skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I finally got really into Twitter this year. Sad to see them being so restrictive with their platform. Maybe App.Net isn't such a bad idea after all.

It's amazing how poor the first party clients for Facebook and Twitter are compared to the functionality and rate of development on 3rd party apps. Maybe paying to be a part of a less restrictive network will be worth it in the end. I just hope they can get a big following with a bunch of apps integrated with it.
I think that the reluctance to pay for anything online is what explains prices like $0.99 - the developers are trying to pitch their apps as "almost free" or "just about free" - sneaking in under that impedance. The whole point of that price is to send a signal that this doesn't cost real money. So this price point is not accidental or unexpected. How developers can get out of this is a different question...
I think it's not so much the individual launches that annoy people as the fact that there are so many at once. It throws off the usual mix on the frontpage.
No apology is needed.. that's among the most interesting articles of HN in my opinion. As someone else pointed out, I'd prefer to see the post from the founders rather than by Techcrunch thought.
>I put in 6'0", 120lb male, age 30 and just looking for basal metabolic rate gives 1500cals. Sedentary gives 1850cals.

I've spent a bit of time researching CR and I can tell you those numbers are way too low.

As an anecdote, one of the most dedicated and extreme practitioners in the world is at about 6 foot 120 pounds and his diet:

>Tonight’s calculations are based on Michael’s caloric requirements, and those requirements are as strict as they come. Unlike April’s daily average of about 1,300 calories, which really is an average (she likes to go out drinking and dining with friends on weekends, and doesn’t mind enduring a few 1,000-calorie weekdays to save up for the splurge), Michael’s regimen of 1,913 calories a day is exactly that: 1,913 calories every single day

http://nymag.com/news/features/23169/index1.html

>There is emerging evidence that while CR is effective, an alternate approach that is less extreme could also be just as effective: intermittent fasting[1].

There are a lot of controversial things in CR research (high protein vs low protein for example) but one thing that has been pretty much conclusively established is that IF only gives CR benefits to the degree that it ends up lowering calories. Many people do find that IF makes it easier to stay on a restricted diet, but ultimately, it comes down to calories.
Twitter needs to get their shit together
Palestine is a pseudo-state, Syria and its de-facto protectorate Lebanon are in disarray.

Iran does not have the breadth of interests and worldwide presence Britain has, nor a problematic (recent) colonial past. Despite this, their actions make it very difficult for them to build solid, trusted alliances with reliable partners.

Britain has a worldwide web of influence because it has proved through recent history to be a trusted and reliable partner for many allied countries. If they start pissing all over the Vienna Convention and be branded as unreliable by their peers, less people will be keen to hear their reasons on all sort of matters, and the already-waning British influence will see a dramatic decline.

It's already hard enough to lecture China as it is; if Hague "renditions" Assange, the Chinese will rightly feel entitled to simply laugh to his face whenever he brings up "human rights".
Yes. They are addressed boxes, but are not PO boxes (for some reason).
Huh, interesting that it's YC-backed. It overlaps with my own website http://GiftyWeddings.com -- though mine is more of a gift list, where you really can add any gifts you like (you just type them in, and optionally add a web link).

One thing that really put me off trust-wise with Registry Love is the payment page (for guests) is sent, and I think submitted, over clear-text HTTP, for example http://registrylove.com/carts/N/payment
Actually all the other TC-like sites will also cover a launch in return for an exclusive. The reason most people go with TC is simply that it's the default.
I have seen a lot more pushes trying to get me to advertise lately (tons of sponsored tweets). I wonder if this is related to their revenue push--knock out their competitors and lower API costs.
The problem is not in low value of memes creation. It may be useful and interesting for someone (and useless and not interesting for others). The problem is in the limited resources of the Diaspora team, which are scattered on another project now, leaving Diaspora underdeveloped. There is some talk that it's really for the sake of Diaspora architectural redesign, which will lead to improving federation and etc, but I'm not convinced yet, since now Makr is positioned as a "service" which drags in support and etc. reducing resources available for Diaspora even more. So you can understand why many people who support the Diaspora project are seriously upset about it.
Hey cool, I've found a solution :)

The Fractal Planning Solution – Jim Stone, PhD. PDF
http://www.fractalplanner.com/clear_mind.pdf
He also offers a hosted planning tool.

James Theiler has found a formula on estimating the fractal dimension. See Google Doc: http://tinyurl.com/cantjjp
I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress their garbage before you could throw yours in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there.

Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies, so I can only imagine how terrible Starbucks is by comparison in your country.
The real problem is that the app stores are generally a winner takes all top list driven market. If you price an app at 99 cents, you probably have more of a chance of appearing on the paid top list. At which time you generate a lot more revenue that you ever would have at a higher price point, despite the inefficiency of the price point.
Shameless self promotion: we've got a bunch of python projects on GroupTalent right now you might be interested in.
In my experience, most of the heat Debian has received has been from its strict adherence to open source guidelines. A lot of people like to make fun of the distro for its lack of pragmatism.
This prices seems to off on your site vs. Merchant site. For example "Keypad Watch" shows as $9.25 on your site but when I click "Looky" then the merchant site "thinkGeek" show as it as $74.
OS X was the clean break that showed Apple (and Unix) were the future and Microsoft was the past. The rest followed loosely from there.
What pool of buyers?
Except that merchant can't switch to the plan if they process that much, since it is limited to merchants under $250,000/year.
None knew how to code, so Sofia taught herself... “At first we tried to hire somebody, but we quickly realized that master coders are just not that interested in the wedding market,” says Markia, “and we were like, well, we could just sit here forever or we could just do it.”

I advised a startup with a premium domain in the wedding space a few years back. Both founders were non-tech founders, and they struggled day and night to find a tech... anything. Lots of folks like myself offered little bits of assistance and packages of discount consulting work but nobody was really willing to commit and take the plunge as a tech cofounder. I'm sure this is a common story. If you don't have a huge amount of capital investment its really hard to rally tech folks behind bootstrapping something like this
"figure out how to create an interchange free system"

In my view, this is the potential of bitcoin...an open platform for payments that doesn't require trusted third parties. I don't think a single company (or even country) could pull it off, but a new open protocol (like SMTP but for payments) that runs on the internet could do it.

I'm making a bet in this space (see profile).
Yeah, I should've realized before trying post my Show HN. Looks like I'll have to wait another week or so.
Is the only difference between this and all the other gift registries like http://wantsthis.com http://wishpot.com etc. that they handle payment/customer service? I'd be curious to see how things like returns and really odd items like "cash" are handled.
“Oh My God” on The X-Files
It remind me an idea: ideally, pages of top news on HN should have a dynamic number of news according to "energy" (the one use for the placement algorithm). For example, the first page could contain news with "energy" from +infinity to 100, page two, from 100 to 90, page 3, from 90 to 80 etc.

Because sometimes one could miss important news due to page selection, and sometimes one could read less important ones due to the current page selection again.
Basic truth: New technology is driven by early adopters, who then influence their less tech-savvy pals. Happened with Google, happened with the iPhone, and it happened with Twitter.

So now that the obvious is out of the way – we'll look back one day and see this as the day Twitter fucked the dog.

They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on.

Yeah, they have to make money. They've convinced themselves the experience must be entirely under their control to do it. Okay. And maybe that's so.

And maybe they'll squeeze some pennies out for awhile.

In the meantime, there's a group of folks who first jumped into Twitter during the days where you weren't chained to their mediocre user products. They'll start the move to a better network.

And one day, everyone will look around and see all that's left on Twitter is the glitter gif morons and big brands with more money than sense, just as happened with MySpace.
Every time I see a post like this (including Paul Miller over at the Verge), it reminds me of an obese person suddenly deciding to go anorexic. You know what the problem is? It's not the food. It's self-control, plain and simple.
LOL this article starts out talking about writing excel macros.

Who does he think creates excel... or the os it runs on. It seems like the author is meaning script monkeys or something. The guys who take real applications' outputs and does whatever those guys do with them... not actual developers.
Thomas

One of the best and most precise and enlightening comments you have ever written. Thanks for this.
Exactly. The founding story goes something like this: Dean Allen had built a CMS (TextPattern) and he, along with other TextPattern users, wanted a hosting provider that would support it in a no-hassle way. He couldn't find one that fit his needs, so decided to create his own; after discussing and rejecting formal VC methods, he turned instead to his userbase with "an opportunity to acquire a piece of TextDrive at its inception, and to benefit from its future success in perpetuity."

Jason Hoffman, Joyent's CTO, whose name appeared at the bottom of today's "sunset" emails, was there when all that happened.
Well, people don't ye olde typo corrections, but seems OTT to downvote this when comments are closed on the post.
They really diverge when it comes to more advanced language features. I make heavy use of functors in my code and my (possibly mistaken) understanding is that F# simply doesn't support them. Ditto for first-class modules, polymorphic variants, GADTs, and OCaml's object system. Of course, in exchange for a wimpier core, F# gives you a lot of convenient polish and proper support for parallelism & concurrency.
Coffee is an addiction for a lot of people. A routine you simply repeat day after day. I used to drink several cups of coffee per day for years. Went cold-turkey one day several years ago. I haven't touched it since. I realize this isn't the case for all.

