skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While on one hand you make a point, on the other hand, perhaps this article can simply be considered community advice to Twitter: if Twitter wants to protect the stability of its platform then perhaps it should consider more explicitly stating its Terms of Service with respect to username ownership.
that uniques graph is deceptive.

any company who's main product is a widget (or involves embeddable javascript) will reflect the traffic of its partner sites.

for example i've never used clickpass but i contribute to their traffic every single time i visit this page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/login
I don't believe that's true. Google sure, but twitter is just another message routing system, like any one of the IM networks.

The average irc server probably handles more than twitter - certainly email software does.

There's a ton of software that needs to scale, and be able to handle a large volume of data.
So true.

I'm still waiting for aggregation of update messages so that I can follow way more stuff, but github is one of my favorite sites on the net already...
I do find the examples he uses somewhat laughable. He lost the name "celtics" for obvious reasons; it's tie to the Boston Celtics basketball team. But then he starts fear mongering with stuff like...

StockTwits just raised nearly $1 million — their business is based off Twitter. Definitely one of their assumptions is that they’ll be keeping their username ‘StockTwits’.

Yes because squatting on a name like 'celtics' is somehow similar to using a unique username that ties to the user/company who also owns the domain name that is the title of a service that they are providing?

Sorry, I just don't see the connection there. Just because the people at Twitter decided your username had better uses doesn't mean that they are going to arbitrarily start cutting off other usernames.

Of course, then he brings up the "...but others are doing it too!" argument as if that tactic has ever worked in defending someone's viewpoint...well...ever.

I apologize if I'm coming off harsh, I just really don't see why this situation is surprising or somehow wrong.
I think we need more confusing euphemisms. Next up: Super-Sizing, as in "We reduced the size of our payroll by half -- isn't that super?"
Great idea- this is an excellent niche that will probably do quite well for you.

A few things:

1) It would be great if I could choose multiple models to compare right out of the gate versus having to navigate to each page. This may already be possible and I just missed it.

2) More review content would be helpful. Users really react well to reviews from both experts and other consumers. The links to the Amazon ratings are great, but it would be nice to have easy access to more. Also, seems like a great opportunity for you to layer over some proprietary content. This can be your own editorial content or the ability for users to post their own reviews or both. It will make the site seem more authoritative.

Good stuff!
that's a good point, but i bet that could be resolved, too. i like the show_all option. the more transparency the better. we still want to be careful not to squander the resources of clarity and lack of information.
Ask HN: Where does Trulia get its listings?
Does anyone know where Trulia gets it's listings from? I've been looking and reading but haven't been able to find anything substantive.
A video that is less than 5 mins which shows how to create a simple hello world script. I don't like longer tutorial videos either, but a demo helps anyone with starting trouble.
My two cents...

1. After clicking the "compare" button, say something like "Choose another netbook to compare <your selection to>?" And don't make me click "browse", show the models immediately (preferably the models, not brands).

2. Include the "compare" buttons beside each netbook on the page that lists all the models (less clicks for those who know the models they want to compare already... alternately you could use checkboxes).

3. Show a mouse-over popup that lists the main specs of each netbook (CPU, memory, etc.)

4. Change "Stop Comparing" to something like "Remove"... during browsing, think of how to show a little shopping-cart-like list of the models you've already chosen.
Hopefully, there's somewhere warmer to boil your hands afterwards. Do they at least wear latex surgical gloves?
"Ask YN"

Something is so wrong here, but I just can't spot it ;)
That can easily backfire. I remember the last time this happened people pointed to an ITR page showing that a router in Iran being inaccessible as evidence that all of Iran was offline and that this could only mean that a US invasion was imminent. Meanwhile, if you actually went to the domain under which that router sat, you'd find The Iranian University of Science & Technology (http://www.iust.ac.ir/), up the whole time.

I think people will see doom and gloom wherever they want to see it.
OneJuicer - Google Alerts for iPhone apps
Do software programmers really worry too much about optimization? If that's the case, why are so many programs slow as a crippled sloth? Why does it take 10 seconds to open a freaking email client, when 1980s technology can do this in less time than is humanly noticeable?
Well, "the metaphysical" needs to actually be there, before it can show us any shortcomings of "scientific naturalism".

How exactly does someone observe the "unobservable"? How could one come to confidently believe in a realm built up out of "unempirical" content?

If anyone can satisfactorily answer these questions, chances are they have done science, and discovered that the unempirical content everyone was talking about was scientifically describable after all, unique from other science only in its being particularly difficult to apprehend.

