skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more fundamentally about this: Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?

A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe when a company focuses on them as a customer rather than them as eyeballs to be sold to advertisers, who are the customer, then a better service is the outcome for the users of the service.

With app.net the user is the customer. With Facebook and Twitter, the user is the product. With App.Net user interests and service provider interests are aligned. The provider wants the service to be better for the users.

With Facebook and Twitter and other ad supported products the users who value their privacy have intentions which are constantly at odds with the service provider whose intention is to continually open up details about the individuals so that those details can be used to improve ad success rates and profitability.
"Yeah I don't understand what you're arguing against either."

I'm arguing against the use of the word squatting to describe people who buy domain names with the intent of reselling who are not infringing on obvious and famous trademarks.

Squatting is identified commonly as:

"Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area of land and/or a building - usually residential - that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use."

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

Specifically if we replace the real estate with the domain name we can see that the person who has acquired the domain name that they wish to sell does "own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use".

Certain words and expressions have negative connotations and "squatting" is certainly one of them. They are used incorrectly many times by writers to get people's emotions up and band them together against something the writer is trying to achieve.
I found that's not so straightforward for consultants like me, because the manager that brings you in is embedded in the "layers," directly in the information path. People-skills were not my forté.
Switch between Sansa buds, which are $10/3 pairs, and Bose QC15 noise cancelling over-ear, which save my nerves on all flights and anywhere I can't sleep.
"Did IBM fork Java when Oracle bought Sun? If so why isn't Oracle going after IBM"

IBM has had their own JDK implementation for more than 15 years. April 6th 1997 is about as close a date as I can find:
http://www.os2ezine.com/v2n7/javarev.htm (that's version 1.0.2, so it's probably even earlier).

IBM have a license and produced a fully compatible implementation. Before Oracle bought BEA (who bought JRockit) there was also another independent commercial JDK implementation in addition to the IBM and Sun/Oracle ones.
Many web fonts seem to look bad on Windows, I think in part due to many websites being designed on Macs. This one looks particularly bad on Chrome, but Firefox isn't so bad.
Yes, it used to be Proxima Nova served with Typekit.
His description is exactly what the site founded by the author of the post (and where I work) is :)
I tend to agree. Even if someone is wrong, oftentimes they can bring up a good point that helps you learn something you normally might have passed over.
And then there's Diaspora and Identica where you're neither product nor customer...
Yea, CSS animations are insanely CPU heavy. CodePen has to kill them after 5 seconds to keep the site responsive.
Does it make you win?
The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. The result is, as Dalton mentioned that they HAVE to cater for their users who are the same people who pay them. If your users are your customers, you've got an easier game to play.

As a developer, I'm a lot more excited about it. I backed mainly because I was so excited about an API that could've been what Twitter promised. I'm especially excited to see what annotations is going to emerge through it. To explain it in short: Any app can now embed any information in a post. This is big. To give a small example: Say people who allow IFTTT to post their music to app.net. IFTTT can decided to add meta information to it (adding song titles, artists, etc). Now anyone else can easily extract this information.

There is a whole underlying network waiting to be discovered. Anything can now live within in it. What if you wanted to do an instagram type app? Ask users with app.net accounts to log in. When they post a photo, add your own information to it (photo title, photo url, etc).

In the normal app.net (alpha) interface, you won't miss anything. You'll just see someone posting a photo. However, now this new instagram type app can extract this information from a user's feed, using app.net's infrastructure as their social backbone! Any social service can live on app.net's infrastructure now.
Congratulations to Dalton and the entire team at App.net! They deserve every penny.

Dalton's steely resolve through this entire process has been an inspiration to me; it takes a lot of guts to go out on a limb and ignore all the haters. Even if App.net as a platform doesn't take off I still consider this project a success.
kudos for putting this up.
As I understood it, it's largely about aligning user and producer interests.

At facebook, they have engineers devoted to pleasing users, and others devoted to pleasing advertisers. It's a difficult line to walk, but it's a legitimate argument that advertisers may win in the end because Facebook is now a public company and must show positive earnings growth and all that.

App.net (I think) is proposing that if that line does not exist, they can focus 100% on building a product that users will love using, rather than something that strikes a balance between pleasing users and advertisers. I could see this being a better product in general.

All your concerns are valid though. I'm not on facebook myself, so this service itself has absolutely no appeal to me--however, I do think there are some good points behind the premise, and I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of people do use facebook pretty frequently.
App.net passes $500,000 funding goal in quest to do Twitter the right way
But I am glad more boards are beginning to recognize this.
I think they must have done, I also don't remember it looking so bad before.

Seeing quite a few sites and blogs now getting a bit careless with CSS @font-face rules and seemingly not bothering to test their sites in Windows.

