skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And so in their effort to make billions now, Twitter is slashing and burning the same 3rd party developers that helped to make it the behemoth it is today."

Third-party Twitter clients (that is, replacements for Twitter's site and official apps) had little impact on Twitter's success. It's a story that sounds good, but I don't see any evidence for it. Those are the only developers that are materially hurt by Twitter's new policies.

"They spend the 6 months they could have used learning to code, trying to find a cofounder instead."

Someone who thinks they might want to start a software business in the future should definitely learn how to program. Someone who's starting a software business right now should pay someone else in dollars or equity to get it done. It takes more than six months to become a competent programmer, let alone become familiar with the tools and practices needed to build a modern web application or mobile app. This just isn't very good advice at all.
<offtopic> Except when the Mythbusters are doing it, it's just pure awesome :) http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishi... </offtopic>
Essential ergonomics for programmers
Marco's analysis makes it sound less reasonable because Marco's analysis is wrong, and your interpretation of Marco's analysis makes even wronger assumptions based off of his wrong assumptions.

They're not forcing you to use widgets, and you don't have to display tweets as proscribed by their API restrictions if you aren't doing it through a widget.
Just a data point, I find lightbox (photo sharing site, not js lib) to be so incredibly addictive that I spent 1/2 hour on it. There's no way I would have spent more than 5 mins had I have to click on each page.
Investor relations is such an important activity for an early stage startup, and something we forget to do often. This is a great reference for how to write those, thanks for sharing
It's a Monkey Podcast Episode 1 - App.net, Medium, Steve Faktor & Dr Larry Rosen
Hmm... I don't know better since I haven't got my invite yet - I was under the impression that conversations were based on posts elsewhere (twitter etc).
I would tend to agree with your initial statement.

Which is why I believe what nerds are ranting about on HN does make a difference. I would guess that other users will never find out about certain stuff unless the serious nerds let them- they are the "trend makers" so to speak. Whether popularity equals instant and lasting profit is another question. But no one can deny Twitter has become very popular. It's valuable because it's useful, even if it's not a winner in terms of profitability. (Much like Wikipedia.)

Contrast this with the enormous number of developers who are focused on some mythical end user they can speculate about and that they know they can easily manipulate. Or with folks who are using PR and the tech media to fool investors and generate short-lived buzz amongst less savvy users. Internet VC guilty as charged. These guys are usually rational and know the scent of money a little better. But they cannot control what becomes popular, not like a mob of irrational, fussy nerds can.

Free stuff frustrates a lot of developers. But do not forget the internet is in its infancy. We're still trying to get stuff working. That Twitter even works (the SMS part) is a blessing.

Will App.net be able to make agreements with all the telcos as Twitter did? We shall see.
A16Z and General Catalyst funded startup seeking a Product Market Developer 
Parlay Labs is a stealth mode company that raised $4M in seed funding. We are looking for a Product Market Developer. Wondering what that is? It's a unique hybrid Product Marketer and Product Manager. If you are a Product Marketer reading Hacker News, you have certainly established your credibility for this role.
I fully agree with that. It's just something to keep in mind before building on their platform. It's not for me to decide how Rackspace should run their business, but for me it simply means I can't use them even though I want to. If only they kept a few "asymmetric" configurations as options, like Amazon does. But, alas.
I won't try to convince you not to switch to Debian, but you don't actually need to use Unity on Ubuntu. At work we use Ubuntu, so I just installed a different WM (Awesome, in my case) and logged out and back in.
If you aren't signed in (or in browser private mode), and visit https://medium.com, you should see this http://cl.ly/image/3z293w0b2V0j. I don't have write access to the service either, but my guess is that's how it looks like? You can actually type, as well as replace the photo in that page. But you can't save.
McDonalds does a roaring trade in burgers, but that doesn't mean their burgers are very good. I had starbucks coffee exactly once, and it was so bad that I vowed never to go back there again. The way to know if a coffee shop is good is to ask for a quattro ristretto with milk, or something like that. If the barista looks at you funny or hesitates in the slightest just go somewhere else.
One minute, let me get my crystal ball out and read the future for you...

But seriously: HTML5 has been here for a while now (so now it could only die after it got started ;)) and with Flash now officially dead on Android, HTML5 is the most likely way forward (especially since it is getting lots of attention on many platforms, so it's unlikely to go away any time soon).
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>the vast majority of a college education comes about through nothing more than reading books and writing papers

You went to a shitty college, I guess. Or maybe didn't realise what was going on around you?

(I'm not normally that mean to folk on the internet, but you totally earned it with that ridiculous opener.)
Statistics provides a wonderful set of tool for summarizing the opinions of a large group of people, but if you use it to determine your interactions with one individual instead of looking at the reactions of the person in front of you, You're Doing It Wrong.

