skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the market was completely transparent, that would be the case, but that's not how it is. For example Yfrog: it looks absolutely terrible, but still it's very popular. If I made Twitter I wouldn't be happy about that.

A new normal Twitter-user (some who doesn't read HN, basically) might think something like this: "Oh, so this is where you post images on twitter? Doesn't look great. How do I login? Ah nevermind, I'll go back to Facebook." At the same time, TwitPic adds something to Twitter, in such a way that it fits in with it.

Bottom-line: users will connect 3rd-party apps and experiences to the API provider, so Twitter is right in making clear that they don't want crappy apps.
Sweet, where shall I procure said backpack?

I think what we need, is to couple the weight of the accelerator backpack-based laser weapon and a generator to power it with the new exoskeleton suits being built by Lockheed, Boston Robotics and others.

I have been toying with the idea of starting an O.P.E.N. project; Open Portable ExoskeletoNs... well, I guess the name needs work.

If anyone is interested...
Florida is an interesting example. If development patterns there were left to market forces, the coasts of Florida would not be as significantly developed. Insurance costs would prohibit it. But the state's insurance regulations control prices and force inland homeowners to subsidize the insurance rates of coastal homeowners. Even worse, as insurance companies flee this distorted market, the state stepped in and now runs its own insurance company, which is building a massively underfunded risk portfolio. Literally the state of Florida is at risk of bankruptcy if another hurricane Andrew hits.

Another factor is, if the storm is big enough, the feds step in with FEMA and bailout people who are underinsured.

People living in Florida's hurricane alley pay nowhere near the cost of the risk of living there, and the result is overbuilding, and catastrophic property losses when the big one eventually does hit.
You're right, I misread. Sorry; a shame it's too late to edit/delete now...
Facebook comes to some Candian IPTV.
If XCode can't be 'given away' then I would say that SOX is preventing loss leaders, because that is essentially what XCode is. They are giving away the developer tools in an effort to attract developers to their platform. At the most basic level, it's not much different than advertising 'free after rebate' items in order to attract customers into your store.
The Facebook Like Log Study
You could get all of the feedback pending for that key, as well, which would expose tokens, and potentially disrupt service.
in principle, you're right.

In practice, i must bring MS as a positive (!) example. Not that they were saint or anywhere close to it, yet they didn't even come close to use legal sh!t like EULA/Terms of service to hit developers on their platform. MS provided their own competitive products and used [sometimes dirty] tricks to win.
> If so, the question becomes: who creates more value on Twitter? Is it the old guard, who use it as a communications and community medium? Or is it the mainstream, following celebrities and talking about sandwiches they're eating, eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder?

> (edit: My hunch is that, too late, the Pareto principle will be discovered hard at work: 20% or less of Twitter users actually generate 80% of the value. I just can't see it as a bland, empty consumption tool. There's surely peril in optimizing toward that.)

Sounds like what Digg tried. On the other hand, while we can see how that one went Digg had competition.

What's Twitter's competition? What other almost-but-not-quite-as-used (say within an order of magnitude) microblogging service is there out there?
Thinking about your failed startup? Hesitating for newer idea?
Facebook, for one.

tumblr, for some demographics.
AOL Has Had Layoffs For 11 Straight Years (chart)
Twitter is a long con just like many other successful businesses, for example Google.
It's basically the same thing, closure is the name of the game here. Your solution is probably a bit more costly for memory though.
Lots of states, but not every state. California is also of particular importance because it's so big: nobody would care as much if Delaware had laws like this.

However, in California, even if you only have a physical presence in some remote part of northern CA, suddenly that affects your ability to sell to 37 million other people.
Cluster Shows You Where the Most Influential People Are at SXSW
Thanks! I can't take credit for it, though - incentivizing CPA offers was probably first done by Gratis Network a decade ago. That was for actual physical goods - complete five offers, refer three friends who do the same, get a PlayStation or an iPod.

Later, the model was adapted for Facebook games, with the offers remaining the same (insurance quotes, etc.) but virtual currency used as the bait. On iOS, the focus is on application installs, but it's still pretty similar to the Facebook model.

I can only recommend the model under very particular circumstances, since what you gain in conversion rate you lose in traffic quality. If users are shown a list of ten different offers, they'll pick the offer that sounds most appealing, but at the end of the day they really just want the incentive. Companies like Gratis were constantly churning through their advertisers, as each advertiser figured out that most of the traffic they bought couldn't care less about their products.

