skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There's nothing wrong with allowing exceptions for software clearly described (and sold) as "beta".

Then all software will be sold as beta.

>Yes, just like he is accountable if he fits the lolcats viewer with a trojan on purpose.

One of those things is a criminal violation, the other is not--"just like" doesn't work here.

>One who is careful enough to use a safe language, skilled programmers and possibly insurance. I fail to see how this is any different from a small vendor of electronic devices, who needs to comply with safety regulations and bear the risk of a recall due to a design problem.

I've developed and sold small electronic devices before--regulatory compliance is a huge burden if you're only selling a few units. Paying the cost of compliance testing when you're niche products with a small number of sales is very difficult. In addition, it greatly increases the amount of capital needed to get going.

Whenever someone proposes regulatory solutions like this, I assume he has only worked for (or owns) established companies and has recently tried to start one himself.

How many small electronic vendors are there vs. small software vendors? Software that can cause death (like electronic devices can) already has to comply with safety regulations.

>How is this different in other industries where regulations that demand sufficient quality and warranties exist?

It's not, that's the point. The regulations in these industries are heavily skewed towards large companies, that can afford to pay entire regulatory compliance divisions and the divide the cost amongst their comparatively much larger sales--complying with regulations is much easier if you are selling a millions copies of something than if you are selling 100.

>So you're saying that complex products should not come with a suitable warranty? How is an image viewer for the PC (no warranty, possibly vulnerable to specially crafted images due to buffer overflows etc.) more complex than a car (comes with warranty)?.

How many car companies are there? Do you really want to live in a world where the software industry works like the car industry?

Embedded critical systems running real time software are much more reliable than desktop software because failures can kill people. But there is a huge trade off--do you want to run a desktop graphics program that is designed by engineers at Boeing?

I like the freedom of choice that I'm currently offered--I'm willing to accept a few bugs in exchange for more a better user experience.
Yes, and yes (hopefully).

It's a twitter alternative that will (hopefully) not treat users as product.

It's also being thought about as a more open developer friendly platform (eg no constraints on clients because the service needs to show adverts).
> It's an interpretter, which means much slower execution

Only BEAM is an interpreter, there are HiPE and ErlLLVM backends as well. You can also write NIFs — functions in C that can be executed within VM.
Interesting to note, in this connection, the rising popularity of Haskell, which is way off at the "Right Thing" end of the spectrum.

Maybe it is really possible to come up with the Right Thing eventually -- it just takes a lot of research.
Is not smalltalk's "IDE" so, so much more all-knowing than any java one?
Clearly app.net is tapping into something that people are starting to feel pretty strongly about--the benefits of "free" aren't necessarily worth the consequences in the longterm.

Well, maybe. Let's remember that Twitter has more than a hundred million accounts, while App.net has ~7500; we have no evidence that the people feeling that are not just a small number of outliers, much like there always will be.
Seems to only be written in Clojure, and has no relation to the people behind Clojure... should not be using the Clojure name/brand in this fashion.
I'd recommend watching all the TED talks by Hans Rosling, they are pretty awesome and eye opening, in particular these:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_shows_the_best...

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_reveals_new_in...

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_at_state.html
I too have spent my non-self employed days of work in the ad game and couldn't agree more. The concept of always"adding value" that has become so parroted in the good circles of the start-up space are relatively ignored in the ad space.

In the old days just creating something "cool" was considered enough value add because the information volume allowed for time for people to focus and decide how that "cool" gave them value. No Mas! If in a few seconds the viewer/user can't own, share, brag, stop and think about or act on what you create, than it is a waste of time.
I love the idea. I am totally rooting for them but I hate the name. I don't see someone in marketing, either girl or guy, who loves tech but does't know the internals of tech, singing up to this service. It's too narrow in it's focus.
Cool.

Honestly I haven't thought he would manage to raise this amount.

I just checked at on 8 and it was 43%. After that I didn't look into the count. Now, wow I'm impressed. I think this is the best crowdfunding effort I've ever seen.

I'm not a backer of app.net. But would love to hear about the roadmap and future development.
Still twitter, FB is OK for me. I'm waiting for what app.net can offer something I wanted.

BTW I'm not a hater :)

Good Luck!
App.net team.
> What really needs to happen is an open decentralized protocol needs to be agreed upon for newsfeeds + blog posts (wordpress) + microblog (twitter). Then everyone can write their own servers and clients and operate in a manner like Email currently works.