"Men have no slack in this regard"? Really? I've never had anyone accuse me of harassment. I've only ever met one person who claimed to have beeen accused of harassment; based on the other tall tales he told (going 130mph on a dirt bike while being chased by a police helicopter, killing people with his bare hands in the Marines, and more), it's entirely possible that he made the whole thing up, or equally possible that he was actually guilty of harassment (he claimed the jury found in his favor).

The cases I've read about recently involved women clearly telling their harassers to stop, that the attention was unwanted, and the harassers refusing to heed those repeated requests. Rather than "one strike", it was more like "3 strikes, and still swinging".
I think the internet is more boring than any outside activity. Sure, it's an easy and comfortable way to get information and communicate with each other, but I see it mostly as a tool. I think the internet gets overused by the most people. A lot of people, even here at work, are online on Facebook, because they don't want to miss anything. But what would you miss if you doesn't read thats a boring day for someone, someone liked your newest image upload or something else? I don't understand this weird behaviour, but maybe it's just me doing sth. wrong.
Is xkcd overrated?
Vint Cerf: TCP/IP is inherently political
Uh, is "being easy to statically compile" some benchmark for simplicity that I've never heard of?

Also, what do you care if git is 230MB? Do they even make thumb drives that small any more?
Sadly the best coffee comes from speciality roasters that only sell it over the counter (or wholesale if you own a cafe in the city), so it's hard to get if you're out of town. A few (like Campos and Cleanskin) will ship within Australia though.

I think it's mainly a freshness thing - after resting for four or five days after roasting, coffee is only at its very best for 10 - 20 days at most (as whole beans).
Well, maybe the law would side with the restaurant if it came to that, but it won't, because the last thing a restaurant wants is a customer hauled away in handcuffs while shouting about how terrible the food is.

And when it comes down to it, my beef with the app store isn't a legal issue either. I might be able to sue the developer for breach of contract or fraud or something, but I won't. That's an even worse move than the restaurant calling the cops.

It may be that 24 hours is too long. Or maybe the return policy should only a apply to non-games. I'd hope a return policy would obviate the need for demo versions and so on. I use them whenever possible, but sometimes it's too much of a pain to be worth it. As for reviews... please. They're too easily gamed. All the apps I've been burned by had good ratings and reviews. If they hadn't, I wouldn't have bought them in the first place.

Perhaps the rational thing to do is just buy more apps and accept that it's always a gamble and sometimes you lose. I don't find myself doing it all that often though.
With Online Hackathon, Microsoft Hopes to Bridge Gaps for Windows 8
Nope, other side of the country in fact :) Is there another mediocregopher?
I take credit cards at a physical location for a physical product, and think I have good rates. We do $10-$20K per month, and averaged across all cards and including all fees we pay about 2.6%. I've checked with FeeFighters and others, and have never seen a legitimate quote as low as you suggest. I don't know if the savings are enough to cause us to switch (we use Square as a backup), but I think that for certain merchants this new offer is the best rate around. If you speak from experience and are currently paying less than 2% total fees in the US by some other means, please tell me how you are doing it!
I don't mind the job postings. I find it annoying that there is no comment thread on them, to sort out the BS.
You don't give inexperienced people guns. That's just stupid - they'll shoot themselves in the foot.

Oh wait this is America - carry on.

Lottery tickets are heavily regulated industries with defined probabilities, players and outcomes conditional on government oversight. These tickets aren't.
The FSF folks, and their followers usually, say that besides the GNU userland (coreutils, libc, etc.) the Linux kernel can't be built without gcc. Of course, there are icc builds, clang builds, although both builds require specific patches, but who am I to argue with all of them. Besides, if the userland is so damn important that they're placing its name in front of the kernel name, where's HURD, 20-something years later? Even DNF managed to deliver.

Sometimes I wish a specific distribution, GNU-free, so people can call it LNG (Linux is Not GNU).

PS: Gnome is a GNU project. X.org/GNU/Linux?
Twitter dies if they lose 98% of their users. So many people would leave that you'd never be able to keep even 1%.

Watching Twitter and app.net over the next couple of years should be fascinating. Twitter can't start charging, but app.net is starting there. If they get 1% of Twitter's population, they are a huge success. And Twitter just gifted them a lot of potential developers.
svn is quite over-engineered and has significantly more dependencies than git. There's no way a statically linked svn would come out smaller than git, so either you're trolling, lying, or stupid.

