skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter has never shown any indication that they know how to leverage the massive network to which they have unrestricted access. I've never seen anything from them that gives me any notion that they have any idea how to make money from the beast. Everything we've seen them try rings more as a "shot in the dark" than execution on a legitimate strategy.

Twitter's network of people is valuable (though not likely as valuable as some believe); but the setup of the network, as it is today, means that Twitter isn't in a very good position to monetize it. I'd argue that a celeb with 100 million followers has far more power within the Twitter network than Twitter itself (a fact that I think is changing now that more people are connecting via "official" clients like the website and other formerly 3rd party clients).

I realize that I don't have access to the proposals that they are showing these investors and maybe in there is some really great strategy for turning what's essentially free, publicly viewable text messages into a gold mine--but I just don't see it. This strikes me more as yet another round of investors riding the hype wave and hoping to time their own cash out before the sad reality sets in that just because something becomes popular doesn't mean there's a good way to make money from it.
> What benefits does an empty try block give you?

An empty try block allows us to repeat variable declarations with the same name in a long stretch of scripty-style code.

> You can always use braces to separate a block without try at all.

You can use braces in Java, but not in that language I'm talking about: it'll throw an error saying "Ambiguous expression could be a parameterless closure expression, an isolated open code block, or it may continue a previous statement; solution: Add an explicit parameter list, e.g. {it -> ...}, or force it to be treated as an open block by giving it a label, e.g. L:{...}, and also either remove the previous newline, or add an explicit semicolon ';'".

The standalone-try looked far more elegant than:

dudlabel:{
//do something
}

Better for that despot to re-enable standalone try-statements in Groovy than petitioning the Java 8 designers that thin arrows look better than industry-standard thick arrows.
New Fossils May Redraw Human Ancestry
Sadly, my own project 1pix.me, which is based on Notifo will probably shut down when Notifo shuts down, as I probably won't have the time to change over to a different service.

But thank you for the great service - it was great while it lasted (I got your email earlier today).
Will they be full closures and remember the state of objects in scope?
Even Friedman's argument observes that some "socially responsible" spending might actually be in the interests of a corporation's shareholders

Tim Cook offering a tax-deductible (I assume) employee benefit that has the additional side effect of generating positive publicity probably falls into that bracket.
Target has a physical presence in many locations, so they already have the tax data for those locations. If they just calculate the taxes based on the rate at the nearest Target location (which is what would happen if you went to the physical store and bought something), then it would be easy. If they have to calculate the tax based on the address of the recipient, the problem becomes insanely difficult.
Seriously, though. Has anybody done a similar information density study on programming languages?
It's sad that Wave is considered a failure. My friends and I use it everyday and find it to be a huge improvement to email in many instances.
Because there's a single failure mode. If your project is hosed after one guy gets hit by a truck, it's a risky project - no matter how good everything else looks.
Interesting to note. Twitter has an estimated monthly user base of 40-70 million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-active-users-does-Twitter-have...). That said, they are valuing each customer at between $200-$114 each. Just thought I would put that out there...
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Sorry to hear this.

I'd like to know, though, how many users did the service get?
Tweets are already ads; it seems like they could just charge social media experts™ to send tweets rather than injecting stuff that people probably don't want.
Facebook Begins Auto-Grouping Friends Into Smart Lists
I do want to add that as a developer who used the API to send 37916 (and counting) notifications, I fully expected to get an email one day asking for money. I never did, and that makes me sad.
That's actually pretty slick. Not sure if other operating systems do something similar already. I know my Macs "sleep" rather than hibernate and are nearly ready immediately upon hitting the power button or flipping the lid open. While that isn't the same as what Microsoft is doing here it is a pretty clever way to achieve faster boot times.

Microsoft does have some intelligent people working there. It's such a bummer it can't get some real work done outside of Office and Windows. I'd say their games unit is pretty solid too but everything else seems to be a real hit or miss scenario.

Neat reading these things though.
> And you can't pay Twitter's bills on the 0.1% of users who'll pay $5 a month.

I wonder do their bills exceed $5 million a month. (I know, you pulled numbers from nowhere. I'm only making the point that they have an absolutely enormous userbase[0].)

[0]http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/09/08/twitter-100m-users-...
Good luck at your next gig, and I look forward to the next at bat
I've noticed a sudden, sharp rise in Diaspora's outreach efforts in recent days, ranging from activity on Facebook, to direct emails. It looks like they're trying to get things moving again, from a PR perspective.

Unfortunately, they've probably squandered a lot of that initial publicity. They had a lot of doubters from the very beginning, and now that the project has dragged on this long, I'm sure that many are dismissing the entire thing as vapourware.
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"Then I remembered about Theodore Roosevelt's speech" kind of gave it away. :-)
Loading Tasks for CPU Processing
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while you have obviously abandoned our other thread, I should point out that the toppling of the Saddam statue is not so much fake as much as it is ambiguous, a sort of dreamlike happenstance between media, military, and Iraqi civilian all preying on each other's expectation.