More on it here: http://blog.webink.com/why-fonts-suck-windows-hinting
"Use one leading underscore only for non-public methods and instance variables." [1]

[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#method-names-and-in...
To be honest, I was skeptical App.net would meet its $500,000 goal on time. Not because I thought it was a bad idea, but because raising that much money from customers just seemed an almost impossible feat.

So congrats, Dalton, can't wait to see what happens next!
Ah, thanks for the info, perhaps they should switch back. Looks like they went home-brew to save cash (or to be more unique). Seems wrong to have to use the Readability bookmarklet to read a Svbtle blog!
Trapwire and data mining: What we know
Another obscene stat - We've Spent 5.93M Years Playing WoW...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiE2czrG0MI

Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken, points to the 3 billion hours the world invests every week in online gaming as a clear indicator that many people are not being sufficiently challenged in their day-to-day lives. "5.93 million years is how long people have spent tackling unnecessary obstacles in World of Warcraft," says McGonigal. "We've spent as long playing World of Warcraft as we have evolving as a human species."
http://ampify.it/

Not sure why the down vote. I'm not associated to the project. Just to highlight an effort of a decentralised social platform.
Boots To Business: Veteran Entrepreneurs Succeeding At High Rates
> Sometimes some compromises will be made in order to keep the team "stable", so the business can keep going.

The thing to remember about big companies, is that they've already figured out some formula to approximately "print money." (Not really in all cases, what I mean more seriously and generally is just they already know how to make a profit.) So not rocking the boat will be seen by many there as the rational thing to do.
... and it did it.
Your Product Chooses Your Community
Should I Use ORM Or Not? Sure.
I love reading fitness and health debates. I think this is still an area that is very much still an unknown. There are studies this way and that way, diets range from no meat to mostly meat, and exercise itself is debated, be it which is best or what have you.

I don't personally know, and IMO the question is too complex. I don't believe there is a single, unified solution. I personally do High intensity stuff, sprinting and weightlifting, and while I'm fat, it isn't because of my diet. I drink, a lot. And love it. I'm not quite an alcoholic, at least in most people's eyes (Europe for example), but it has some negative effects. It also probably keeps me from ever hitting the 2x BW bench, 2.5 BW squat and 3x BW Deadlift, but what the hell. I try to have a balanced, fun life. I'm healthy, even if I'm at ~20% Body Fat.

I truly believe in the Calories in Calories out method, from a physical or mathematical perspective but get that psychology and other factors make this more than a simple "law of thermodynamics" issue. Yes, the law still stands, but if there is no human motivation to a diet/lifestyle change, then it isn't going to work.

We need a lifestyle change that works, and I don't think there is a single, master lifestyle that will work for everybody.

I for one, have no interest in endurance running. It works when you do have an interest, a passion, or the motivation to make it work, but so does keto - another thing I'm not a huge fan of. I eat plenty of protein, don't get me wrong (~150 g/day) but I don't think "high" protein diets work for everybody (though I do feel everybody should eat 150-160g a day, just a IMO thing).

Anyway, on topic, I don't like Reddit's /r/fitnees or even the spawns of it (/r/fitnesscirclejerk etc), as they tend to be filled with acerbic know it alls that are very insulting and not very much fun to interact with.
Not true. I didn't support App.net and am not optimistic about it, but there is a much larger potential value proposition to App.net than "not seeing ads": App.net promises to allow arbitrary 3rd party clients in a way Twitter won't, because Twitter will suppress 3rd party clients that harm its ad ecosystem.
Oh I've definitely been thinking about it. One big problem is it wouldn't be nearly as lucrative as other potential project ideas -- it simply won't be possible to build another $100B Facebook style corporation around a social network. Diaspora was kind of onto the right idea but I think they completely chose the wrong technology stack and are now stuck in the mud without any momentum.
I watched the video, and I still don't know what app.net is. "Social platform" is all I got, that's extremely vague.
Metro.css
Good point - I was equating the rarity of the action w/ it being a genuine demonstration. The demonstration of showing such commitment by going "all in", at least in poker, isn't really meaningful. It's a function of math and happens all the time. But, poker on ESPN for example, makes it into a dramatic event for their viewers. My favorite is when they would have the "all-in" moments brought to you by X sponsor.
>"We've spent as long playing World of Warcraft as we have evolving as a human species."

That's obviously a meaningless and unfair comparison (world time vs. cumulative individual time). Here's a better one: how much cumulative time has been spent watching and playing baseball? If it's more than 5.93M years, is baseball evidence for the same thing? Is any form of recreation evidence that reality is broken?
WHY UNSEXY STARTUPS GET US HOT & BOTHERED
Congratulations to Team App.net and a special shoutout to the Alpha App.netizens who brought da noise, and the passion to the last 10 days.

