skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers.

Precisely. Monetizing Twitter is a no-brainer if it has to happen. If the company runs out of money, they could do a token layoff of a couple people, issue a desperate plea to their user community with the headline SAVE TWITTER, and a bunch of us will pony up $19.99 a year.

I don't expect them to do that. There are all sorts of more subtle ways to bring in money, and I expect that they will try all of those first, serially or in parallel. They're trying to be very sure not to set a price so high that they can be undercut. If they avoid that mistake, they can own their niche for a decade or more.

It's also obvious why we haven't seen any attempts yet: Twitter is still recovering from the effects of the Fail Whale phase.

Now that Twitter operations are stabilized, I believe they still have a bunch of smaller competitors. It would be a mistake to drive traffic to those competitors by inelegant monetizing. It would be a better idea to let the competition die from lack of oxygen first. It would be even better if some of Twitter's competitors, driven by necessity, were compelled to experiment with charging money before Twitter does. Some of the best market research is that which your competitors do for free. And, best of all, one of the competitors might succeed in finding a monetization model that can keep them alive... and then Twitter can copy that model, but with a massive advantage in network effect and scalability.
Dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328767

I think it's an interesting idea though. How many things sort of fade, or don't take off, only to be resurrected and achieve popularity elsewhere?
Any plans for a Linux Gtk/Qt client?
Great site, thank you. It will be useful for me (I know nothing about music, so my musical variety is very limited... a good recommendation engine that goes out of the typical genres is like gold for me).
...and I predict that once Twitter tries to charges a corporates it will be replaced by an RSS Feed.
In what way are you required to read an SMS the moment that it arrives?
Another thing for you to keep in mind: the same group handed out prizes at some point to Hayek and Friedman.
As a Michigan native, that analogy brought back some bad memories for me.
And Porshe has 0.2% of the car market.
About the Heisenberg-principle of interacting with others: my experience with Americans is that they tend to be outspoken and direct, and expect the same in return.

In cultures where people are more subtle and polite and reserved, where people regard modesty an important virtue, they misunderstand an outspoken, direct opinion for taking charge, taking leadership, and they think the Yank expects them to follow orders from then on.

Suggestion to Yanks when dealing with foreigners: talk like a Briton. You know, like "I'm not yet entirely convinced doing N is the best way" instead of being outspoken and direct.
My friends and I run the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGFest: http://magfest.org/ ) and for the past few years I've been tinkering with a webapp to help us get more organized. I've been to a lot of conventions, mostly anime conventions, and no one has a good integrated system for tracking attendees, staffers, shifts, events, inventory, budget, etc.

My webapp does all of this, and I've spent a lot of my free time lately making the code cleaner and easier to read. After the next MAGFest in early January I'm planning on releasing this webapp as an open source project on Sourceforge or somewhere similar.

I think a lot of other conventions might find this useful if they can find a programmer or sysadmin to make the small changes necessary to adapt the code for their purposes. I'm excited that some of our staffers are already planning on recommending this system to some of the other conventions they staff.
Diversity is good because when members have different experiences, and thus point of views.

"Point of view is worth 80 IQ points"
How about some NY love Josh (or maybe even Howard)? You should camp out in Cafe Grumpy
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I've been reading around some. As I was the first to admit, I am ignorant. FWIW, glowing reviews are running about 70-30 with critical reviews of their award. There's a nice glowing review over at Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/13/krugman-economics-...)

Even then, the author ends with:

"But these days, even while disavowing overtly protectionist positions, Krugman's columns do sometimes have a protectionist tenor. Not only purists, but developing country policymakers, worry that Krugman is part of the shifting intellectual climate in the United States that has become ambivalent about keeping markets for goods and services open. Now that he also has the imprimatur of the Nobel Committee, Paul Krugman has a special responsibility to retain his cosmopolitan and internationalist credentials. At this time of financial crisis, Krugman should be reminding us that shutting down markets for trade helped transform the depression of the 1930s into the Great Depression."

I'm open to discourse, just not impressed with the downmodding as a result of going against the herd over here. I've found economics a subject of some interest, but even with as much math as it takes, my _opinion_ is that it is far from a hard science like physics. So pointing out that politics and people's biases are involved shouldn't be such a freaking big deal, in my opinion. And that goes with Hayek, Friedman, and Krugman. My comment holds for all of them. That's the weird part about it.
Hehe, its more about being a big bully than strategy! giving it out for free which VMWare cannot afford to do with its only bread and butter product.