In other words, it is exactly the sort of delicious nexus of unpredictable behavior that makes for an interesting symbol--but such subtleties of intent on all parties involved is lost on your black-and-white thinking.
Or, you know, write your own. Google doesn't owe you anything.
That looks like an insanely fast boot, under 10 seconds, must've been an SSD. Hope Windows 8 leads HDD manufacturers to make Hybrid hard drives, say a 3TB disk with 16GB SSD embedded inside. The OS can decide what files to keep on there based on usage (boot files and frequently used programs are an obvious choice).
So what stops me from writing a client that whitelists only the users I want to see? Unless Twitter completely changes their API, or camouflages ads as tweets from my follow list, how can they lock you into seeing ads?
This one of rarest stories about Microsoft on HN. It is easy to forget about Microsoft all together. Good to notice Win8 could really add up to the previous versions.
I can't resist, so,

public static class ActionExtensions
{
public static void InvokeAsync(this Action<object> target, object context)
{
new Thread(obj => target(obj)).Start(context);
}
}

((Action<object>) (Console.WriteLine)).InvokeAsync("Hello, World");
I concur with the disappointment in Lion. I don't even see 3+ GB in new features, much less features that I actually like.
Although I agreed with most of Jason Fried thoughts on dispora, I thought the jury was still out. It turns out his prediction was right.

...That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. Here’s the problem: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise.... love the underdog, but I fear for the product-less underdog that has all the wrong things at the wrong time.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse
digg's ads only work if you enable javascript
And I thought email.
Break the ad chain, use https://identi.ca
there's definitely a reason YOU don't...
Assuming that you believe the compensation for this contracting gig will be enough to sustain the company for a time as if you had been funded: absolutely. At the end of the day, you still walk away with 100% equity and no potential for meddlesome investors.
"we want to start with boot time – no feature gets talked about and measured more."

What?

I've never understood why I should care since it's something I do once a week or less for a few seconds.
I've always found this an unacceptable part of their library. It's not impossible, and not even especially difficult (it's just some viewport adjustments). Sencha Touch got this right a long time ago. Fixed toolbars should be fixed, the whole point of using a library like this is to abstract away the individual device implementation details. Waiting it out, until the manufacturer implements it just seems lazy and unprofessional, especially since it was an easy fix that just never got implemented.
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If you do already bootstrap your start-up as a team, where do you find the gigs? Referrals? Craigslist, or another contracting site like Monster or oDesk?
They can't do that. Then you'd have revenue to base valuations on.

Revenue is a big no-no in silicon valley, it punctures the reality distortion bubble.
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It seems like we are not in a bubble, excluding Groupon.
"we didn’t want to sacrifice user experience"

Bullshit. They are ads. At least be honest about it.
I thought Twitter cut Google off? Well, all the people with non-European names / pseudonyms will have to stay with Twitter.
I've never seen a UPS truck at a regular gas station. Perhaps they too found some way around retail gasoline taxes.
How many people do you follow? I am pretty sure a Google Forum would not work for me...
Original paper: http://www.lsadc.org/info/documents/2011/press-releases/pell...
Before everyone starts hyperventilating, they aren't going to send you emails of promoted tweets from accounts you don't follow. This sounds like Reddit's promoted links -- hopefully, like Reddit, they'll open it up to more users and it won't be a repeat of what happened with Digg.
T-shirts for 3.5k people. Stickers and CDs for 4.5k people.

I’m estimating $15k for the T-Shirts, $1.5k for the stickers and $3.5k for the CDs. Maybe I underestimated one or several of those. $26k certainly doesn’t seem unrealistic for the merch and they had to ship it. It was part of the deal.

That’s actually one of negative things about Kickstarter: It can’t be good that someone who should and most certainly is busy pushing out a product suddenly also has to be this expert in getting merch made and shipping it to people.

I would assume becoming that expert is not easy and being good at dealing with merch doesn’t seem like a valuable skill the rest of the time – you know, when you are busy building a social network or doing whatever.

All this merch crap sadly seems to have become a staple of Kickstarter projects. Maybe it’s necessary to get people to pay?
All of the B8 posts have gotten good HN coverage because they're written in our language.
Not giving you access to the APIs for a new, "misbehaving" client is one way.
That's not a market valuation. That's one group's overinflated opinion of Twitter's value.

A market valuation is obtained by offering a good for sale to a public group of people who, in concert, determine a fair value over a certain period of time.
it is still around. just using it today to prototype webhooks with openstack
From all the MSDN posts I've seen thus far, it looks like MS is going to kick their "every-other-os-is-great" trend with Windows 8.
It depends on the startup. If I were starting a company that needs a critical mass to be profitable (eg a social network), and therefore needed more cash up front that could be produced without external funding, then no, I probably wouldn't try to boot strap.