Then do it. Make everyone look like idiots for not doing it sooner. Make it so cool I have to sign up.
A detailed list that is regularly updated, with exact version numbers has been around for years on the stdcxx Wiki:

http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C++0xCompilerSupport
I doubt git would be nearly as popular without a really polished hosting site, though. Github is git's killer feature.

And there are other DVCSs. As it is, the main hosts for bzr and hg are clearly less slick and less popular than Github. But had Git not been there, it's quite plausible that someone would have built an equivalent site around another technology.
You are assuming the IDE makes everyone more productive. For some people that is absolutely not the case. And the idea that you need to use an IDE for a bunch of boilerplate is abhorrent to them.

It's hard for a Java zealot to understand this position for some reason.
Stunning panoramic from Mars Curiosity - water?
Excellent work! Love this.
That's my point, I want as much of the "let's fund the military-industrial complex" money as possible to go to NASA. Right now they're struggling on funding.
Dalton Caldwell: We Did It
There've actually been discussion about that. Some even think it's too much, but I guess people will get accustomed to it quickly.
The upside, as I found, is that it's possible to write slightly better arguments while still keeping brevity. On Twitter I almost always hit the limit (or very close) on app.net, so far not really.
Credit Stephen Fry for probably at least $10k of that — he told his 4 million followers about the service, which pushed it over the edge: https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/234695539357257728

Seriously though, this is great. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next. Hoping to experiment on the journalism front there.
Help in this context means discussion, advice, him showing me what he had done, me suggesting quick solution, or talking to him what to type, similar to pair programming. If _I_ had to actually write more than few lines of code, we'd just switch to my computer.
But what if child mortality is up mainly because of high birth rates? When their religion/culture calls for having as many kids as possible, it causes problems that lead to high child mortality. It's very difficult to change religion/culture.
Congrats, dude. Now to scrape together a seriously unexpected $100.
I backed the project without watching the video. The posts on sites like DaringFireball and Marco.org had already convinced me. I doubt I'm the only one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet
The reason that no one has managed to make a proper decentralised version of Twitter is that it's really, really hard - much harder than saying "what really needs to happen is..."
An update from Dalton that deals with new features and third party verification of the funding - http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it
But the big difference is the traditional investment model requires fewer backers. While by no means is raising investment an easy process, first time entrepreneurs have a better chance since they have to sell fewer people on it.
But Will it scale?
I am amused. "which university did you attend" is a required question.
See this: http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it
It could be a lot of curiosity that drove it.

Now I can see a problem arising if they take outside investment.
Thanks for the hate. I know it's worlds apart and there extreme implementation differences, but from a design pattern/code organization perspective it sounds similar, I just thought that was curious. A javascript programmer's view on the Rover's software.

(and I feel stupid having to apologize for a harmless comment. way to go HN)
1. Awesome to see this funded.

2. Curious to see all the post-funding pile-on. Looks like their subscribers are jumping quite quickly (for a Sunday!) now that funding has been met. Funding validation makes it feel like a safer 'bet' now?

3. Really curious to see if app.net can scale better than Twitter from the start. I'm talking full archives, proper search, robust conversation tracking. If app.net covers these areas sufficiently well, I could see this becoming a go-to feed for journalists / other people for whom proper archives and full-search would be invaluable.
That article is from 2010. ISOHunt is alive and well. You can do there right now: isohunt [dot] com
>You provide a warranty that states exactly what is covered and what not (and suitability for a particular purpose, which software licenses often deny completely).

So software vendors state in their warranties that running this software on an internet connected device voids the warranty, and they stop offering patches and support. All support moves to unofficial third parties.

>They do, at least here in the EU you get differently rated safety doors at different prices. You know exactly what kind of minimum resistance they offer.

And that's an objective quantifiable measurement. Levels of software vulnerability are not.

>Why should that make a difference? If you cannot handle the responsibility you have as a vendor, then don't be one.

That is stupid, no software vendor can harden consumer software meant to run on a desktop internet connected computer to the point that a large government agency can't find a vulnerability.
I'm guessing people are working on it. It's not an easy problem to solve though.
I'm not really sure what the purpose of this service is. ... I myself wouldn't pay to use Facebook minus the ads.

You answered your own question above, and also identified why app.net won't interest you. If you're okay with ads, then I think you'd get zero utility from app.net
What I learned in selling my company for $100 million
Yup, it's easy to get caught up in the euphoria of reaching an arbitrary target. Still, I'm hopeful.
Did Svbtle change its font recently? The text looks terrible. It's blurry, poorly aliased and some of the letters have full-out gaps in the strokes.