Besides, file sizes of statically linked version control binaries is utterly uninteresting for anyone with an ounce of sanity.
What an amazing GIF. They way the colors work out it reminds me of a fire that smoldered for awhile and then woke up in late 2008.
Create stunning visual presentations with impress.js
Yes, AuroraUX is generally dead but on the bright sight it initiated[1] the development of GNAT-AUX[2] which is fine up to this day and even compiles Ada for Android devices :)

[1] http://www.dragonlace.net/questions/quest_003/

[2] http://www.dragonlace.net/
> So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, > that’s OK. But services like Storify and Favstar, which are > actually useful and/or fun, those are no good.

Seconded. Just seconded. Know, why I keep using Twitter less and less...
Not that I'm aware of, but our (is it still 'our' if you graduated ten years ago?) mascot is the gopher.

Of course, the original artist didn't have a gopher picture to go on when he drew Goldy, so he used a chipmunk instead, assuming there wasn't any difference (http://www.mndaily.com/2003/07/21/goldie-really-gopher)
Get preseason tickets of Miami heat via Ticketmaster bot 
Last Wednesday, the officials of Miami Heat announced that the tickets of this event would be put on sale earlier than expected and it is going to be exclusively over Ticketmaster.com, so anyone who is willing to get his hands over Miami heat preseason tickets needs to create an account over Ticketmaster.com and can buy tickets.
Wow first time seeing this site. A very awesome discovery engine indeed.
Pragmatic Marketing Framework
>He's right, and at the same time wrong. Yes, GNU/Linux includes the GNU tools, but if we start naming the component systems where do we stop? Should i tell people i use Gnome/X.org/GNU/Linux? What makes GNU so special that it deserves to be included in the name?

Their FAQ answers that: GNU is the single largest source of code for the system; if you look at all the packages in e.g. debian or fedora you'll find that the largest percentage by far is written by the GNU. So if you want to call it only one thing, that one thing should be "GNU".
There was also "Mastodon Linux"[1], an attempt to both get rid of most of the GNU userland as well as stick to the a.out format (for binary compatibility and glibc-sucks reasons). Always thought it was kinda interesting, but pretty dead due to basically being a one-man project (by David Parsons, nowadays mostly known as the author of the discount markdown parser).

[1] http://www.mastodon.biz/
Try twicca on Android. It is substantially faster to use and performs really well (scrolling long lists) on older Android devices.

In fact, the official clients are almost unusable on slower/older Android devices, whereas twicca is fast and responsive.
So much this

I figure out they have 2 designers there, one really good and one that doesn't have the slightest idea of UX and design

Case in point: the way DMs are notified to the user. That's right, in the previous web version it wasn't. And this version is better, but not great
What graphing library or tool was used to make these charts?
µTorrent will include ads, users pissed off
There's an apache version of this in the works:
http://www.itworld.com/big-datahadoop/290026/new-apache-proj...
> high school educated people are increasingly useless to our economy.

That seems like a silly statement. The jobs that most college graduates are fighting for were once, and often still are, done quite successfully by high school educated people. It is not that education matters in the workplace, it is just that the demand for those jobs has kept people trying to increasingly outdo everyone else in order to get the job. Education has been an easy way to do that.

Education doubly serves as an easy filter. You have probably heard your parents say something like "in my day you only needed high school." That is because there were less high school graduates during that time. If you threw away the resumes without high school, you could pare them down to manageable levels. In the meantime there was a big push to see more high school educated people. Suddenly, filtering by high school yielded too many results. Degrees were still relatively rare, so applying that logic allowed the filter to work again. But then the big push for college education started...

53% of recent college graduates are underemployed or jobless[1]. This seems to indicate that having a bachelors is not even enough anymore. "Everyone" has a bachelors degree these days, so why hire one of them when you can hire someone who has a masters degree?

The economy would do just fine if we had more high school (or less) educated people, but we would have to find some other filter, like gender, race, or religion and we have already decided that no company may filter based on those attributes. That leaves the infinite arms race of education where it is still socially acceptable to consider those without said education "stupid" and unfit to do the job.

[1] http://blog.fora.tv/2012/04/the-new-53-unemployed-college-gr...
Using .Net MVC4 AsyncSections to improve perceived page loading times
This reminds me of the sad fact that most distributions are just repackaging the same old GNU tools, or if embedded then busybox. Where's the innovation/experimentation of base userland? Android (other mobile linuxes probably too) is a nice exception, even though I'm not particularly fond of it as a system, I approve that at least it's trying to be different.
A user-editable userland is a pretty neat idea, and if your language of choice is Perl, why not? Plan 9 has the pretty neat 'src' command that immediately opens the source file (or main entry point) of a given command.

