skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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>Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50?

True, that alone might not do it. The $50 paired with a rudimentary reporting system might limit the use of a single account to a small time period in which the ROI wouldn't be worth it.
You can't compare something that requires a critical mass to be useful (app.net, Facebook, Twitter) with issue tracking software.

B2B products, like bug trackers, can carve a niche and do rather well with just a few hundred or thousand paid customers. Yes, they're not going to all be Atlassian, but a solo founder charging 1,000 people $30 a month can live very comfortably. And you can drift along for a while and not ultimately give up because "the big guys" are 1000x your size.

B2C products, like app.net, exist on an entirely different plane.

Disclaimer: I run a fairly new project management tool / bug tracker that already has already replaced a considerable amount of my monthly income.
The idea of twitter/facebook not appealing to their users enough may be a bit exaggerated. Yes, facebook/twitter must please their advertisers, however they only have those advertisers paying them because they have many users/subscribers. To keep advertisers coming to them, surely they must keep users happy so they can stay and even hope to attract more?

Now I'm sure having to cater to the advertisers certainly affects the decision making(even a bit adversely at times), however their massive following is essentially what makes them valuable.

I also notice that whenever this startup is challenged, I only see people simply parroting his belabored battle-cry of "catering to the users" without actually giving any concrete examples. I'm not against app.net's idea, I just believe the true novelty of this project is creating a micro-twitter(which can also be created on twitter by simply following certain people) for affluent tech people, and _keeping_ it that way via the subscription fee.

Besides that, I haven't read or heard of anything that they plan to do fundamentally different than twitter. Honestly, even if they do, and it actually proves to be a great feature that users love, I don't see why twitter can't simply copy it and perhaps even make it better.
That's ad hominem, but for a theme. Ad themium.
"he can legitimately be praised for being prescient about the role of satellites in researching a number of environmental problems"

Good catch to notice that. I was impressed this too, but didn't post until I saw your reply.

To me, Earth remote sensing is the most clear-cut example of near-term benefit to humanity by space technologies. It's amazing what can be done -- way beyond inputs for weather forecasts.

You can assess health of forest canopy from space (because you can measure water content of leaves -- it's a delicate measurement, but it can be done). (Hyperspectral radiometer)

You can measure full-air-column CO2, CO, and other gases, from space.

You can measure sea surface salinity and temperature, and even surface wind velocity, from space. (microwave radiometer, radar scatterometer)

You can measure tiny post-earthquake land deformations -- not at selected sites, but continuously over a broad area. (Radar interferometry)

All this is way beyond where it started, with pictures of cloud formations. Having these physical inputs allows much better modeling and prediction of all kinds of activity: weather/ecology/seismicity.
Because hedonism isn't really a good argument when being offered to a nun.
Regardless of your opinions on whether or not app.net is a worthwhile endeavor, I think Dalton is proving that the "pay for service" business model still does exist and can be applied to internet services. For so long, the norm was "build service people use for free, get a million users, figure out business model" which inevitably leads to a) selling user info or b) targeting people with ads.

Constantly trashing app.net is not seeing the bigger picture. Thankfully, people like Dalton aren't as short-sighted.
Startups Need a Special Learning Curve for Sales
Gruber also mentioned it, explaining that it hasn't reached the funding goal yet.
"...Good use of a few million tax payer dollars. We could go to Afghanistan and get the same picture for cheaper.", I thought to myself.

Our daily burn-rate in Afghanistan would buy us a new MSL-sized project every 8 to 10 days. It would probably be cheaper to go to Mars but pull out of Afghanistan a couple weeks early.
Spare Time Project: HiveSpun.com online art collaboration
facebook would shut it down instantly. A "Share with your friends" app would be awesome, and a powerful tool, but it wouldn't last a minute. Likewise, Google+.

Which is another good reason for us to hope an open social web continues to grow.
I don't see how you can be confident of this: Look at how youtube handles allegations of copyright infringement.

There's also a problem with flow of information; if your provider takes down something under the DMCA, they inform you, so you know about the (possibly frivolous) claim.

I don't see how Google could make any reasonable guarantee to be able to inform the affected parties -- neither the author/user that publish, nor necessarily the various admins and providers that would be affected (Think shared hosting, shared domain, community message board...).
Dalton has managed to convince 8000 developers to cough up cash. He's got a working alpha with a high level of community engagement. Those are substantial accomplishments.