However seems like someone at MS is pretty head strong on this issue -
"Choice is always good for customers, [so] instead of playing 'my hypervisor versus VMware', we decided we're going to leapfrog VMware, and the way we are going to leapfrog them is through our management solutions."
I'm becoming more and more convinced that "Idiocracy' was a documentary. It's truly scary to me that not only does this happen a lot, but that professors have class sizes so largest that it's literally impossible for them to get to know students well enough to put two and two together.
Missed Apple Predictions
Oops! Let me amend my statement, then: Twitter is a stream separate from your SMS, so you have the option of treating those two streams separately. For example, I treat SMS like a sort of semi-synchronous channel: I leave my SMS alerts on so that my phone beeps whenever I receive one, and then I reserve that channel for my friends and family.

Sorry, I'm not much of an SMS user, so I lack sophistication with it. And I sometimes forget that my personal quirks are not generally applicable.

While I'm correcting myself, let me note that sending an SMS costs money. That money may add up if you're blasting SMS messages to 10k customers at once. Of course, we're discussing the possibility that Twitter may end up costing money too, but perhaps it will still be cheaper.
Diet pill reviews
Pretty good review site, they provide well researched articles and information on the popular diet pills.
Worldwide dell has 14.9% market share vs 3.6% for Apple.

In the US Ford has 17% and Porsche has 0.2%.

So Porsche is around 10x as exclusive as Apple. If Apple want's to keep growing they need to keep putting out cheaper boxes to take an ever larger slice of the pie. However, Porsche is far more profitable than Ford so their are reasons Apple is not selling cheep boxes.
> area with lower cost of living

Bologna is not a cheap place to live, although IIRC maybe he had some help with the apartment, which would be a big contribution. Italy in general is pretty expensive these days, especially considering the salaries.
I recently bitched on Twitter about my bad HD service from Comcast, within minutes I had a reply from a Comcast rep on Twitter offering to fix my problem. Within hours I had a phone call from another rep who left me her direct line and told me to call anytime the symptoms appeared.

If Twitter can make Comcast connect with their customers better, anything is possible.
Yup. I'm on the Mac and it's one of the things I haven't found a good keyboard shortcut. Drives me up a wall.
But you are coding in JavaScript. You just make sure that your methods return the current object if you want them to be chainable.

The real JavaScript of jQuery doesn't happen when you're writing simple transformations on the page, instead, you really get deep into it once you start extending jQuery through plugins. To really write these correctly, you need a deep understanding of JavaScript (because you'll be reading the jQuery source code at many points).

More than anything else, jQuery is an API to make the DOM manageable (itself an API of sorts).

What's great about JavaScript in many ways is that it's not Python (which is also great in so many ways): It's very flexible and lets you write your code as you see fit. I don't think that jQuery could happen so easily and cleanly in many other languages.

But any serious object-oriented language needs to be able to method chain, and it needs to feel natural. Even PHP can do it (I used this in a template engine to generate HTML structures very quickly):

$template->div("#header")->ul()->li()->a("A new link");
To address the original point, I don't think Chrome is a sign that Google is losing the elusive "it". Google has a bunch of less-than-popular initiatives out there. Sometimes, they roll new products out not as an end-game but as a means to some other non-obvious goal.
I'm stumped these days on how to handle dupes. I had been deleting them when folks pointed them out (except the print version over the multipage one). But here it's apparent that a bunch of folks didn't see the original. I wish I could transfer the karma points to you, or link this submission to the original, though I imagine that would introduce many more new complications.

What do other folks think about duplicates?
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I can see it now: it's a trilogy. The war on Drugs, the War on Terror, and the War on Copyright Infringement.
Fantastic. Do let me know how you get on with the site.
I'm not so comfortable with this intervention. It's one thing to offer capital during a crisis, it's another thing to force capital during a crisis at set rates.

I'd be more comfortable if the government said, we are offering $250bn in capital to American banks and those banks are able to bid for pieces of it. Those with the most attractive bids will get it.

How is this different? Simple, it makes the banks offer as much in return as they see in their interest giving the government the best deal. There's no reason to reward companies that can't raise capital on the open market with a sweetheart deal. If some banks are unwilling to bid up for that capital, that's fine. They can look to the open market for capital or maybe (basically just Wells Fargo) they're in a strong position from good management.
"You just made me and every other female/over 30 reader feel like shit."

Why do you care what other people think of your age or anything? If someone wrote "she got a boyfriend with a much smaller beer gut", should I feel bad just because I have a significant beer gut? Nay. Other people's priorities is other people's business.

