skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Twitter's business is threatened by third-party apps, why not charge for an API license? I also can't quite understand why developers expect a free API from services like Twitter and then complain when something changes?

What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you) releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around "here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if someone could break it down.
It's a joke that in this day and age the funding process that seeds silicon valley startups is only legal offline and to the privileged rich. Democratized access to small equity investments in germinating companies that may one day be giants, is exactly what is necessary to help the non-rich get richer too. The social and economical benefits of the need for this democratized access is real. Even if the SEC ruling does not go in favor of it next week, the US government should not and can not deny its citizens such benefits for much longer. It's clear that Funders Club has got the right idea of what needs to be in place to enable this change in history.
@andrewfelix - you're right in that there are specific roasters, but I'm unsure about where they get their beans.

I guess I took 'Aussie' coffee to be places that marketed themselves as 'Australian', or internationally recognised Australian coffee brands. While everyone can find a bottle of Australian wine, and what it means to be Australian wine, defining it for coffee is a difficult task.

dpark, 'Western' is more of a cultural moniker than a geographical moniker.

If you want to get specific about it, all of Europe west of Greenwich is not 'Western' - and that's most of it. Tunisia is definitely Western Hemisphere but you wouldn't call it west.
The rules on displaying a tweet on a website seem so batshit insane I can only assume that my interpretation of it is wrong, and it should only apply to applications that provide the functionality of a Twitter client.
As I said, he's awaiting trial, which has been delayed by both sides for various reasons. One of those reasons has been to gather evidence of the very things you're describing. Personally, I think this is a better way for a justice system to function than treating press reports about what third parties say as primary sources.

http://www.armycourtmartialdefense.info/2012/08/unlawful-pre...
How long before someones raises a "spray-and-pray" fund just to invest in Funders Club startups?
I highly doubt Twitter cares about them at all, and they'll most likely have their keys revoked.
I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. The writes that come from these third party apps (that enable messaging multiple people, or queuing/delaying tweets) might throw a wrench in their system if it doesn't follow the natural usage they've designed it for.

The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network, something that third party apps could interfere with.
No, i actually think just he's correct. It's OK to be wrong though, so no big deal.

Though I do disagree with his sentiment. I think App.Net is a perfectly good alternative to Twitter and every attempt at open, federated services since the original one (eg www) have failed to catch-on.
Most of these are at small companies. Thanks for the info, though.
Then the logic question as far as the OP's original topic is this:

Can any app truly be a substitute good for a sweetened beverage with stimulants in it? I would say no. It doesn't matter how much people are willing to spend at Starbucks. It has virtually no bearing on how they'll value your app.
I would not engage in this conversation with an interviewee if someone asked me that question. It sounds like an invitation to an argument or a lawsuit.

Chances are it's not something you did wrong, it's just that other people who had the same phone interview seemed like better candidates to move to the next level of screening.

If you want feedback on your phone interview, have a friend/colleague sit in the room with you and listen to your side of the conversation - or, more likely to be illegal, record the conversation and have someone you trust listen to it afterwards.
It never gets that far when they tell me 'no'. Maybe someday i'll have that privilege.
How do you control spam?
The authors of these requirements don't seem to know or care that the World-Wide Web was never intended to mandate one visual-only rendering of your content, and in fact doesn't even do that very effectively. Most of them are pretty reasonable semantics (e.g., @user links to their profile) but as soon as you mention "lines" or "icons" or "top right" you're Doing It Wrong, and no affordances using other services is just blatantly anti-competitive.
Rat bastards. I'm sure you're right.
This is why I agree with the original article over these comment parents. I work in a small software agency for clients who would never grasp the Cone of Uncertainty. They are much closer to the pointy-haired boss type than the type of person who appreciates the finer points of software project estimation. While reading the literature is good, the average developer will seldom find the time to do so. And even if they do, an off-the-cuff estimate is often better than carefully planned specification documents that no business stakeholders will ever read.

Of course accurate estimates have tremendous business value. But in reality they often come at the expense of what the client really needs which is delivery of features. I have seen estimation and tight project control taking up substantially more time than delivering actual features. And it was exactly as the OP stated:

> Software projects that require tight cost control are the ones delivering little or no marginal value.

The lesser the project value the tighter the control leading to a vicious cycle of developers cutting corners and increased micro-management.
Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization

Interesting take. Seems almost exactly the opposite to me. What makes Twitter valuable is not the "eyeballs," or even the infrastructure, but rather the pulse of content. It had what essentially amounted to first-mover advantage in the sphere of mobile content, and that is why none of the Twitter clones have been able to take its place.