On iOS, the advertiser churn doesn't happen, because the installs are just a proxy for front-page App Store placement - and at the moment, anyway, App Store placement doesn't have anything to do with application usage. Because of this, the advertisers get what they want, consider any application usage they get a bonus, and the incentivized model keeps working. If Apple were to change the 'top free' list to take into account time spent in app, the model would have to be changed.
If you run a Linux or BSD stack, there is no reason to expect much trouble. Performance characteristics will be very different, but, that excepted, everything should work. Debian has a full port (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/armel/release-notes/)
The guy who won Entrepreneur magazine's Student Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009 did so with the idea of paperless/digital receipts. You can see his service here:

http://www.3secondreceipts.com/
March 11, 2011 - Twitter was fatally injured by a gunshot wound to the foot. Initial reports are indicating this was not an accicdental shooting. Twitter will be mourned and missed by a wide variety of tech enthusiasts.
I’m neither? Respect? Barking? No concept? I understand you're a business guy and really, I do appreciate your feedback. However, you make a lot of assumptions. I don't bark and with 20 years of leadership experience I’ve never had anyone disrespect me or question my tenacity - let alone my understanding of what it takes to get a job done.

ROI is Gain-Cost/Cost. It’s got nothing to do with the understanding my product, how it works, how to communicate and/or manage employees. Please explain.

I’m looking at YC as an opportunity for traction, so perhaps it isn’t the right fit for me or this opportunity. If I really wanted to do it myself, I’d hire a programmer and build the damn thing. But I think the collaborative environment around so many vested interests is really what makes this group special. Am I wrong?

Do you have any experience with this group, as a founder or other participant?
I just made encrypted.google.com my default search.
Why not let the market decide this though? If someone wants to make a new client because they either see a profit there or have some new ideas I don't think they should be telling them not to.
I thought the next paragraph was much more interesting:

"If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users' privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service."

Translation: "we will be looking very hard for any excuse to shut down existing unofficial Twitter clients."
It's a great book but one has to note that not everything there is "how things should be done" these days, Crockford himself has changed his mind on some of the things he wrote there. Take this as for example: http://www.bolinfest.com/javascript/inheritance.php or that the book advocates extending native objects (including "Object").
It's a debate surrounding positive rights vs. negative rights - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights Libertarianism generally supports negative rights arguing that the establishment of positive rights will always violate someone's negative rights and that negative rights are the natural state of human beings given the absence of violence. That means that you would not have a right to "not starve" if that meant you had to hire someone (the government) to club me over the head and steal my sandwich so you don't starve. But you do have the right to try to convince me to voluntarily give you half of my sandwich. It is the use of violent aggression as means to an end that Libertarians universally oppose, so by definition Somalia is not a libertarian paradise.
This is the BarBird open beta. Expect some things to not work right!

That's cute. I like it.

It looks like it could be an interested app but none of the tweet content loaded for Seattle or San Fran. Maybe post again when that's working.
Actually, dools is quite correct. Generalizing from spelling mistakes is a classic technique for tracing phonetic shifts in language. That's because misspelling is almost always in favor of something that sounds the same (e.g. their/there/they're).

One couldn't ask for a better example than "then/than". When I read the previous sentence out loud, the first "than" sounds closer to "then" than to the second "than".
Japan is and has been pre-eminent in earthquake prepareness for decades. Whether they decided to increase efforts doesn't diminish that.

At this point, you're trolling.

(Also, I think you meant to type "overstated".)
Fred Wilson pretty much announced that the status quo was over for Twitter API developers in an article published last April, "The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point": http://avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/the-twitter-platform.html

Notable quote:

"I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone. It was a great period for Twitter and its third party developers."
This is why people should stop frothing at the mouth any time a company does something (another example: Hudson).

If a problem is significant enough, the Community will figure something out.
I'm not quite sure about that. Check this part:

"More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.

If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service"

This sounds to me like they don't really want "normal" Twitter apps anymore, but have just grand-fathered in the existing ones, while opening the door to closing them down if they don't follow the guidelines.
Yes, this is correct. I just checked and Angry Birds has 267,000 reviews across all versions. It's just surprising the number of reviews for Smurfs Village: 71,000 in total for a game that is 4 months old as of today. Maybe this just highlights my inability to understand the appeal of click-wait-repeat style of games.
I swear by historio.us

And they might just get my subscription once I use up my last 70 or so free bookmark slots. The two best features are that you get a good search function, and it caches the page for you in case the original one falls off the net.
And Convore, though nowhere near the same scale. But that might not matter. The founding members of the Twitter community enjoyed its budding intimacy once upon a time, I suspect.