In another example, my hypothetical startup might be able to reach profitability via bootstrapping, but wouldn't be able to grow organically fast enough to prevent competitors with deep pockets from beating you to market dominance. In such a case, taking external funding to scale quickly might be a wise move.

So yeah, I'd bootstrap if my startup lent itself to it, since having more equity is great. Ultimately, though, I'll do what the startup needs.
You know, there's a reason people say ORACLE stands for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
I think that fragmentation (esp. by interest, and even more so by profession) will make SNS much more profitable in the long run.
Sad to see it's closed. Hope you gain many intangibles out of the adventure despite the closing.

Do you mind sharing any lessons? What's the cost like for running Notifo?
Ask HN: I can't get on my email and I have no host yet
On my pc, can't connect to my live account. On my mobile, can't connect to my live account either. I'm not sure what the problem is so that is one of my questions: anyone else getting this problem and what do I do about it?
The hosting is my next problem. I signed up (and paid) for hosting at HostGator and last I checked (yesterday) I hadn't gotten an e-mail of verification, and receipt. This was done and paid the past Saturday, Sept. 3. So yeah, if you have any words of wisdom, please share.
Cheers.
You may be close to winning already. Identica was at half a million (may not be active) users two months ago. Adding in StatusNet, TWiT Army, and all the other nodes it could be there.

http://identi.ca/conversation/75407544
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Agreed. Just discourage people from turning the PC off instead of putting it to sleep.
Even with 100% honest taxpayers, the use tax still puts local business at a disadvantage, due to the time value of money. I'd much rather pay later, with "worth less" dollars, than pay now.
Hm, .91 'information per syllable' for English at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second are 5.6 'information' per second vs. .49 * 7.84 = 3.8 for Spanish.

How is 5.6 "more or less identical amount of information" as 3.8? That's a 47% difference!
For someone else? No. For my own project? Anytime.
Imagine If Everyone Had to Reinvent the Wheel...
Watch,entourage season 8 episode 10,online,megavideo
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striking out very well I think that marriage is far from behind us uncomfortable says Dana It is clear that Entourage is in the heart,
Not disparaging them, but on my MBP/SSD Lion boots to login screen in about 2 seconds and boots to desktop w/ auto-login turned on in ~5.
Does anyone else get really annoyed with the interjections about other articles I should read on Time? Reminds me of those Bing commercials.
I really like this service; I use it everyday. I'll be sorry to see it go.
$500k a month: 0.1% of 100 million is 100k, not 1 million.
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Interesting move from Facebook. Something i'd like to see, just to see how it groups my friends. But I doubt i'd ever use.

Facebook is my instant messaging, 'friend email' and groups platform. That's basically it. The second the groups email interface is improved and gets iChat integration ill stop using facebook altogether and just run it all out of other apps.
yes, closures are implied. lambda's are almost useless without closures being included.
Great move. It's time to grow up, ignore the people who complain (let them move on, they won't click on ads anyway), and make some profit.
While the Tech Press is busy with other things, The Senate passes patent reform
Now they just have to enforce a rule on OEMs that every windows 8 PC must meet requirements that allow it not only to work, but actually make it work well. Especially in regards to ram requirements.

I like what they did with WP7 in that regard.
can you share the instructions for getting ForthOS on QEMU?

I tried it using Q on MacOSX, and I don't see the last line of output. ie., the FORTH prompt.
For some reason I seem to Cio new programming language will be locked up not only under the WEB but under a large-scale development of all kinds of goodies for Android and Chrome

Perhaps this language in the near future will be a key to all projects Google
Growing up == throwing your userbase in the shitter? In case you were in a coma a year ago:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

Shoving your monetization attempts in the user's face by interrupting the stream of information they expect from you is like shoving a dogshit-filled paper towel in someone's nose right before they take a bite of cake.
Ask HN: How much would it cost to build the ultimate VR hardware system?
We have a lot of epic Nerf battles around our HQ and we also play a lot of Call of Duty.

That got me thinking... what if I could combine the running, ducking, and aiming of Nerf with the visuals and general awesomeness of CoD? The ultimate toy... Snow Crash without the brain stem tap.

I'm picturing a 15ft diameter ball with precision servos coming in from all directions attached to a full body suit and helmet combo with built-in projection glasses.

The servos would sense your body motions to animate your character model and would also provide feedback... the sensation of running, climbing stairs, crawling on your stomach, leaning on a wall, getting shot. The helmet would control point of view.

You would have full range of motion within the ball and the ball itself could move up and down and rotate in all directions to provide the appropriate gravity simulation.