Now it is up to the developers to show us!!
I always imagine putting my martian grandkids on my knee and pointing to the martian heavens says "That dim dot is where i was born."
> Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?

So, what explicit rights does the customer have over that which they get with Facebook or Twitter? Do I have voting rights for features? Is the business model solid? I mean, $500,000 is great and all, but that needs to last an entire year all while supporting future development. Sure, they can get new people on board, but what's their plan for that?

As for being the customer, it means little. As we've learned from experience, being a customer doesn't mean anything. You ask a question about being the product or being the customer as if being a customer actually gives you something, when in reality, it doesn't. I mean, in this case, you get a years worth of service. After that, nothing else is promised.

So, beyond the years worth of service, what do you really get? What are they promising? Because so far from what I see, the reality differs from the promise.
I should point that while engineering the skycrane was no doubt very difficult, and provided all sorts of lessons and solutions, that if we wanted to develop autonomous helicopters for use on Earth, the best way to do it is infact to develop autonomous helicopters for use on Earth [1] [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_MQ-8_Fire_Scou...
[2] http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/07/marine-kmax-bea...
Existence is hardly an impressive accomplishment.
On the other hand exploration and colonization can make place for many more billions of potential Catholics and ensure the sect survival in case of a global extermination event.
I'd say that you are still being very shortsighted. Research and discovery are usually a very long progress. Maybe there is something on this mission that directly benefits someone else and maybe there isn't. The fact that you're asking means you completely miss the point.
The former, just hell of a bland way to build things these days (even though it is great). Even if it was skinned or something it would go a long way of making it stick out a bit.
Bets on how soon someone will imitate this approach to the platform business in other areas?
Doesn't the injustice of that bother you? You are given the power to weigh up life and death, without any chance of ever starving yourself. Such naval gazing is stereotypical of people with full stomachs. Is basic human empathy such a bad reason to try and help?
I don't buy the argument. A $100b space mission is going to have a bigger benefit to the desperately poor than a $100b medical research program? No way.

But then, why does the space program need to be defended like that? People prefer buying big TVs, big cars, big houses instead of giving the money to starving Africans. So why not view the space program as just an extension of that?
Excellent point. I've been the customer of many services that still either close or get bought out by companies that I didn't want to do business with in the first place. I had no real 'rights' as a customer. Just because I'm not the product via ad views doesn't mean I (as part of a large customer base) don't make an excellent acquisition/takeover target. Will Caldwell sell out for $10 million? Probably not. Might he sell out for, say... $300 million? Possibly, and then I've yet again been turned in to a product for sale.
I've been using Trello for a couple of months and so far I've been impressed just how flexible its underlying metaphor is. The implementation itself is easy to use and surprisingly fun. I love the fact that very few things are actually deleted, instead they are merely archived and can be searched, unarchived, etc.

Stuff that I miss:

* Filtering cards based on tags. Once you have a couple of dozen cards on a list it becomes increasingly difficult to get an overview of what you're doing, what you should do, etc. I use tags like DO THIS, DISCUSS THIS, INCOMING and would really like to filter lists so they only displayed, say, DO THIS cards. Right now I find myself fiddling around with the lists far too much, trying to figure out what I should do next. Not good if you're a procrastinator.

* Universal markdown support. Sometimes you can markdown, other times you can't. Confusing.

* More than 5 tags on a card. I think this limitation is arbitrary: Trello uses a color bar for each tag on a card so there's a limit to how many colors, i.e. tags, you can display. On the other hand it forces you to be more disciplined with your tagging, which makes organization and collaboration more streamlined.

* Trello doesn't do traditional, calendar centric, planning too well. Sometimes I just want to move around cards on a calendar (day, week, month). My current solution is to create a card for each week or month but it strikes me as unnecessary manual labor.

* Card comments should be editable once added. Currently, if you discover an error in a comment, you have to delete the comment and re-add it.
>The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads.

IMO, the people who care about ads on social networking have Adblock+ installed. I would even go so far as to throw this (very probably unsourcable statement) and say that most users don't care about ads, period.
The one thing that pulls me to social networking is people, not the ads. A social network isn't social or a network if there aren't people I know or care about using it.
Nice work. What do the two buttons do? Some kind of ranking algorithm behind the scenes in play?
Best Buy founder proposes $10B plan to compete with Amazon
Twitter, that you pay for, that has no adverts and that is developer friendly with the API.