Some truly like to have coffee in the morning. I get it. The discussion is about comparing the purchase of a daily cup of coffee with the purchase of software on a daily basis. To me this is simple: Create an addictive software product and you'll have your daily purchases. Hard to compete with a stimulant though.
Yeah, I still don't understand the logic behind this. I've used the App Store and the Windows Phone Marketplace, and of the two I've actually bought a lot more stuff from the Marketplace. The concept of "trial" software where you can later upgrade to the full version if you want is built right into the Marketplace and the phone OS, so it's fairly easy for developers to offer it if they want. When confronted with several apps that do essentially the same thing, I pick up the trial version of each one and then buy the full version of the one that works best. I've bought a lot of apps this way, almost all of them more than $0.99. If I decide to try a new version of a different app later, I can do so with pretty much no risk.

Does anyone know why Apple doesn't offer this? Are they just worried it will somehow cause customer confusion?
VC blogs sorted by Google PageRank
Webinar: How to Close Your 1st Customer
"Only" 23% of users.

Still, I could see the argument that some users are better than others and the most engaged ones are more likely to get a third party client.

Which means either Twitter loses those users eventually or coerces them into using their first-party offerings.
Wow, fuck you very much, Twitter. I really wish this had happened when App.net was still raising their $500k. Even though I still don't think App.net will work out, I would've still chipped in out of spite towards Twitter.

This is ridiculous, and I'm going to figure out how to get out as soon as possible.

edit: I put my money where my mouth is, as it were:

Success!

Thank you for joining App.net!

You will receive an email confirmation to complete the signup process.

Your plan is Developer Tier for $100 per year.

You're in line to join the alpha with username: @aaronbrethorst.
Nassim Taleb: Stay Out of the Investment Industry
Don't get me wrong, Aussies make amazing coffee. The best coffee comes from a portable stall outside Sydney central station crafted by a Polish Aussie using Campos beans.
In order for you to sell your app like Starbucks, you have to have Dunkin Donuts, ..... (add the rest of the coffee shops) as well.

You can't be a stand alone Starbucks in the market. It wouldn't work.
Twitter's API Changes
Look Paul, I know you don't want to spend time coding and upgrading this site, your time is more valuable managing your business and dealing with all the new startups coming down the pipe.

But it would greatly benefit you, the startups and the readers if you had a section with all the upcoming startups, their founders bio, and a place to showcase their products.

Something like crunchbase, but better. Organized by batch (YC S12). Searchable by funders, VCs, etc.

We want to see what your guys are working on and give them props for their work!
While it is easy for some to slam Starbucks coffee for taste , the truth is nearly every cafe you go to will have a healthy business - and often perpetual lines - of paying customers. Quality is subjective, and the entire experience Starbucks brings is what the urban masses are looking for. For that matter, take a long road trip, and if you happen to see a Starbucks logo on an exit sign, more often than not you're going to throw in the towel and go get a Grande.
Or have the ability to connect to the local corporate Oracle database and get the data from there directly?
Please read the original article. This very unfairly summarizes the actual blogpost.

The limit isn't 60 hits per hour. It's 60 hits per hour per endpoint, and only for some endpoints.

The user limit is 1 million users for certain api endpoints, and 100k for others - and if you need more than that, they would like you to reach out to them.

Oh, and also, all current clients are grandfathered into the old terms.

Please examine the bandwagon carefully before jumping on it.
> They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on.

What decision specifically are you talking about?
With the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini coming up, I wonder if the projections of new users from those influenced this decision?
It will coerce/force a % of users to use the 1st party apps. It will also allow them to focus on media platform features without the distraction of pleasing 3rd party devs (at the moment). I am pretty sure they will improve that side AFTER they have finished being a destination platform.
Existing clients are grandfathered in, as far as I can tell from Twitter's blog post.
Just for the record:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540480.stm
I wonder if a p2p twitter would be possible. I guess there would be real storage/timeliness issues, but twitter always struck me as more rss replacement than anything else, and I'm not sure it makes sense to have something like that run by one company.

I think twitter is a cool concept/application, but I'm not sure it will ever be a great business.
This is really cool. Especially with the potential for ordering parts/BOM management. How are BOM vendors to be chosen?
What steps do you take to make it look like they are a contractor? Also, would you recommend having a lawyer draft the contract agreement, or is adapting a template good enough?
Limiting the growth and development of third party applications.
wow..sorry but that is completely incorrect. Melbourne has amazing coffee. I've been in Canada for over a year now (travelling to the US every now and then) and the general level of coffee here is truly awful (starbucks, tim hortons etc). The positive is that it is cheap.
From https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api:

"If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission."

Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit at most 200,000 users.

Edit: I kept reading the blog post and it got better:

That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

In other words, 3rd party Twitter clients are dead. Not today, but next year they're dead as a doorknob.

Edit 2: Thanks for the clarification on the '200%' thing. I think the net result is still about the same for Twitter clients in the end. They'll be EOL'd by their developers and increasingly ignored by users.
They aren't located inside of post offices.
I agree with this Toronto Globe and Mail editorial on the issue:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/editorials/ecuador...

"As for Mr. Assange, he should step out of doors and defend himself."
Software effort estimation causes three problems. First, most estimation processes model the uncertainty about the effort required for tasks but fail to model the uncertainty about the tasks themselves, leading to unreliable estimates. Second, people are overly confident of the estimates, in any case, because the estimation process looks impressive and produces impressive looking artifacts. Third, the estimation artifacts obscure the coupling between the stakeholders and the implementers by not transmitting how the one group’s decisions affect the other; the estimates, in effect, form a barrier that makes it harder for people on opposites sides of the estimates to take shared responsibility for business goals.

If you understand these problems and can solve them for your projects, estimation can help you to make better decisions and to allocate your resources more effectively. But, in a lot of organizations, these problems have no good solutions (for cultural reasons), and there you might be better off not sharing your estimates if you do them.
Awesome advice for any cash strapped startup - let's not just give out business and coding advice, startups have problems that go way beyond that (like survival!)
So is this extreme hard work a sufficient condition, or just a necessary one?
Chromium-based RockMelt 0.16.91.something (on Win7)
MySpace didn't die because they pissed off the early adopter geeks. They pissed off everyone. And everyone left. If Twitter just becomes the place where hundreds of millions of people follow hundreds of celebrities while also looking at ads, I think they're okay with that.
Communicate freely.
Was talking about Starbucks not Australian coffee.
Some company in China stole my game
Last legs, or first legs .. it's a matter of opinion ;-)

I just get the feeling square are offering a similar deal to a lot of other payment gateways, but packaging the deal differently - i.e. they're not really being that disruptive.
Ah makes sense. Starbucks is pretty terrible and I never really understood why you would go there (especially in Melbourne).
The price difference is due to 35GBP = 55USD currently. To quote the email I received: "Delivery Type Desc	Standard Delivery (Despatch expected within 12 week(s))"
In the tweet display guidelines: "No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet." https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines

Wonder if that means 3rd party apps can't add actions to tweets like "assign to a user", "translate", "schedule a reply", etc. That might just kill major functionality for apps like HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6's Engagement Console.

Or, since it's under the guidelines for individual tweets, are tweets in the timeline excluded from that limitation?
A decentralized "Twitter" exists, is fully functional, and is open source.

http://status.net/
I don't think Myspace pissed anyone off, it was more that their product didn't make any sense. In my experience people didn't leave Myspace for Facebook because they "hated Myspace", they left because Facebook was a better product that met their needs.

I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better product.
Square's culture: "That makes us look really bad."
3rd-party Twitter application apocalypse
YouTube makes tags private
If I use Twitter, it's not because of third party products. While I could see a decision like this severely impacting Facebook, whose applications I do use from time to time, I don't know that it will hurt Twitter.

Are there any ground breaking Twitter applications that are keeping users around? If not, why would they need to make themselves a platform?
That's one less useless feature clutter YouTube video pages.
The S&P 500 is not "the market". It's certainly a better representative of the U.S. market than the Dow Jones Industrial Index (which has just 30 stocks) but it has nowhere near as many stocks as the Wilshire 5000. Not to mention none of those give you any international exposure.
I don't even drink coffee. It's always strange when people say that I should spend my $4 on their app instead because that $4 doesn't even exist.
Wow. Either Joyent is financially doomed on its own (and is trying to cut costs), or is just really stupid.

EOLing an old lifetime product with high support costs makes sense. What they should have done was moved the "small number of customers" using Lifetime service onto a new lifetime platform using their shared hosting platform. The plan they're offering for a year seems like an adequate replacement -- the cost of providing that low tier of service forever is probably not much more than the cost of providing it for a year.

Maybe make it opt-in, so inactive accounts don't spin up on the new platform, and provide some higher level of service at a discount (so, instead of a $50/yr cloud plan for free, you could optionally get a $250/yr plan for $150/yr.)