I wouldn't write it off just yet.
Posted a much earlier version of this a while back, made some decent progress on it since then, but still a ways to go. Let me know what you think!
"Tell me, do you plan to report on the millions we've saved by advancing medical technology or kept from starvation with our intelli-crops? All those breakthroughs, military funding, honey." -- Tony Stark, Iron Man.

I agree with TheComedian that the drawbacks mitigate the benefits a lot, though. The thing about space exploration is that the drawbacks are purely speculative (alien regard, exoplanet contamination, etc.) and are a lot easier to dismiss.
Our entire CS Department runs on these. We're a primarily Linux-based department that emphasizes Linux/UNIX development with C. With these keyboards and the support of the department, I don't think we've ever graduated a student that didn't at least have a basic understanding of how to use vi.

They are very decent keyboards in my opinion; small and pleasing to type on.
I'm afraid that the difference it makes when we decreased infant mortality in a region, is the difference between having 8 children and having 5 children.

The problem is one of culture, education, and relative-wealth (and also whatever traits are infuenced by DNA). Everything else stems from that.

Sub-Sahara population has seen a decrease in infant mortality and at the same time has gone from 250M to 850M people in 30 years.

It's blowing up and I'm also afraid that the cause of all that is foreign intervention and artificial aid. In 2050 there will be 2 Billion people there. Who's going to help feed the hungry then?
Awesome writeup! I will definitely be pointing friends who are curious about algorithms to this.
I'd love to compare $billions in expenditure / angry letters from conservative nuns, for both NASA and the Department of Defense.

Even better would add the estimated lives saved by NASA technologies and DoD bombs.
I don't know that it's an ad hominem argument because there was no argument made--only an observation.

I didn't realize he was not part of svbtle, but it does seem like he's trying to claim credibility he hasn't earned by styling his blog as if he were a member. Svbtle is new enough that I don't know if there's much associated credibility, but still.

None of this is relevant to his point, which may as well be made as part of a chorus. Lots of people don't see the value.
Some people might tell you Go is the one, and if enough people believe that it might become a self fulfilling prophecy.

I personally am very interested in Go and I think it's a great choice for all my future projects.

Will Go become popular after 5 years? I honestly don't know, but I think it's a great tool and I want to use it. And honestly, I'd be weary of a language/platform if its popularity was based primarily on hype (for example, node.js) rather than usefulness.

Also, there's no reason that only one of Rust or Go can become popular. They could both become popular, just like Ruby and Python are both popular these days.
The biggest advantage is easier configuration. You can set the DNS on the router, and then all computers on your network (including Xboxes, iPads etc.) and work with it. It also seems like it would be a bit faster not having to do a VPN.
In short, changing DNS settings is usually a lot easier than setting up a VPN connection.
Cognitive teardown of the user experience in Angry Birds
Why would I want to alter my entire typing style for no reason other than to use YET-ANOTHER-APPLE-PRODUCT(TM) ? I have a Macbook, and the keyboard is fine for most situations. But whenever I try to do a lot of writing or programming on it, my fingers end up hurting really badly.
Right, at one point, the developer interactions were the primary focus. Well, secondary, right behind growing the user base.
This is one of those things that makes Rubymotion am increasingly attractive prospect for me as an iOS developer. I wouldn't be ready to move off my familiar Objective-C stack quite yet, but if more projects like this one come along i might just consider it.

One thing I'm curious about is the support for TDD when using Rubymotion, there's a lot of Rspec clones out there for Objective-C but they all feel a bit hacky due to the language's less than stellar support for DSLs. On top of that, testing doesn't seem to be all that big a deal in the iOS world. I'm wondering if a healthy dose of the Ruby ethos changes this.
Ask HN: What should I (and other people) know about technology?
I'm currently teaching myself how to program. I also want to learn more about technology in general. Not being technical has held me back somewhat in my startup experience so far. I think I have a pretty good plan for learning to program that seems to be working (= just trying to build stuff and going over it with the developers I work with).

But I want to learn more about general technology too (e.g. how flash memory works). Even some history would be nice. Almost all of my friends who are non technical (and even some who are) would benefit from broader exposure to technology (I frequently get asked questions like "What's an API?").

I'm considering diving into this (in addition to programming) and posting what I learn on a blog, but it would need to be organized to be useful. I was thinking to (1) dive into the history of computing a bit (2) understand how hardware + software have evolved (3) learn about today's systems setups (4) learn about where top people think tech is going.