Convore is infinitely more optimized for community than Twitter was, though it remains to be seen if the structure helps or hinders organic community growth.
I generally just use the web interface now.
That's not why he left.
has google not bought twitter yet?
The first problem is your answer is condescending. To my reading your starting with probably some insider BS about what he's asking. He wants to know where he can find a capable or "rock star" developer. You interpret "Rock Star" as someone with bona fides of a whole different magnitude and then take the opportunity to bitch slap the guy in public. He's not thrilled and takes the opportunity provided to slap you back. There's not a lot of mystery here. Don't not answer questions in order to preen around in public by taking a shot at someones possible misuse of a term that might mean something different to an insider than someone trying to get in or in other words don't be an a-hole.
Identi.ca: http://identi.ca
Status.net: http://status.net
What was the question, if I may ask?
Twitter settles with FTC over security breaches
"As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where
every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already
happening organically - the number and market share of consumer client apps
that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking. According to
our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly
basis."

If this is true, then what's the point of this announcement. They make it sound like they are already getting what they want...people moving at a rapid pace towards the official Twitter applications. Yet in the same release they come off as scared that the fragmentation is growing. I don't get it.
Or government intervention.
This is a good article, if for nothing else besides that button gem which I somehow haven't heard of before.

The downside is, there will be a bunch of sites that look the same, so folks will want to do some real work and find their own components.
I'll grant that Sproutcore (and Cocoa for that matter) actually have a lot more in common with Fowler's Passive View (which I've usually seen implemented as a MVP rather than MVC) than the original Smalltalk MVC. But it surely has much more in common with the Smalltalk MVC than the Rails MVC. The only real difference is the composition of the pattern. The Smalltalk MVC is composed of Composite (View), Strategy (Controller) and Observer (Model), whereas the Sproutcore MVC is composed of Composite/Command (View), Mediator (Controller) and Observer (Model). They both manage state through a very similar three tier architecture.
Which is also counteracted by simple self interest on the part of people that don't want to die in their homes. Some of us, even those who rent, do consider what might happen in a disaster and choose to live in sturdier structures.

Its true that government standards get tightened and relaxed, just as they do in banking. Which is probably a good reason not to rely upon them. They are dumbed-down, lowest common denominator standards anyway.
"We're not even Twitter's customers. Advertisers are Twitter's customers."

There's a saying: "If you're not paying for the product, you ARE the product."
> I swear I caught my brain 'compiling' or 'defragging' or something.

That might be your brain telling you to switch to a task that doesn't involve one of those activities for a day or two. :P
Re-routing Chris Sacca's Buzz to Aid Tsunami Victims
The "underestimation" of mortgage risk was deliberate, the bankers were motivated by short-term bonus payouts.
> Fahrenheit is more than double the precision of Celsius.

How do you figure? For any given interval, say, freezing point to boiling point of water; F is precisely 9/5 the precision of C, no? Which is close to double, but not more than double.

Or am I misunderstanding your point?
Storify tracks all the sxsw news in one handy place.
I'm not very familiar with Drupal or the news CMSs built on top of it.
First impressions:

- the UI makes sense if I bother to spend more than 30 seconds playing with it, but it's hard to tell what it does at first. Maybe add a tag line or a brief description for the non-mobile users.

- has actual content for major cities that are not in the US. Impressed.

- looks polished overall

- how are you monetizing?
Yep, I've worked here since 1996 (the company was founded in 1995) and we didn't release Guitar Hero until 2005 (actually, we didn't release a game at all until 2001, although we had done other music apps before). It was a total hockey stick curve.
And yet Twitter interaction needs to be the "same way everywhere", "consistent", "same experience", rigorous adherence, etc. Seems anti-innovation to me.

I think it's rather that they want to own the client space, and are setting a "high bar" - i.e. a way of removing the competition by fiat. But if you supply content that they can make money off of, by all means, continue to sharecrop.
This is not a serious reply. [comment deleted]
Adobe Flash Is Doomed, Says Firefox VP
Eh, it was a little sensitive, and it would probably make the staff able to identify me. :)
We've toyed with taglines at the top and once the iPhone app/Android app were done we wanted to use that space to advertise. We definitely need to work something short back in there.

We have a few different ideas for monetization; the most obvious one is auctioning off that 'hot tweet' area on a nightly basis; that is seen by every web/mobile user. I like it because these are advertisements our users would actually want to see.
> many of which are nonsense like one which was a 5-star review that said only "ok"

I recently got notified by the iPhone Things app with a message along the lines of "most people only rate the app when they delete it. If you're using Things, why not rate it right now?" and a button to go directly to the review page. I had no idea until I had clicked through that a textbox would be involved; I was expecting to just click on some stars and go back to my app.
This reminds me that another way for fellow Japanese to help their compatriots would be to remove the passwords on their wireless networks and rename the SSID to "Free Wi-Fi for those who need it".