Always being scared knee-jerk of saying anything less than happy-positive-sugar-candy because it might offend someone somewhere is a sure way to become unable to express anything important.
"Ars gratia artis"

Explains why great artists lived poor financially. But there are always who bring in the genius of AND with art meets living (commercial). They ofcourse are geniuses.
up-vote for Idiocracy, but this current election gives me some hope.

I'm actually less concerned about people getting through school by cheating. Sooner or later they'll have to actually prove themselves or face the consequences. Character is destiny.
Two quotable quotes: "Work does not necessarily make you happy, but it may provide you the money to do the things that make you happy."

"If all you get from your job is a paycheck, you're underpaid"

I don't think it's a trade-off if you don't love your job. However, if you truly hate your job - why are you doing it?

I was a workaholic for the longest time and I still am - I am re-applying my workaholic tendencies to outside-the-cube. Software development bankrolls ventures like learning Spanish and Salsa dancing.
Anatomii of a Hack
The problem with most exercise advice is that no exercise in the world helps if you are not willing to do it. And this is what they don't tell you. They just tell you to gather your willpower and make it a habit and whatnot. Does not work. You gather your willpower for a month, maybe two, then it drifts away. So it's of no use.

Instead: try to find an exercise you LOVE. It does not matter much how good it is, the only thing that matters that you love it, that it's fun, play, a hobby, not a duty you hate to do.
I agree, but the basic element (government money for stock) is still pretty progressive. And don't stocks involve valuation bidding among investors?
I think Hugh MacLeod's How To Be Creative gives this subject a better treatment. I haven't forgotten the very simple "Sex & Cash Theory." Creative people need two jobs: one is sexy, and one pays the bills.
Everyone should learn at an early age that they need at least two addresses; one for personal asshattery (leethaxor@gmail.com) and one for professional or semiprofessional correspondence (your.name@gmail.com). Only use the professional one for your professional correspondence (sending resumes) or signing up for mailing lists / whatever where you are going to be on your best behavior (an open source project's mailing list). Use leethaxor for whatever the hell you want.

On a similar note, use 'leethaxor' when posting your personal opinion in a comment / on a forum... if you make a comment / post in your real name, assume it will show up on the first page when someone googles your name (this actually happens a lot).

Preventing the need for your personal data to be removed is the best way of ensuring your privacy, rather than wishing you had never written that Harry Potter slash fanfic eight years ago under your real name.
The lesson I draw from this is that you should be sensitive to the distinction between "discredited" and "making progress on a longer time scale than you can recognize".

You can discredit any technology -- or overestimate it, for that matter -- by analyzing it on a short enough time scale, just as you can take a random walk and interpret it as a series of dramatic surges and crashes.
Not in this case. There is no valuation bidding. The government just set a rate without regard to the value of the companies individually or what the companies would be willing to relinquish for the capital.
I can understand not wanting this sort of thing here--just for clarity, we didn't post it here. Someone else seems to have seen it on my blog and subsequently added it. (I just noticed it a moment ago as a I was doing my morning Analytics review.) Cheers!
Ask HN: Creating a "Hackers Society"
Hi,

I am thinking of creating a new society at my college. I'd like to bring together some hackers; the idea is to be able to meet like-minded people.
Typically, societies meet up once or twice a week.

My question: any ideas on what could be done during such a meeting (typically 1-2 hours)? Some possible things include:

- short (10min) lectures on interesting stuff

- programming competitions

- forming up into teams to work on individual projects

- ...

However, this is all still very rough. If you guys have any better/more concrete ideas, I'd be very glad to hear them!
"Doing what you love is as important as ever"

Eh. Does the sticky sugar-candy new-age optimism pouring out of blogs like this disturb only me?

It's pure bullshit. Work was NOT meant as something to love. Work was NOT mean to provide you means do things that make you happy. Take a good, hard look around at the world, dammit: work was meant to give you a chance to SURVIVE.

Perhaps some people who have very well functioning minds - very optimisting, easily get enthusiastic, easily get to love people and/or things - may eventually learn to love their work, or work on something they love.

But for most of us it's out of question. Work, therefore you hate it. Get over. Don't raise unreasonable expectations in people, please.
"So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map."

Hilarious!
> I'm open to discourse, just not impressed with the downmodding as a result of going against the herd over here.

That sort of thing pretty much invariably happens with economics or politics on sites like this, whatever persuasion the 'herd' happens to be.

Which is why I think discussion of said topics should be ruthlessly hunted down and driven away.
jodie--the email is pinkgaragementors@gmail.com or email me directly via my blog-susan mernit
> What do other folks think about duplicates?