If you have any suggestions or advice or parts of tech you've found helpful knowing, any good books / resources or general thoughts, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.
It's pretty hard to imagine an IDE not making a Java programmer more productive. The difference is truly astounding.
Is this tongue in cheek? I don't think this is what theu are gong for ...
How Google+ Punk’d The Oatmeal
That need could be filled in other ways, though. Religion is harmful because it makes people irrational and often controlled by dangerous forces (religious leaders).
I don't even agree that science doesn't care about human psychological needs. In the same way some scientists care about curing diseases, others care about curing psychological problems.
Hmm, that's a fair argument, but I think there's a difference between "the author isn't actually an part of svbtle" and what the GP said. I understood his implied argument as more like "he shouldn't be criticizing app.net because he ripped off the blog theme".
The data seems to be bunk, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372627
Wicket is a single design flaw:

-no clean dependency injection possible due to the "page" life cycle

-inheritence hell out of the box with coder kiddies thinking adding even more subclasses would be "clean" and maintainable

- excessive round-trips required in the build and test cycle

- breaking Maven conventions w.r.t to resources and Java classes which f###'s up Eclipse workspaces

Compare this against Bootstrap and a lightweight server-side implementation which can be learned in a fraction of time compared to Wicket's "different" approach.

great "design"
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Used that image myself for my undergrad thesis project on image compression. Didn't actually know who it was till a while later, it was just an image given to me to use.

This was my favorite part of the story http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/
I think that this really is going to reveal is that dichotomy between users as product and users as customer is a false one.

It's an interesting alternate perspective that has somehow gained the force of common wisdom without the evidence to support it. On a service like Twitter, the users are both customer and product, as five minutes of objectively clear thought would show.

App.Net make succeed or it may fail, but it won't be because of this issue.
A nun, in the 1970s, in Zambia, is not going to have easy access to economics textbooks.
What's going to prevent people using app.net from talking about things you don't care about? There is nothing that forces you to only talk about tech and related, as far as I can tell. The reason this doesn't happen on HN is because the topics are agreed on and moderated.
No reason it should take that long. The article suggest 6 person years - which could mean 6 people for 1 year.
Can you point to someone who is making that claim?
After reading almost every single comment in this story, I have come to 1 conclusion:

Geeks on Hacker News should not be giving out diet, nutrition, and fitness advice.

(No one should be taking the advice anyway.)

Diet, exercise, and nutrition stories on Hacker News always seem to be messy. They do end up being entertaining seeing all the back and forth controversy though some times.
Honestly, understanding how to use floats and clears properly is one of the hardest "computing" concepts to learn out there. First of all, they're a completely non-intuitive way of structuring layout, and secondly, they can break in 1000 different ways if you don't know exactly what you're doing.

For anyone who doesn't do CSS professionally, tables are vastly easier. They're easy to understand, and generally do what you want.

It's just that, as time goes by and your site becomes more and more complicated, tables become less and less flexible and maintainable.
Also, isn't everything derived from something? Case in point: http://drawar.com/
Review where your previous influx of customers came from then put a little effort back in.

Maybe you should be also looking after your existing customers e.g gathering feedback, thanking them, offering awesome support instead of tinkering with the core of the product.
Please, explain what do you mean by that - "pre-emptive"?

My understanding (coming from C and OS terms) is that pre-emptive means taken over. e.g. if I have a real OS thread it is being temporarily "paused" and the resources (CPU/mem/io) are given to something else. At some point control is restored back.

But this is without the knowledge or instructions from the thread itself. So things like priority inversions are hard to battle with pre-emptive multitasking - for example thread A with low priority holding a mutex, while thread B with higher priority waits for it. (and no need for mutexes, if only message passing is to be used).
Yes! RubyMotion ships with a port of Bacon, which removes all the friction from testing in the traditional iOS stack (setting up Xcode, adding multiple targets, verbosity...). Just have to add tests in ./specs and run 'rake spec'

Glance at the docs, especially the section about testing views. Much cleaner API than anything in Objective-C: http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/articles/testing/

(also a recent blog post on testing if you're still curious: http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/26489000626/functional-view-...)
Working solely on what makes you win (always) seems to be at odds with 20% time, or "slack" (where you focus on whatever you want, regardless of priority)

Curious as to how you reconcile those things.
Olympic Medals per Capita - 2012
Thanks!

Right now there are 51 items in the database, I'll be increasing that number throughout the week with the goal of doubling it.
Creating an itemized dumb is also on my to-do list for this week, I'll post something in here and link to it on the wtfnasa page once it's done.

-Jacob
An academic paper on how estate law applies to the undead
Twitter was crap when it started, something happened which caused it to be useful. App.net is crap, but maybe something useful will come out of it and then we'll find it useful.

p.s I'm in the app.net alpha.
Beat that Retina :).... Just kidding... Retina is just fine for our poor human eyes.