I think that's a good summary: https://alpha.app.net/
Understanding of the cache (specifically) and the memory hierarchy (in general), and of register allocation, are vital to writing efficient C code. Obviously, you don't have to understand that stuff to write marginal C code, but the idea that C hides it from programmers is a bit of a stretch.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the existence of a status word", since much of the expression syntax of C is a mapping of the status bits.
I happen to like the grainy feel, actually. It's like a filter from the 70s --- you could position it as the "forgif.me" look-and-feel, in an Instagram sort of way. HD isn't always better. :)

One recommendation, in addition to other people's notes about messaging the 5-sec limit: Try adding a line of copy on your home page indicating what this site is / what to do there. The HN post title you used could do the trick --- as it obviously worked for everyone who clicked thru and tried it (myself included).
Node.js is preemptive, there's only one thread running JavaScript but multiple C++ worker threads doing work on behalf of the script.

vibe.d on the other hand is cooperative since it uses coroutines for concurrency.
Actually, I think the previous comment has made the point of Steven Pressman's article. I, too, came here looking for things to read. I want to find information, to see new ideas and viewpoints. On the other hand, I don't care what ten_fingers read before this or after. I don't care that his power supply was making noise. And no, I didn't finish his comment.

It was too long, rambling, and seemingly overflowing with the opinion that ten_fingers is the most important person in the world and the rest of us should drop everything to absorb his every utterance. In short, not to put too fine a point on it, that his shit don't stink.
I suspect that excessive influence of religion led to all those other problems.
I think for now it's just for the efficiency of making a solid alpha. I have no doubt they'll get some solid designers working on some of the UI (and UX people as well).
Steven Pressfield: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pressfield

The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Afghan Campaign, etc.
FBI believed Kim Dotcom had a ‘doomsday device’
>How is a nun in middle of Africa meant to have even a basic understanding of how a specific government's budgeting and economic system works?

She can't have read a few books on economics? His explanation was pretty basic and nothing that couldn't be found in econ 101 textbooks. He essentially just assume she was uneducated.
Which also has nice links to the specs for each feature.
> But if you do nothing the second generation would be even larger still since the fertility rate of the extremely poor is so high.

Obviously the population must eventually plateau or decline, due to finite resources.

I think it will be extremely difficult to alleviate the cause of poverty in many African countries. It seems that they have a high fertility rate mainly because their religion/culture demands it. It seems just as difficult to get the fertility rate down there as it would be in Utah (nigh impossible unless nature forces the issue).
"churches spend part of the money on social assistance"

As a vehicle for proselytizing. Organizations that are dedicated to social assistance have reporting requirements that churches don't. It's not transparent at all what churches spend their money on. It's a murky government-sponsored wealth redistribution scheme. Not unlike the financial industry in that regard.
Evidenced by the phrase, "Rich Internet Application" :)
Rather than being big, public, Wal-Mart-esque torrent sites (where one can find a little of everything), most sites are going the route of Private Trackers and only specializing in TV Shows, or Music, or whatever.
Is there research on claims that the golden ratio is visually appealing? Seems like the kind of thing Mythbusters would bust.
While I'm in favor of the concept behind this, I have one deeply concerning question that I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else ask here:

Why is it called App.net?

The first 4 or 5 articles I saw about it, I ignored completely because I assumed it was some sort of app (web/mobile/whatever) framework, not a social network. They talk about the users being the customers (versus advertisers), but the name of the service is clearly targeting developers, not the users...
You think it was the technology stack and not just that users and developers were disinterested?

As a developer, I never thought once about building an app or integration for Diaspora.

That's why App.Net might have a chance -- he's making this about targeting developers. There's a reason Apple has spent millions marketing different 3rd party apps -- and the whole ecosystem via "there's an app for that". There's a reason "killer app" is part of our lexicon. There's a reason Steve Ballmer jumped around on stage screaming 'Developers!' and there's a reason XCode is free now.

Building it is not a guarantee that they will come. But it is a prerequisite.
This talk by Hans Rosling makes a pretty reasonable case for decoupling the notion of religion and birth rates.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_religions_and_...
Also mininova.org went legal, they're not technically dead but for piracy and for the overwhelming majority of their users who only wanted them for piracy they are.
This sort of service depends on network effects. I suspect that 90+% of Twitter and Facebook users aren't willing to pay $50 to get rid of ads.

If even Google is having trouble getting traction with a social networking product, I don't see why anyone is confident that a social network users have to pay for will end up with a large enough user base to be useful.
That's a personal attack and offensive and inappropriate.

My point was about information as the desired content. For that point I gave some examples, today before coming to HN, after HN, and some recent reading, and those were good examples of information to make my point. The point is the content, and the examples were fully appropriate.

I made a point, clearly, strongly, and thoroughly. Apparently my doing so made you angry. Apparently you resent seeing points made.

You are angry about something, but I did nothing wrong. Your anger is something you have done wrong.

You are attacking me and not my thoughts.