I don't really care - unless pg creates some kind of market for the karma points I have accumulated, they're worthless (like ideas?:-)
Fascinating, and a little creepy. I found this part hilarious:

You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers -- several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups.
A Masters degree in CS at Texas Tech.
Yep, that's a good idea with a long tradition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_group

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp

Go for it.
Thanks sgrove,

It’s something that we’re still unsure about as well. As you noted, it’s the guidance and knowledge of the Y Combinator team that’s appealing to us. At this stage, I think we largely want to remain open to possibilities. I’ve particularly enjoyed what I’ve read in Paul’s essays, and believe we’d benefit a great deal from his insights and feedback.

At the same time, we’re plugging away here, and will continue to do so regardless of Y Combinator or any other funding. The nice part of the service aspect of our business is that it keeps us paid (even if modestly). Although this route is in some respects slower, it keeps us building, which is the only part that really matters to us. :-)

Cheers!

Eric
Your observations are mostly correct, and so is the assertion that it's more of a cultural thing here. But the root cause of this behavior is not the evil caste system.

In India, kids are taught to be respectful to elders/seniors, and it is often taken to an extreme, and one is not encouraged to present a different point of view to them most of the times. You can also add to this mix the earlier generation's 'yes-sir-ism' to Britishers and people in power, and it would give you an idea why most Indians you have worked with, do not tend to speak up much.

I have commented about this earlier on HN, things are changing and changing fast here. The next generation of Indians, is far more open, direct and confident. Globalisation after 1991 and more exposure to 'western' ideas, has had a very positive effect, both economically and culturally.
Thumbspeak: Is texting here to stay?
Wasn't he cured?
Krugman in this op-ed from 2004 doesn't seem to be advocating lower interest rates, but simply stating that they are probably coming, and that many people are badly prepared for them.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E6DD1E3BF...
"A number of analysts have accused Mr. Greenspan of fostering a debt bubble in recent years, just as they accuse him of feeding the stock bubble during the 1990's. Just two months ago, Mr. Greenspan went out of his way to emphasize the financial benefits of adjustable-rate, as opposed to fixed-rate, mortgages. Let's hope that not too many families regarded that as useful advice."

One reason why he might have argued for lower interest rates, is that the employment growth during the "Bush Boom" was so dismal compared to earlier expansionary periods. (See: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/about-that-bush-...)
My theory is that if you try to "manage by metrics", the quality of what you are managing will go down.

Unhappily, this often leads to more metrics, since more quality control is clearly needed...

To me, the alternative of "managing by metrics" is knowing your staff and being familiar with their work. This is hard to do and harder to scale (say, to national level), since it requires that the managers are doing a good job.

Metrics scale much more easily. But - those who care have to fight the measurement system to produce quality. This reduces their effectiveness or drives them to leave, leaving you with the less-motivated.

Being a teacher, being a student and software development are areas which can and do suffer from this. (Students perhaps less so, they have to learn to play the system since they have fewer alternatives.)
Choosing a Web Design Firm? Ignore These Things
Why do folks (hint, hint) point them out though? I can't say my memory is good enough to recognize dupes. I know on a few occasions I've submitted something I had previously submitted.
Somehow, I've managed to have more women bosses than men bosses in my programming career. I've never had a problem communicating with them, or felt uncomfortable voicing my opinion. I suppose that's different, though, than having the coworkers mostly female, too.

Mind you, I am not saying that I have any complaints about my own experience. The women in question have been good bosses, and mostly have let me use my own judgment in deciding how to complete the tasks assigned to me. For those of us programming as an employee, for the most part I think this is all we really want.

Maybe this is why I have a hard time accepting programs that seek to pump indifferent women into computer science/programming fields. I can't relate to the idea that women are discriminated against in this field when, more often than not, it has been a woman telling me what to do. For what it's worth, most of these women seemed more than happy to let others do the implementation and make technical decisions, while they focused more on the parts of the work that require human interaction. This is not to say that they did not understand the technical questions or were incapable of doing the implementation, just that it did not seem to interest them as strongly as the inter-personal aspects.

Having said that, I don't have any objections to this program being offered to help women entrepreneurs. I agree with the sentiments expressed elsewhere that men in women dominated fields find the same need to talk to men who have "been there" and can relate to the minority experience.
I'm a bit confused about the last two points. If you were a big strong female would they not have asked you to help move patients or take care of hostile patients? Were you asked to help with physical tasks because you are a man or because you are strong?
In Praise of Heuristics
I thought about creating a prediction market where you can gamble away your karma.
"It's not really a sex issue:"

Nope. It's totally a sex issue.

I still think it's a fine thing to do. But this is just a ridiculous statement.