no feedback other than a downvote doesn't help me adapt to the community. I may not agree with why my post wasn't accepted by the community that is HN, but at least I'll have more information to work with.
Indie Fund Makes Funding Terms/Agreement Public
I'm neurotypical, and I thought that comment was just fine.

I don't know why you brought that up, though.
>It sounds to me like Twitter wants to round up its user-cattle and drive them on down to monetization gulch.

Uh, yeah. Is that really surprising? We're all being driven to Monetization Gulch to escape the absolutely fatal Winter of Unprofitability.
That's fine so long as you trust all of the users on your system. Otherwise they could potentially get something running on port 22. Which, so long as you aren't actually sending auth info to 22, probably isn't a big deal.
I usually don't defend Microsoft, but I don't think your unstable workstation is the fault of Windows 7. Most likely it's a problem with one of the drivers, or maybe even a hardware issue.
How is it that I can't take criticism? I thought about the response and I agree that my answer was not helpful. How much more accommodating should I be?
An idea community: good or bad idea?
I think it is very unlikely that I am making anything up as I go along to impress an anonymous stranger on Hacker News, but you can of course think whatever you'd like.
Right, I got that. It was still confusing (or perhaps misleading) since the post you wrote wasn't about that.
You are right, those results suck. However when you type 'how to get pregnant /health' those results seem to be pretty good.
Id like to see a desktop development model more like modern web development - UI in HTML5/javascript/SVG, json data messaging, UI & system events coming from a port [eg. shinetech/eventserver], able to write small server-like plugins in Node.js / C / Ruby / lisp that can provide services and be remoted away from the UI.

Sounds a lot like HP webOS (originally developed by Palm). They even include Node.js for non-GUI services.
Yeah, as much as this post makes me not want to touch Twitter with a 10-foot pole, I have to admit that they're not going to go any further as a company by catering specifically to developers concerns. I am, however, counting the days until Evan's departure.
Where are these developers that ask this?

If you're going to roll on new draconian policies, have the balls just to lay it down as it is. Not wrap it up as if they're doing the developer community a favor when clearly no developers have been asking this at all!.

(Yeah, I know that 'we've been asked' is usual a PR spin mechanism, it's just a shitty way to communicating with people)
Sadly, this is already the case in the "War on Drugs". In another sense, we already do this but there is no competition.

A free society is not exclusive of a strong government to protect property rights and handle externalities economically. It's when they take liberties with their charge when things get bad.
mahalo?
They put out some statistics on this last year: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html
> Uh, yeah. Is that really surprising?

Your sarcastic grunting aside, it's utterly shocking. Imagine Google, circa 2001, with crass, interstitial banner ads between search and SERP. It would have destroyed them. The opportunity for heaps and heaps of money, gone in a single, vulgar puff of smoke.

Twitter has the opportunity to leverage a critical mass of enthusiastic users. This is a rare, golden gift.

Last time this happened, Facebook minted some billionaires while discovering a sustainable, user-virtuous business model. There were growing pains, especially with the early, spammy apps, but overall, Facebook has managed to balance the needs of a lot of people without screwing up the magic of their product.

The time before that, Google did the same thing.

Sadly, rather than pushing toward a business model that makes the most of the very impressive ecosystem they've cultivated, it looks as though they want to break down the most interesting portions of it and then find money in whatever turns out on the other side.

The lasting virtue of Twitter, to me, always seemed to be that it would always be whatever any given user needed it to be, thanks to the wealth of apps that dip into its API. If that goes away, Twitter's shelf life is curtailed.

To me, it seems nutty, and not terribly imaginative. Ask Digg: pissing off your core constituency so you can hopefully make money is not the same as actually making money.
Twitter’s Developer Hostility and What You Can Do to Help
How to get $10k in Google Ad Words for Free for Non Profits
I have thousands attempts at my nginx server mostly from China and most of them checking for free proxy server. I am even convinced it is some sort of automatic software scanning IP ranges for proxy. Freedom is difficult in some countries.
Given how long it took to load the link, I think he should instead say Hasta la Vista to Posterous.
Not to be pedantic, but where's the recursion?