Given something like file system overlays, individual users forking their own command versions would be a pretty neat idea, albeit it might turn out to be a bit chaotic. Although not much more than e.g. a highly-customized shell or emacs environment.
Except it is not difficult to prove that you can't win in expectation against a random RPS player. The programming competition is only fun because the players are nonrandom.
I think you might be mistaken about the order of events. Originally, the operating system was supposed to just be called "GNU". They developed almost everything except that they bet on the wrong horse with The Hurd. Then Linux came along (Linus used the already available GNU tools to develop Linux) and filled the empty spot.

I sort of can understand that Stallman is pissed that he not only realized the necessity, but actually sat down and spent a lot of time and energy developing a project which today is portrayed as being (mostly) Linus' achievement. I mean, interested techies know the deal with GNU and Linux (the kernel). But in the general public? By now the word "Linux" (meaning the full OS) has already gained some attention outside tech circles, but who has ever heard of "GNU"? At the same time when you listen to Stallman talk about this he likes saying things like "the GNU system was just missing the kernel", as if it was a minor contribution.

I think calling the OS that is based on both GNU and Linux "GNU/Linux" is fair, but at the same time it really just sounds a bit silly.
I'm not currently paying less than 2.6%, because i deal exclusively with online transactions. All i know is that most of my clients who handle offline transactions through another provider are shocked at paying over 2% when they start collecting money online.

and my experience is in Canada, not the US, but in general our rates are slightly worse here. Your rates might be high because your volume is pretty low.
OT, but any one knows why square.com redirects to squareup.com instead of the other way round?
But it's already established that deadlines are moot. So giving a deadline for planning, training, and hardware merely reduces to a random guess.

They'd be better off telling the client the truth that "We don't know a honest date and we don't want to lie and come up with an arbitrary one. I can only say it's unlikely that the project would take more than six months and you should at least be prepared to order the hardware by the early summer. We'll keep you posted."

Emphasis on the last part.

Schedules are more accurate later on when some work has been done already. Instead of creating an arbitrary point in the future keep the customer posted with: "We've already finished X and Y in the first month, so we'll soon start working on Z which is a big task but on the other hand we noticed that we don't have to do Q at all since we can just build it in terms of X and Z combined which won't take more than a week instead of the month that was originally planned."

If you tell this every week then everybody has an up-to-date view of the runway ahead. You can also give a "deadline", like: "If you need a deadline for higher-ups or administrative planning, use October 31st but tell them to prepare to plunge in earlier. We all know we'll be done then by a far margin."

Most customers that I've ever had have intuitively understood this is how it works, even if they had to have a "deadline". YMMV.
Armenian Dolma
Dolma national dish of Armenian cuisine needs grape leaves, minced beef meat, rice, onion, basil and other spices.
It's like "Delta" that makes faucets vs "Delta" that flies planes
I'm dubious. I just glanced at my interchange plus billed Merchant Account Statement, and the highest I saw was 2.95% + 20 cents for a couple international business rewards cards. I suppose you could count this as 5% for an under $10 purchase, but do you have a specific example of a card that exceeds 4% on larger transactions?
Productivity depends way more on the programmer and his/her knowledge of the common idioms, language features, and libraries for any particular platform than any specific language. The characteristics of languages that make it fast to implement features include dynamic typing, built-in collections, a large class library, availability of an interactive console, availability of a debugger that can easily be used on any host machine, JIT compiled or interpreted, no binaries or packages to build.
if you don't need http/https/svn/gtk support then git can be built without perl, curl, git-svn, python etc. installed
Apologize for my tone, but the point is that the time we spend reading and replying to each other's comments and shared links don't produce anything. It really bothers me to think about all of the time humanity is wasting entertaining itself in the guise of learning. I do learn some things from HN and news sites that is of use at work, but that happens only every once in a while, not enough to justify the time spent.

The Roman civilization brought roads, civilization, language, and technology to the world. However it died because its people got too fat and happy and were doing what we are now- living just to consume and be entertained. Despite all of the production initially, the purpose in the end was lost.

I think the people of many first-world countries have lost our way like this. I think of the U.S. being the place of business and innovation through the 50s into the 60s even, then fell on its sword slowly first with the free love and liberties of the late 60s, followed by the microcomputer revolution and cable television which along with electronic gaming basically started killing time and productivity. The rise of the internet leads to what, peace? No, actually it leads to everyone sharing every detail of their life and thought on their mind. But there is nothing to work for or aspire to be other than being right and popular and accepted to a bunch of people we didn't even care about before, and in the end, it is for nothing.

We should be working to make our people better and produce new technology and solve hunger, crime, promote peace. Instead we just consume and stare at screens.

So, what should we do? We need to unplug. We need to live for purpose. We need to stop typing statuses and responses and start being productive. Live a life you would be proud of and raise a good family.