But this is incredible nonetheless. Just Enhance!
Evolutionary process is not just genetic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOZ3Xt6ZMBA&t=6m15s David Sloan on the evolution of egg laying hens.

See the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_equation
Lego Mindstorms Submersible Piloted by XBox Controller
Teen used bb gun to rob fellow player of 4.7bn fantasy coins for RuneScape
I didn't realize he was not part of svbtle, but it does seem like he's trying to claim credibility he hasn't earned by styling his blog as if he were a member.

I'm not sure being part of Svbtle lends anyone any "credibility".
It's not always about the idea. It's the execution.
Could we theoretically control the resonance of these nano-posts electronically, and use this technology as the basis for a next-generation reflective display?
Killing a Stackless Bug
I worked at a corporate giant where my skip level did not know who I was for close to 8 months. He never met with any of the employees besides the leads reporting to him, his manager and his peers. I think he had to find out about me when I left, but he still didn't even bother trying to talk me out of it.
I think this app is great! I've always been the kind who's terrible about staying in touch, and it's so nice to have something that I can send out quickly without spending much time, yet still looks nice when it gets there.
I share your enthusiasm but there are limits. C++ compilation speed (and thus interpretation speed) will make it quite impossible to use it as an extension language. And while I like and use C++ a lot I don't think it is the right language for this purpose. It can do quite a lot of things, but working in a homogeneous language in your extensions as well as your core product doesn't have enough benefits compared to using a systems programming language and an extension language.
If you're like me and you like the sound of white noise more than rain, you can relax to this http://wookiehangover.github.com/whitenoise/
I tend to agree with you regarding Pons and Fleischmann, it seems to me it went the way science should go, they thought they had a discovery, it couldn't be validated, no discovery. But then a witch hunt started around the politics of it.

On the other hand the eCat seems like a pure scam, it's things like the eCat that really get to me, Pons and Fleischmann not so much, I still wonder whether some unknown condition caused their experiment to actually work and others to fail.
Simple guess: Their DNS server always returns the same IP address, which is a simple transparent proxy.

An encrypted VPN would protects you from data sniffing done by your ISP. Obviously the VPN provider will be in a position to sniff your data. With the transparent proxy, your data is not encrypted and can be sniffed by both your ISP and your "VPN" provider.
Well, that kind of invalidates part of the comment I was going to write: "How is this any better than K&R's 'the C programming language'?". I guess it all depends on background and personal preference.

I've never become comfortable with C's pointer/reference/dereference syntax -- I much prefer Pascal in this sense. I recently had a look at Ada and was pleasantly surprised -- it has a very straightforward syntax.

As other's mention here, I think C should be learnt with assembler (and computer architecture - especially the bit about cache hits/misses). I find that:

http://www.drpaulcarter.com/pcasm/

is a great introduction to assembler and C -- and how the two (can) interact.

Another thing I find frustrating with C is that it's still a bit of a pain to work with unicode/wide strings -- on my todo list is writing a short post on "Hellø wørld (with unicode)" -- with some examples of wide strings in C, (possibly Pascal) and ADA -- along with assembler output and a "pure" assembler version.

There is surprisingly little good material on the web for this (that I managed to find, anyway).
Wow, this is really going to change the world. YC S12 is probably the best class out of YC so far. A mobile app that allows me to send a postcard to my mom...genius!!! A billion dollar company in the making.
I think this is so awesome, I spent a summer as a lowly intern for a bank once trying to write up an entire debt model in VBA (bad idea on so many fronts...), and I wanted to gouge my eyes out at the end. I would've given an arm and a leg to be able to write in Python, as I'm sure many others...so excited to see this happen!
Nope, it makes it self-contained, therefore more pure!

...or at least that's the way I look at it.
and you will always build the same type of things. Work in system administration, and have an idea for a really cool db-intensive app, and the company also thinks it's cool?

Then they'll get a db admin and a programming team to do it.. after all, that's not your area of expertise (even if you write similar apps in your free time).

you'll get a nice pat on the back for coming up with a great idea though.. and kudos for being such a great team player when the other team implements it. (Note: pats on the back and kudos do not involve any money.)
Is this another one of those stats that is supposed to divert people's attention away from facebook's inability to produce income at a level that justifies its valuation? Because even if it's one of those, it's not very impressive.
As if she lived there her whole life, never had a standard education, never had any opportunity whatsoever to access a standard library?