Until we get there, this unempirical component of consciousness being posited shares common heritage with the Luminiferous aether, the life-force, hollow earth theory, mythic gods of natural forces and any number of premature theories which hover in the closing gaps of indeterminacy before a science comes along to explain them.
That's just it there was no opportunity and Twitter is better off preventing people from trying exploit others by being the first to grab interesting names.
My internet is really slow today. It took me 15 minutes to download CherryPy!
Do you have to define red to discuss it?
Well some folks, for instance Vaughan Pratt, have taken a shot at explaining things like cartesian duality using some interesting mathematics (
http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf). It's tough sledding if you don't have the background.
The silence of the fans: Macworld attendees to sit on hands for Schiller keynote?
If you keep on giving away their secrets, the blog mafia is going to hunt you down and make you pay...
Browsers fail password protection tests
I disagree - I don’t think Twitter is going down a slippery slope. I think they’re making a sincere attempt to make their service as authentic and as useful as possible.

The subtext is that a Twitter username suggests identity (in fact that’s the underlying magic of Twitter) and that the service on the whole becomes less useful as identity becomes fractured.

It may well come to pass that they need to set up a more stringent system to analyze conflicts (e.g. what if your last name and user name were knicks and your twitter feed was not about basketball?).
Chilling Effects Shut Down Mixwit.com
When I read that bit, all I could think was "Man, there has got to be a better way to do that".

Perhaps I'll be inventing a lamb castrator device this weekend...
Stopgap auto bailout to help GM, Chrysler
It is a fascinating report. Yes, it seems like Madoff was able to able to convince his investors based on the implications that he made his money with insider trading,

The classic approach of con-man is to attract the mark with the promise of ill-gotten gains.

The report shows everything we've seen in the news and more. Remember, the report's scenario is for a Madoff scheme collapse in 2005. One would have to assume that in three years, the money hole has gotten bigger while market conditions have gotten far worse.

One point of the report is that most reputable funds managers avoided Madoff but didn't actually help bust him. So we have not seen large US banks or pension plans hit by this, just small but wealthy individuals and European private banks. But as the report says, the hit these folks will take can affect everyone else.
I ran into this a while back:

http://blog.brianbeck.com/post/53538107/python-dsl-i
This could be made more obvious.
Am I the only person in the world who intentionally avoids both those apps like the plague? Facebook chat doesn't work in Camino. All hail Camino.
Twitter is not "just a messaging system". See:

http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi...

(Many thanks to Eran Hammer-Lahav for writing this so that I don't have to.)
WeMedia Pitch It Challenge
We’re looking for commercial and non-profit venture ideas and will award up to $50,000 in seed funding to the innovators who can bring the best ideas to life.

We Media Pitch It begins with a simple goal: We want to find the best start-ups and help launch them with advice from funders, influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, attendees and media.

We’ve created a platform for early-stage - and frequently unfunded - companies to take center stage based purely on merit, without regard to their own financial resources.

There are two ways to participate.

1. Enter the We Media Pitch It Challenge. If you’re a finalist you’ll pitch your idea live at We Media Miami (February 24-26, 2009) before the leaders, innovators and investors of the connected society. A panel of judges will select the two best ideas - one commercial, one non-profit. We’ll invest up to $25,000 in each to help them turn the idea into reality. We’ve partnered with Ashoka’s Changemakers, a global network of social entrepreneurs, to help us select the finalists.

Hurry! The entry deadline is January 21, 2009.

To enter the challenge, visit http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/powerofus.

2. Display your business, project or concept in the Pitch It Gallery at We Media Miami. You don’t have to enter the challenge to display at the conference. Just register and reserve your space. There’s no additional fee to reserve a space in the gallery (beyond the normal conference registration fee) - but the gallery is limited to about 30 participants and is available on a first-come, first served basis.

To register and reserve your space, visit http://wemedia.com/miami/register/.

Read more in the Pitch It FAQ (http://wemedia.com/miami/rules-and-faq/).

Slots are limited, so apply early.
Even within income groups, intelligence and the ability to save (and invest) some of your earnings might be correlated. In that case, smarter people would lose more when the market tanks.
Being realistic, no. I'm not the kind that downloads gigs upon gigs of music. Honest and truly, I've only downloaded 3 albums at a time, and that's kept me full for a while.
Richard Dawkins interviews Derren Brown [video]
He could invest perhaps in a better chair.
But Sergeants and Corporals are non-commissioned officers, and they are fighting in the muck with the rest of the enlisted soldiers.

If you consider the size of the average squad led by these non-coms (certainly larger than 5 people), then 20% of deaths is still probably not too good, but from what I know these people don't lead from behind.
And personally I think they mean 'Canada' :)
If you don't like the rules, then don't play in twitter's walled garden.
What if HM had a Blackberry?
Maybe when Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 10.
I'm Israeli. I did expect it to be high on the list, but that gap between it and 2nd place is quite surprising...

I can think of a few reasons:

1. Israel is in a way similar to a big city - a small place and tightly knit. It's a young nation without much traditions so people are open to try new technologies and if they work out they quickly spread.