That said, this direction Twitter is going toward "more closed" is wrong. Given that it's the market-researcher's goldmine of content that makes Twitter valuable, disallowing developers the ability to build infrastructure on top of that content seems really stupid. Raw data is not useful; the organizing of, packaging and presenting of that data is where the business value can be (profitably) delivered. It can be profitable for both Twitter and developers.
Selenium-aaS - a new take on website monitoring
Sorry, no. Fees are paid to the issuing bank, acquiring bank, and network. The majority of it goes to the issuing bank, and that's the non-negotiable rate when you get a merchant account. That fee is known as the interchange fee. The processing fee is something you negotiate with your gateway and/or acquiring bank.

I work in the industry; it's my job to know how this works. Here is an example from Wikipedia (bear in mind the amounts are fictitious but relatively accurate): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gao-report-on-interchange....
You are so unbelievably wrong that it is quite simply incredible to behold. I'm talking about where this is going to lead (specifically the JOBs act).

We deny people many rights for the simple reason that they abuse a lot of them. Or conversely, they get abused by others who use those rights for personal gain. This is such a bad idea and it kills me that I know that it's going to happen anyway.

Unsophisticated investors should not be able to invest in start-ups - at all - ever. They can barely handle regulated houses, bonds and equities - and you're throwing things at them that even VCs can't handle - what is wrong with you?

This is bad - it will happen - and I will watch it burn for the same reason that shoe shine boys shouldn't be recommending stocks - they just don't know what the hell they are doing.
Android 2.3 and Windows CE 6.0 Dual Boot 2 DIN Car DVD Player with GPS, WIFI
Ah, gotcha. That type of push or stretch goal is something different. I've never tried it though, anyone have any experience with this type of motivation?
This is very good. Some suggestions - you should make the the camera point to the center of the model. Also fixing the light to the eye (not transforming it with the model) will make the rendering look good from all angles. Zoom and pan would be nice. Also maybe an orthographic projection will make better sense as the 3D printed models are likely to be quite small.
Location Analytics Startup Locately Acquired By Research Firm SMG
This doesn't really prove the value of a degree, just the value of having been "vetted" by a credible entity, and also having higher average intelligence.
> To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla bla bla...

Translation: so that we can charge even light API users.

This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.
They will curse the application developer and choose the next best application. In this case, it will be Twitter.
Taking a 5 minute break from writing a php tutorial sounds pretty therapeutic to me.

I have a degree in computer science with a wonderful salaried 8-5 job (doing what I love) with benefits, a wonderful girlfriend of 5 years, and 3 excellent cats. We take walks and go out to our downtown area to socialize in the many available bars on the weekends, and take vacations whenever she can get time off from work. I also greatly enjoy working on my project car when I have a spare weekend and the money required to buy parts and tools.

I'm incredibly happy with my life and what I have to show for it. I'm also incredibly grateful for the plethora of new things that I learn on a daily basis while browsing HN and reddit during little breaks from coding.

It seems as though you're a rather agitated individual at the moment, given the overtone of self deprecation in your post, but I really think that you should examine the good (great, amazing even) parts of internet citizenry along with the unfortunately bad.
What Twitter's Announcement could have said
Err, grep uses regular expressions.
> "Objectivism is objectively the greatest system of Philosophy ever put together up until now."

Please.

Objectivism draws no clear distinction between self-interest and self-worship. Its followers are some of the most unbearable narcissists I have ever had the misfortune of talking to. Many of their arguments can be boiled down to "My pre-packaged belief system says its logical, therefore I must be logical!"
To play a bit of Devil's advocate... Most of the popular apps fall under the free API access, don't they? If so, isn't it unfair for everyone to say how users need to jump ship and find an alternative? I mean, Twitter is giving you API access for one of the most utilized services on the Internet... for free. You just have to make sure your app follows some guidelines.

Unless I've misinterpreted this?
I wonder how many of these jobs are government jobs?
The value of a college degree is that it is correlated with other things, many of which are desirable to employers. That is all.
Any decent language runtime with lightweight threads will have the same effect...
A personal website that works like the command line
> "No one who "really knows what Philosophy is" takes Ayn Rand seriously. Actually, taking Ayn Rand seriously is a pretty good sign you don't really know what Philosophy is... "

Forget about the 80 years bit. Their main point is still totally valid... and you can go way back beyond 80 years and read Heraclitus or Dogen (playing favourites but sure there are more) and still get much better philosophy that is relevant 'our times' than you ever could hope for with Rand.