The development scope would necessarily include modding a game to accommodate the inputs and outputs that the suit needs. CoD would have to enable reaching down to pick up a grenade and lifting a gun, Skyrim would enable riding a horse and swinging a sword, etc.

Success is defined as being able to do every stock action in the game using the body movement that you use in Real Life and with the sensations of RL... gravity, obstacles, etc.

So, if you picked one game (let's use Skyrim) to port, how much would it cost to build a fully functioning system including hardware, software, and game mods?
First to file vs. first to invent are procedural requirements that do NOT, in any way, alter the standards for patentability. In other words, you still have to prove novelty, utility, nonobviousness, and sufficiency of disclosure of an invention falling within the scope of patentable subject matter.

This change just brings us more in line with other members to the Paris Convention/Patent Cooperation Treaty. It's important to note that their definitions of patentable subject matter may differ from ours.
The Main Points of the bill as I can tell:

1. Patents are awarded based on first to file not first to invent.
2. More funding to decrease wait times for filers
3. Patent Review process for challenges

Why, did I hear about this first from WaPo/AP an not TechCrunch?

Oh. yea.
You guys don't care but they're reporting that the majority of users do. They're not saying its rational.
It seems like a deceptively easy way to solve global warming. Anyone see any holes in it?
Sounds like an easy value-add for them or someone else to provide design/manufacture/drop-shipping for all the merch if you give them your logos and brief, or whatever.

They save on effort, and you take a few percent yourself. Scale means you can make better arrangements with suppliers, and quite possibly everyone comes out ahead.

Edit: to address the "is it even necessary?" question, I'd personally guess at 'yes'. Having some sort of tangible reward for your contribution, even if it's just a sticker, helps people justify the cost. Then they can wear your hat or t-shirt and get maximum indie "I funded them even before they were underground" credit. Also, free(ish) advertising for you.
On my X220 the Windows 7 boot is already fast even without a SSD (pre-desktop authentication and some Lenovo sauce helps) but watching the video FTA - that's mind bogglingly fast - it's more like the Mac's sleep/resume than a cold boot!

The key change seems to be a clever kernel session hibernation. They discard user sessions as those involve writing a lot of data (full hibernation) but save kernel session which can be written out and read back fairly quickly. Then there is multicore enabled resume - doesn't help with disk io but with decompression of hibernated data.
I think that a new programming language to be used under the WEB for large-scale development of all sorts of goodies for Android and Chrome

Perhaps this language in the near future will be a key to all projects Google
Mozilla Publishes Do Not Track Developer Guide
I'd rather my startup made money! This is all very much possible. Sure i'm all for raising a fair amount of money (not too much) and being lean. Then making money from the get go.
Trying out http://jquerymobile.com/test/ which is synced to the latest code base, it seems that they have added one final step

5) delay a long time then scroll back to where you were

Not losing your place is significant, but the steps are still quite distinct and the delays quite painful.

I suspect this is a testament to the difficulty of cross browser/device mobile development in general.
I'm not worried for them. If they're entrepreneurs they'll either work hard and make it work, pivot or if they want they'll get hired by someone.

I think they should forget about fighting Facebook and be the Wordpress of Social Networking. Ning was trying to the Wordpress.com of the space.

They could then offer the ability to create social networks like Ning did with premium features. But look at where Ning went wrong and iterate.
Ask HN: Where/how can I find a personal Programming Coach?
I'm a professional designer, but I want the ability to build my own ideas. I've stopped out of learning Ruby (and Rails) three times now due to frustration, lack of discipline and just not getting beyond parroting the tutorial examples from the books and videos. I can follow along, but I'm just not grokking it.

I'm making this (learning how to code) a top priority in my life for the next year. I'm setting aside an hour a night to learn, but I need a coach (and I'm willing to pay market hourly rates for an experienced developer's time). I'm looking for someone who can spend an hour with me every week night helping me learn how to code, either in person (Pasadena, CA) or over Skype with a screensharing app.

Where/how can I find this person? spking82@gmail.com or 805-404-7732. Thanks for your help!
Not so much for desktops, but for laptops it's nice. I coldboot my laptop a couple times a day. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 with an SSD and it takes about 8 seconds after autologon.
I'd rather raise money. For me, startups are all or nothing. I believe focus is critically important to an early stage startup. While splitting time between consulting and your startup gives you a broader view of the world, it spreads you thiner, and means you make less progress with your startup.

I always remember that 100% of nothing is nothing. If you really believe in an idea - enough to spend time on it - raise some money, don't worry that you now own a smaller part of it, and change the world.
Wish I could help other than saying don't waste time here, try another forum. HN isn't really a troubleshooting site in most cases. :)
Intel is a fast growing software company...
Not sure where you should go, not sure HN is the best place to put out problems like this. Especially because most people use Gmail vs Hotmail. http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/ is a useful place.