When viewed in Windows, of course.
The community and interactions made possible by this general feed will supposedly create the value. It makes sense to me, information is my entire life and I'd pay $50/year for a network that was even a tiny bit better than Facebook/Twitter.
What is all this methods-starting-with-an-underscore crap? That's a pretty shitty way to namespace methods. /ruby guy
Higher? I believe it will be much higher, which is quite concerning.
Free Online Course about In-Memory Data Management from HPI
> I was about to tear down your critique bit by bit -- you think healthcare is all about delivering pills? -- what do you know about roads in the 3rd world

It's good you didn't because the 1st one would be putting words in my mouth, and it's apparent I know a little bit more about roads in the 3rd world than you do. (I've actually traveled and worked in parts of the world where there are no roads whatsoever, no electricity/gas/landlines/mobile whatsoever, locals have to take a boat 2 miles on the river to get their mail, and planes have to land on the beach.)

> I think running drone networks to deliver medicine and small good is merely a stopgap measure to building roads. And once roads are built, I feel that real economic growth can finally commence.

You should read the Matternet site. That is exactly the idea. It's a good hand-up idea. Once you enable healthcare, government, and economic activity, you enable the local population to build and maintain real infrastructure. Drones are interesting precisely because they are potentially low cost and "better than nothing."

> In fact, having this drone delivery network in the 3rd world may retard the development of roads; roads will only be needed to transport big things, and people can get by with continuous delivery of small things via autonomous drones, thus it will take longer for roads to be built because there will be less demand.

Unlikely. Drones are simply better than nothing. Once you have more economic activity, then you have the local economic base for real infrastructure, like roads.
Ah, classic. Everyone always thinks that they know better than you how to take care of your kids. I have never understood how people like you don't realize exactly how rude you are.

But for your information, over-supervision means different things at different ages. It is not over-supervision to insist that there is always an available adult that a 4 year old knows how to get the attention of. It is over-supervision to insist that you always be within earshot of a 14 year old. It is one thing for my daughter to be playing in my back yard with me inside of the house. It would be quite another for there to be no adult available when she suddenly realizes that she needs to poop because I am running around the block and won't be back for 15 minutes. (The problem is not that she will have an accident, it is that she does not wipe herself sufficiently well.)

Also what is exercise is relative to your abilities. For instance yesterday we went on a 2 hour hike up a mountain before the heat of the day set in. For her there was a definite cardio element. For me, traveling at her pace, not so much. (My wife and son set out a bit earlier and went at their pace. When we met up they had done 3x the vertical that I did, and had much better exercise.)
I'm taking issue with the use of the word "squatters" in the way you used it.
Except that it's not actually all that broad.

It's broad in the human (as opposed to Heinlein's Martian) sense because we engage with religion, philosophy, and science in a largely intellectual way. Yes, even wingnut fundamentalists. They're all highly linguistic things; most of our more mystical traditions have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another.

In the Martian sense, that mystical perspective is far more useful: it unifies their physical reality of transcendent Old Ones and life that can be grown through singing and so on. The presence of a single word signals that they've collapsed all of these things down to a simple concept; the lack of a human analog simply says we haven't.

So to make a long thing short, the word cuts to the heart of a conceptual area that we can but dance around with all of our words and qualifications and half-understandings in the fields of religion, philosophy, and science. The desire to know divinity, to know oneself, to know the universe: these can be streamlined into a single concept, to grok.

Thus why Heinlein goes on to have Mike explain his pantheistic "God is that which groks". The closest English word I know of is not "understand" but rather "suffuse" or "permeate". To me, the reason the word survives the novel as a mere stronger version of "understand" is because most people hand-waved the novel's walk-through of religion as a boisterous critique rather than as a considered and valid approach to life, the universe, and everything.
Good question!

Firstly I would like to suggest that even if you can only tackle the symptom, not the cause, it would still be worthwhile - a patient with untreatable cancer should nonetheless get painkillers. You are correct that the number of people in the second generation would be higher than the number you bring out of famine. But if you do nothing the second generation would be even larger still since the fertility rate of the extremely poor is so high. Therefore simply alleviating the symptoms and not the causes of poverty (a) delays the suffering of hunger by a generation, and (b) reduces the total number people suffering in the second generation.

Of course, it would be far better to eliminate the cancer. In many cases it's difficult to know how effective the long-term treatment is, but in some cases the outcome can be measured quite well. Here's a great talk by Esther Duflo about measuring the effectiveness of aid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zvrGiPkVcs
In the book she co-authored called "Poor Economics" she mentions a study of a deworming program for children in Kenya. The study concluded that an extra year of deworming costing $1.36 USD PPP lead to a lifetime income gain of $3,269 USD PPP for the child. To me that is a slam-dunk evidence that aid can be effective in the long term.
This is awesome, it even looks like the "funding bar" graphic breaks when it gets to 100%...