2. Since Israel's main industry is hi-tech (it's 2nd or 3rd in number of NASDAQ traded companies) having a computer is seen by parents as important for their childrens' future prospects.

3. There is some still kind of respect for knowledge mentality (you wouldn't know it from the reality shows on our TV channels, but it's one of the top book reading nations) which meshes well with the internet etc.
The article is interesting but didn't really explained why "RSS is rotting brain". I don't say it doesn't, but why exactly? Any thought about this?
Great, now I can chat with all the annoying acquaintances and old highschool friends who randomly add me on Facebook. I think I'll pass.
[if you are going to try smacklet, leave it in a tab in your browser and it will ask you again in 30 min]
The IT world is a lot bigger than websites. Monte Carlo simulations for example are constrained literally by power and cooling and the floor loading of your datacentre. If you aren't squeezing every last drop of compute out, you might as well not bother. Algorithms are everything.
Because integrating the document into a page is annoying - in order to fit other content such as ads, the main viewing window is restricted to an unreasonable size. I'd much rather have it open up a document in the full screen.

Plus there's a certain senselessness to distributing documents this way when everyone is already happy using a pefectly capable, open file format that every machine can read as it is, not to mention tying the existence of said documents down to the survival of a single company.
In summary, he's saying they need a better policy (i.e. more clearly defined rules), so that he can game the system better. Classic webcockery.

Sorry, chap, but the Terms of Service do not state that Twitter will guarantee your business model, and you're an idiot for thinking that you "owned" the name in the first place.
My point is that it's an old problem in desperate search of a solution. We need a single name that works across all sites. Why should I have to tell people that I'm AndrewWarner on Hacker news and Twitter, but if they want to find me on digg on AndrewDiggs because AndrewWarner was already taken. And if the want to find me...

We need one public identifier that works across all networks.

What do you think?
It's dividend time.
What this article lacks is an eye toward things that must be optimized when you get to a certain level.

For example, when you replicate databases, the replication overhead grows quadratically (n^2) to the number of servers. So, eventually you can't just throw hardware at it since eventually it's all overhead replicating between the servers and you can do any selects/updates/deletes. Most people will never get to this level and the article is probably written for people that won't have to deal with this.

So, at a certain level, you need to optimize your code to shard data, avoid joins, etc. because you simply can't throw hardware at it.

Most people will never get to that level so throwing hardware at the problem is often the answer, but if you have a lot of quadratic algorithms in your code, you're going to hit scaling problems that will make throwing money at it expensive to the point where you'll loose money.
what a show off
Not sure how that answers why you need that many systems, sounds like she just needs one beefed up one and a lot of monitors - having extra boxes online to split up the work wouldn't help with Photoshop or her workflow, right?
Official google.org Blog: Power to the People or Power from the People?
We need one public identifier that works across all networks.

OpenID?
I probably got lucky. The office space I'm working in is amazing and my office space at home is messy, dark, and disorganized.
Yes, you're right; the market would merely have to be somewhat competitive, not some ahistorical wet dream of Hayek.

Regardless of whether monopolists and oligopolists are good or bad in general, I was only trying to establish that in the presence of oligopoly, the RIAA's strategy would be very bad, and in the absence thereof, it would be ineffectual.
I'm always split on that - go Joel Spolsky and treat yourself right to an Aeron, or go the Paul Graham route and skimp with a cheapo? I've had nothing but Aerons at work for a few years and my butt kinda misses them now that I work from home on a folding chair.
If you can determine an upper bound on n, then your algorithm is technically O(1), and you don't have to worry about scaling.

If you want to be able to handle any value of n, and expect it to be large, you should care about O(n^2) algorithms. You don't have to necessarily get rid of them all at once, but you should at least know where they exist and have them listed as possible pain points or places to start optimizing.
Yes, I agree, although it might be worth an hour of your time to improve the app's responsiveness if it makes the customers happier.
Meebo is an impressive breakout from the past few years, they keep pushing the envelope and are really doing an amazing job at finding their revenue stream as well as finding new functionality which brings their users back over and over.

What's next? Complete interoperability?
Mobile Spy App for iPhone
You could look at SQLAlchemy, Storm, Schevo, or Nevow Stan. Or even BeautifulSoup's element-finding.
This is the second time in less than a year (I think?) that multiple backbones in the Middle East have been broken simultaneously...
1000 core 2GHz machines for the desktop are 5 years out. Parallel is the way forward.
Not suing isn't a business solution. Meeting customers' needs is.

Customers are asking for a way to conveniently listen to any music they want, where ever they are. Somewhere in that burning desire is a business model waiting to happen.
True. I did point that out in the blog post. Widget views are still one metric for success.
Fluidinfo seems to have an interesting handle on the problem.
From Font Hatred to Microsoft's Modular Innovations
I won't worry about it until I see "100 Ways to Make GHFigs Pay", etc.
Why is that better? The author was using the logo for both the icon and the background, and under the name "Boston Celtics News", and perhaps most damningly, it wasn't a fan account by an actual human being, it was a fully automated bot account. One one dozens he runs. Or did run, before most of them were suspended.