As an aside, I'd like to mention that Rand also does a huge amount of damage to the already damaged issue of women in philosophy, and that her popularization in recent years over, say, Susan Sontag or Julia Kristeva, just makes the whole situation even worse.
Airbnb Releases Infinity.js: A Javascript Library for Smoother Scrolling
How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any. Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours.

The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage automatically?)

In an ideal world I agree, but that's not where we live.
The Science of Genocide
This may be seen in the future as the big momement and somehow like a big favour for App.net current hype.
A provocative indictment of scientists and technicians.
Best description of Klout I've seen to date: "utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense"
People who are motivated, who love learning, and who know how to create value can be successful without a college degree.

The degree generally doesn't hurt, though.
If they're appealing to Apple, I'd say it's because they already have such a big partnership with Apple in iOS integration. For whatever reasons the partnership was appealing, an acquisition would likewise be appealing.
Which USA do you work in?
It is fair in the sense that they earned the same color code on that wikipedia page. If you break them down into grades or something, it's like they both get a B-.
Meet the car that runs on air
I wonder how Twitter's developers are feeling about these changes... Devs tend to be pro-openess, I imagine this to have a bitter taste for most of them.
Interesting until "we still have our phones." From what I observe while commuting current smart phones are very amenable to wasting time on the internet.
If anyone would like to join our beta group, we're looking for people with experience using Selenium who would like to help out by providing feedback in return for free monitoring.
Remember that these rules apply to users of the API; I don't think Twitter will come after you for block-quoting a tweet.
I don't, it's just a proof of concept.

In the distributed implementation I would have a chain of trust from the people you follow, where if you report someone as a spammer, the server that represents people who follow you could look at your list and filter spammers based off this. You could also set the depth to traverse. There is a lot you could do with this.

I'm not saying my implementation is right, but someone needs to do it. Tweeting is a type of communication and needs to be distributed.
If Twitter thinks I won't use <blockquote> to show a tweet when I want to, they're smoking something. That has to mean something else, right?
People keep talking about Facebook and Myspace, but they lack(ed) full-on third-party clients, so what I'm wondering about is the LiveJournal comparison.

LiveJournal too had and has third-party clients. And though hardly popular in the English-speaking world these days, it's still going. But I don't think it has similar guidelines. So what's the comparison?
Where's the bright and shining line between a website and an application?

If you've got any widget that uses the API the Tweets are going to have to conform, it would seem.
Those stats show that grads have stayed employed.

They don't show that those people have stayed employed by taking "do you want fries with that" jobs from the non-grads. Receptionist? College degree. Janitor? College degree. Walmart greeter? College degree.

Here's another chart from the same publication:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/08/chart-of-t...

If you're in debt out the wazoo to work at a minimum wage job, then no, the college degree is probably having a net negative effect on your life.
This also reminds me of a study mentioned in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational (currently reading, great so far). Tversky and Kahneman gave people two scenarios. You go to buy a new office pen and find one for $25, but then you remember the same pen is on sale for $18 at a store 15 minutes away. Do you go? Most people do. Now you're shopping for a suit and you find a great one for $455, but someone tells you it's on sale for $448 at a store 15 minutes away. This time, most people don't make the trip. So is $7 worth fifteen minutes of your time, or isn't it? We apply a different standard depending on the reference price.

I'm not sure this is the same phenomenon that's going on with mobile apps, but a case can be made it's related. Arguably, the reference price is $0, so any deviation from that is going to be treated with the greatest significance. But now I'm just getting back to the OP's point that "Starbucks Has No Free Alternative", from a slightly different angle.
Overall public sector employment has dropped significantly over the last three years.

Reuters: "The last three years of job losses at the state and local government level has been the most dramatic since Labor Department records began in 1955"

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/08/usa-states-employe...
this was Leroy's post in 2002 about multithreaded runtimes

http://web.archive.org/web/20110724004117/http://caml.inria....

Here are recent commentaries:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1302272/is-inria-going-to...

http://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/xxxn4/interesting_dev...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10705526/is-there-a-surve...
I have wondered if an updated version of nntp would have worked.
Chinch bugs in Florida
Being 8x faster than a GIL'd Ruby is not exactly going to win you any awards.
As of right now, one of the reasons why you pay for this service is because it's shipped to an address first where the BufferBox team accepts packages for you. They bring the packages over and fill the lockers.