Brilliant.
App.net will reach $1,000,000 mark when they will be funded (AUGUST 13 at 11:59PM PDT.)
Address it early with people who need to know (direct team and people who work with this person frequently). Be honest without going into too much detail. If people press for details you can't or don't feel like sharing, tell them you can't share.

Don't make up a softer story to cushion it-- this can bite you big time. there have been companies that have been sued and lost because a manager used the "Tom left to spend more time with his family" white lie, because it masse jurors believe that Tom had been fired due to familial status (a no no).
I wouldn't want to work for an entity that implements "decision processes", I'd much rather work for a (small) company that takes decisions. It's that simple.

Also, even though I'm already in my early 30s the word "career" scares me. I'd rather build things
I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer the question of what the service provides that Facebook or Twitter doesn't.

Are ads in and of themselves really a huge problem? I don't find myself often annoyed by them. Now if there were a systemic change to the service because you didn't have to alter the experience for users to generate ad revenue, then I begin to understand. However if this is the idea, then in what ways the service would be different is exactly what I'm trying to figure out.

Remember, there are two sides to the coin "we offer a better experience without the ads" method. First of all you are going to get a smaller user base. So how much are you going to charge? $5/month? $10/month? You would need to get a pretty massive user base to be able to pay the overhead and attract top engineering talent, so in the end I'm not sure you'd be a whole lot better off.
"What we need(or what I need to find if anyone knows one) is a site that lists a bunch of interesting projects that target the specifics of different languages with a repository system for people to upload their results to for any potential feedback."

I would love this. The biggest hurdle for me learning any new language is what to write. I mean, I can only rearrange my iTunes library so many times. :)
Congratulations!! Incredibly excited, still waiting for that killer app.

EDIT: I purchased it weeks ago, but you get the idea...
This is a reasonable alternative, but I hate it because of the monotony. Taking care of kids involves lots of little interactions and quiet periods, so would not break the monotony. But perhaps I should look into getting a setup where I can do that while I'm on the computer, killing two birds with one stone.

Thanks for the suggestion.
The page title is still "wtfnasa?"
Thanks for your interest.

I'm taking an approach that is fairly general, e.g., for that 2/3rds, and where solving the problem for video clips is just another application.

Roughly, first-cut, my work looks like a new Internet 'search engine', but that has to be only a rough description. That is, while 'search engine' may be the best two word description among widely understood two word descriptions, I don't think that much like a usual search engine can solve the problem. I believe that a solution needs to be a combination of search, discovery, recommendation, curation, and subscription!!!! How 'bout that!

Then there's another point, well connected with your "niche": Trying to provide what is 'most popular' is not promising! I.e., something in a niche is almost by definition not very popular. Or, what is in a niche is in 'the long tail'!

My guess is that we are moving to much more 'specialization' in content so that the fraction of the total content in the long tail and the niches is becoming a much more significant fraction of the total content. So, my 'search engine' is to help people mine this new fraction, the long tail.

How to do that? Well with the problem described, a key concept becomes obvious: Some case of strong 'personalization'!! That is, somehow have to get the user more involved so that the user can better indicate what they want and so that the search engine can, in some useful sense, 'learn' about what the user wants.

I've got the crucial, core, unique 'secret sauce' programmed and now am finishing up the routine parts of, really, just routine, simple Web site construction. And except for the crucial core stuff already done, it's a quite simple Web site. But the routine Web site work has taken me far too long -- those 3000 Web pages of Microsoft documentation of just routine parts of .NET really slowed me down.

Today I'm trying to finish up some work on just a simple session state store: I didn't like what Microsoft offered in ASP.NET, found a bug I wanted to get far away from in part of what they had, so did my own handling of session ID and session state with my own, simple session state store. But my session state store is via TCP/IP in my server farm, and I also need TCP/IP inside my server farm to connect my Web pages to my secret sauce servers. For using TCP/IP, have to build a 'message' service on top of the TCP/IP 'stream' service, so I did that and have used the session state store work to test it.

Then write the rest of the Web pages, load some initial data, and go live.
We'll see if this idea is capable of jumping from internet nerdom to the mainstream, but mainstream users are also becoming more and more aware of the actual cost of 'free' products.

I agree. I'm not in the business of predicting the future, but it's worth noting that Twitter did not start with more than a hundred million accounts.
Brainpad: How I get stuff done using Trello