See the list here, and see how many are still around:
http://blog.stevepoland.com/first-twitter-bots-launched-spor...
that article used the word Facebook exactly once.
Officers are the most targeted, that why the officer's uniform recently looks very much like soldier's - to make them harder to snipe.
It migth help.
There is a big difference between "If you have trouble with applets..." and "If these applets rape your browser with a rusty pole..." -- I would have preferred a... heartier warning.

Firefox froze so bad it didn't even know it was frozen. It was actually kind of interesting.
Pandora hits 20 million registered users
PDF hosted by WSJ here:
http://online.wsj.com/documents/Madoff_SECdocs_20081217.pdf
Nice site. I'd prefer the results in a grid format so I could quickly compare the results (specs/price) of many netbooks on a single page.

I had an Acer Aspire One for two months, the 6 cell 160GB HD version. It was just a little too cramped for me and I replaced it with a HP 1035NR. It is not much bigger, but the keyboard and screen are now just big enough that they are more usable.

http://www.amazon.com/1035NR-10-2-Inch-Netbook-Intel-Process...
PDF was on WSJ a couple of days ago: http://online.wsj.com/documents/Madoff_SECdocs_20081217.pdf
Thanks for checking it out.

It's PHP.

I agree, it does need something to make it more appealing.

I always planned for it to be used as like a Basecamp for MMO guilds and even casual gamers too, but I decided to withhold management features until after it picks up a little.

I do need to implement a better photo gallery type thing that would let people upload more pics.

I am short on ideas on what to do though.
It's funny how little you hear about Meebo compared to say Twitter.
Meebo do a good job in the main, although I'm not convinced Meebo rooms was a good idea.
I still haven't quite grasped the concept behind what a DSL really is, and what makes your code a DSL versus any other program or API. Any insight that can be offered, especially in the context of something other than Ruby and Lisp? I just want to know what all the hubbub is about, and why it matters to me?
on what? loses?
There's a ton of software that needs to scale

Yes, but there's vastly more that doesn't, you need to stop thinking that most software runs on the Internet and has tons of users, it doesn't. The vast majority of software is written for businesses and runs either on an intranet or is available on the internet to the users of that business.

For every public app you know about that needs to scale there are a hundred you don't know about that don't need to scale. Most programmers work on systems that will never need to scale, EVER. It is a tiny tiny minority of programmers that actually work on systems that become publicly popular on the Internet and actually face scaling issues.

Secondly, we're talking about programmers here, not the software, most email systems use existing mail software written by that tiny tiny minority of programmers who write such systems. The vast majority of programmers will NEVER write a mail system, a chat system, or anything that handles large volumes of data or users. Most of them of doing one thing, biz apps for in house projects at big and small companies exposing relational data to in house users.

How many IM networks are there? Now how many programmers are there? I'll say it again, most software does not need to scale. Because a lot of software does need to scale does not make that statement in any way false because a shit load more doesn't need to scale.
Can you elaborate? All I see is that I have to listen to Robert Scoble talk for an hour about it, and a blog post explaining that it takes an hour to explain it.
In this case, it's quite clear that Steve saw an opportunity to make money where there wasn't one. His attempt to squat on these "quality" names that were "front row seats" was based on the ridiculous idea that a Twitter name is worth money. He was wrong.
4 is pretty redundant... I only have one backup. And on top of that, there are indirect routes if all 4 of those fail.

Keep in mind that these cables are very, very expensive.
Solve it the same way that they solve naming conflicts in programming languages: namespaces (Edit: as others have suggested).

There is both a "whitehouse.com" (it has a landing page at the moment, SFW) and a "whitehouse.gov"

I tend to side with Twitter here. Don't like it? Go create your own website (set up a laconi.ca node). I don't think that there is any inherent justification in the first-come-first-serve method of provisioning, maybe it is just an artifact of our culture?
Steve Jobs doesn't learn lessons.
Keeping track of something that hasn't yet happened (at least in terms of blogging) sounds a little frivolous. Maybe you just don't have anything to say? Try approaching it as PG does, post an extrapolated anecdote. (aka an essay, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369141) Otherwise start from square one, pick up a good book on the writing process and don't even worry about blogging, and instead focus on writing as a craft in it's own.
Actually, philosophers who think that there's something special about consciousness (i.e. it can't be explained by structure and dynamics, but might be due to another fundamental physical property that the scientific community has so far ignored) don't think that only humans are conscious. David Chalmers once described how thermostats might have a dim form of it, although he just mentioned it as an unlikely possibility.