Thoughts?
That's very odd; it works great on Chrome/FF4, works decently on Safari and IE8+; anything less than IE8 doesn't work. Which browser were you using?
If you're in the bay area finding talent is going to be especially hard, not because it's not here, but its already in such demand. The jobs area of stackoverflow and github could be great bets for finding people. As these are newer resources there may be not quite as many companies taking advantage yet.

Networking events while a slow path is a good one to take. It also makes the interpersonal parts of evaluating someone much easier than through the formal interview process.

The final thing, is that even though there is profitability salary compensation will be a factor for talented employees. If you're looking to give up a bulk of equity then you're looking more at a co-founder than employee and should just set expectations accordingly.
What is particularly galling is that Twitter has been saying for years that they want to monetize without slapping ads over everything. Now they're monetizing by... slapping ads over everything. And ensuring that no one can threaten the business model they supposedly didn't want to use.

All of this would have been better had Twitter just started off by slapping ads on their service and making it clear how they were going to protect it. Instead, they've grown their userbase (at least among the technorati) by asserting that they weren't going to pursue the exact model they seem so ardently chasing now.

Sure, 3rd party app devs might be "suckers" for having latched on early, but I don't think that excuses Twitter for such a (to use a Gruberism) dick move.
This has to be the first time any one has compared us to a "giant insectoid creature" but we're happy for the feedback.
Yeah. Actually, the savviest investors were the ones betting that the bubble would pop. Of course, the majority thinks otherwise or there would have been no bubble. Savvy in this case was simply looking at the facts and not letting popular opinion keep you from acting.

And, for some, having friends in the government to bail out the fools who bet on the bubble growing forever so you can get paid.
Hey, thanks for posting it here. I am the author of the study. Here are some additional charts for fellow HNers:

Most voted words at HN:

http://ediscope.labs.yahoo.net/final/hackernews_positive.png

Least voted words at HN:

http://ediscope.labs.yahoo.net/final/hackernews_negative.png

These trends are pretty volatile. The data was collected at the time when Larry Page was announced to succeed Eric Schmidt. They were pretty hot that day.

Actually, original study was posted to HackerNews on Monday night (50+ votes, frontpage 1am-8am PST), but US audience has missed it. Thanks for repost and added comments :)
With all due respect to the open source Twitter clones, Facebook didn't beat MySpace by being open source. It beat MySpace by being an exclusive, opinionated, clutter-free alternative to MySpace, and later on a developer platform.
http://yokosonews.com/live (english, ad for 30s)

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-gtv2 (Japanese)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42025882/ns/world_news-asiapacif...
The real reason why Twitter is banning 3rd party clients
Visualization of Japan's earthquake from NOAA
the guy participated only in one hijacking, in all the other cases he was an investor.
If someone wants to explain a down-vote, they'll say it in a reply to that comment.

Requiring explanations will merely result in meaningless deluges of "not helpful", "bad", "this is a comment of a type I don't wish to see on HN", or people C&Ping long political rants.
This is a great idea. I'll be adding it to my site shortly.
I couldn't help but selfishly compare to founding a startup while reading this. I've been working on my startup for 6 months and have hard days. I can't imagine how throwing away 5 years of work would feel.

To me the struggle holds true anytime you are creating something. A novel, a song, an application. I wouldn't say coding is a struggle. Nor writing. But building an application or writing a story—those are challenging.

Reminded me of this post too:

When you want to quit because it's just not worth it
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271405
Here are my thoughts:

1) Big professional societies like ACM and IEEE will not just dissolve or go away (I vaguely remember being told that IEEE was the largest professional society in the world!). This is a good thing. We need these to manage the complicated management of prestige in the academic fields, e.g. senior members, fellows, etc and arrange conferences and similar gatherings. I am a member of IEEE (been for the past 11 years) and will gladly pay my dues just for these services.

2) However, the outdated paper publishing approach that these societies are pursuing has to be stopped. Now, it won't stop on its own because of the "if it ain't broke" principle. There has to be some definitive act to show the world a better solution. This could be (i) creating a website and put pirated versions of all recent papers (e.g. in the last 10 years) for selected journals, while offering much better search tools than are currently offered at the society web sites; and/or (ii) convincing more and more professionals to put up papers on personal pages, make it prestigious to do so, again perhaps using a central site, similar to Citeseer.
An interesting read, but it seems very strange to me that so much could be written about how Smalltalk came to be as it is without any mention of the influence of LISP.
I feel really foolish for asking this, but...where the heck is the RSS feed?