Seems like an instance of a common metaphor:

while queue.hasElements():
element = queue.pop()
explore element if we haven't already
put element's successors into queue using some priority
Fun fact: every single URL on the first page of results also has Apache directory listing enabled.
that doesn't mean anything. In America, the wealthiest nation in the world, do I have the right to not starve to death if I become disabled? Do I have the right to live in a building with strict earthquake standards if I'm in an earthquake zone? Doesn't that conflict with the right of the business constructing the building to build it as they see fit? Do I have the right to breathe clean air? Doesn't that conflict with the factories right to pump pollutants into the air?

One persons individual rights inevitably conflict with someone else's individual rights. I have no idea what libertarianism is by your definition. For it to mean anything you have to lay out a value system that gives a default answer when one persons individual rights conflict with someone else's.
Twitter doesn't want you to build a twitter client that automatically filters out ads in the twitstream, or doesn't have ads on the sidebar like the official client, or in some other way is superior to the official client.

That is, Twitter is planning to monetize by making their product worse, and they don't want anyone offering a service on the level of what Twitter used to offer.
You can read that as, 90% of active twitter users visit the twitter.com website at least once per month.
I want my browser to develop and improve the History feature so I don't have to rely on manual bookmarking. Strangely, no one is paying attention.
This has got to be at least partially about UberMedia.

Still makes me glad I don't depend on Twitter's platform at all.
You forget that the retailer has several additional costs that you have not considered. The warehouse retailer has to transport goods, run the store, and (very importantly) has to maintain much higher stocks of each product in their stores to guarantee that, no matter which store a customer goes to, the popular item is present. (Do not underestimate the value of this factor. Volume retailers of all kinds are incredibly focused on reducing the turnaround time from when goods are purchased to profits realized from the sale.)

On the whole the advantage is definitely with Amazon, as can be verified from the prices for end consumers.

Now we get the question of fairness. People often argue about fairness as if it was an absolute fact. It is not. Fairness is a subjective opinion. Rather than trying to argue about what is fair or not fair, the best you can do is to try to understand other people's point of view.

There is a point of view from which Amazon is inducing Illinois residents to break Illinois law, and spend their money in a way that creates no Illinois jobs. Every piece of this hurts Illinois, and is not fair to companies that are forced to abide by Illinois law. You clearly do not share this point of view, but is it that hard to accept this mindset?

By contrast your point of view seems to be that Amazon is obeying US law, and it isn't Amazon's problem if Illinois wishes to foist stupid rules on its people that the people don't want to follow. That's a fair opinion, but having that opinion should not prevent you from understanding that there are other points of view out there.
If you see requests like:
"GET http://somesite/proxycheck.php

Try this in Nginx server config:
if ($request ~* "^[^ ]+[ ]+[^:]+://" ) { return 444; }

444 is nonstandard Nginx code that closes the connection without sending any headers.
Wasn't Apple using security as a OS X selling point for awhile? It's all a part of the "it just works" selling point. Security for most computer platforms is a pain in the 4ss. One of the few where it's not: Google Chrome. I have to say that my Macbook and iPad do a pretty good job of "it just works." That's a far cry from my dad's Thinkpad, where Firefox and IE both have like 7 toolbars.

A lot of suboptimal user behavior is like those dogs in the cages with electrified floors. Everything/everywhere sucks, so you just lie down on it and accept the suck as normal. (The dogs in the experiment were eventually just lying down on the electrified floor.)

Basically, if you're to have a hope of delivering the highest levels of "it just works" then you're going to have to build some security infrastructure to support it.
80% of Twitter's users probably won't care, it'll be Bieber and #bootyappreciationday as usual for them.

If we start seeing a lot of Dickbar-level gaffes from Twitter though, it may end up that the other 20% starts flocking to something else (kind of like the slow exodus from MySpace to Facebook).