So, there's no reason for you to need the driver to follow instructions.
What I'm really concerned about is if this ends up sparking an arms race for more education for the sake of careers. A master's degree, depending on the subject and the institution, may not necessarily be the biggest time investment, but it's still a significant financial commitment. And where will this end? Will PhD's end up being necessary for the great recession of 2038?
There are many. Email is a particularly notable example. Luckily, the technology sector wasn't run by "entrepreneurs" back when email was invented, or we would have wound up with walled gardens there too (Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users and contacts can't be exported, etc).
My interpretation is that it's referring to actually embedding a tweet in a way that pulls it live via the API (or otherwise presented as a tweet entity), and that just quoting someone's tweet (like one would quote an article) is still fine (how could it not be?). I could be wrong.

These kinds of specific restrictions that aren't actually specific enough and really up to their whim are troubling. Twitter needs to be careful that their regulations don't become too much of a burden on their ecosystem. The vagueness and uncertainty of their rules is the problem.
Apparently the new rules completely obliterate the just-launched branch.com. That's incredibly stupid.
www was not the original federated service. E-mail is still around and quite successful.
That's not "the whole point". You're missing the part where it's yet another proprietary walled garden designed to maximize profits. That's not really a great model for end users.
People aren't building apps for fun. They're trying to build a business. No one in their right mind is going to invest in a business that's built in an area that can be bulldozed at any moment, and that's what twitter's platform is.

For developers, twitter is now officially a burning platform.
I'll buy it. Unlike a lot of tech/nerd folk, I actually don't think privacy/data ownership makes people jump platforms. If pictures+captions is the thin end of the wedge, that's great :)
Ok, so what is "Social CRM"?
Does this kill Instagram on twitter?
Can you imagine if any other content provider or medium had this restriction? Or even worse, imagine how Twitter's growth would not have occured if the developers were intially subject to these restrictions...
It's also a huge difference in scale. MySpace ultimately stumbled on a comparatively small stage. IIRC at it's height they had maybe 80-100 million legitimate accounts. A mass migration of say 20 million users in a short period of time is something totally different than say 100 million users. FaceBook also had about 50% as many users by the time MySpace hit their numerical peak. So to apply that to Twitter I think some new service would have to grow about 100 million users and then steal about 100 million from Twitter.
Actual article that the blogspam links to:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/08/forget-elec...
This isn't actually true for all companies.

At my (large) company HR only gets involved once a decision to hire has been made. They make sure the background check is performed, vet the offer to make sure it is within guidelines (or the guidelines have been waived by someone In Charge) and then handle the huge volume of paperwork that must be signed in order to formally accept the offer.

Following on-site interviews the hiring manager will collect and sanitize feedback from all the interviewers to give to the candidate. Sometimes the message is something generic, like "not a good fit" or "lacking required experience" because some feedback just can't be sanitized.

If the deficiency is in skills (technical or soft), rather than personality or demeanor, then we generally provide solid feedback. For a candidate that is borderline we will sometimes invite them back (or out for a drink) to ask them how they would address the perceived deficit if we were to hire them. Not only does it give them a chance to recover, it lets us see how they handle critical feedback.

I don't believe there is liability exposure here, unless someone were to refer to gender, race, religion, disability or ethnic background as a reason for not hiring. Since those are never the reason for not hiring, this isn't an issue.
What would its advantages be over status.net/identi.ca?
I have no idea what you're trying to say. He could certainly learn it if he wanted to.
The Emerging Revolution in Game Theory
If the percentage of 3rd party client users are small, then why would they even bother enacting this change in the first place?

> Twitter aren't stupid

Oh come on, that's not an argument. There have been countless examples throughout history of companies (in tech and otherwise) that have done stupid things that have directly contributed to their demise. There's no reason to assume that Twitter won't end up like them.
I thought Cohn's book was good, but a bit padded out.

Basically all that agile really changed is how often folks take a sounding. Velocity is basically a productivity metric, it's a first derivative of project size (hence ... velocity).

But I mean you could always do that with traditional estimates.

That's pretty much what an Earned Value chart does.

Don't get me wrong: agile is an improvement. But it is an improvement that is evolved from what came before; not a categorical change. Looking at the historical literature still pays dividends to thoughtful engineers.