skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Dear Mr. Woodhill,
I am embarrassed for you writing such an article when GM currently has about $40 billion in cash and liquid assets in the bank and is projected to earn
about $4.00 per share next year which comes to another $8 billion profit to add to it. GM currently has enough cash in the bank and liquid assets on hand to buy back ALL of it’s shares at the current market price if it chose to do so. GM’s liabilities per the balance sheet are maybe $15 billion which is very manageable for a company of GM’s size. The shortfall in the pension and benefits is estimated depending on who you check it out with between
$15 and $25 billion. GM has well over $100 billion on hand in its pension trust fund and the shortfall is payable over many years into the future. There has just been a law enacted which increases the future interest rate expected on the future returns for pension plans that will significantly decrease the present value of the future obligations and GM has billions in tax deferrals to use up.
It doesn’t matter if GM loses some market share as they are downsizing. What matters is how much profit they are making whether they are first in sales or not. A big problem GM had before was that they strove to be #1 regardless of their profit status or the reputation they were sacrificing to remain first in sales. I will be very happy to send you a contribution to enable you to sign up for Security Analysis 101 as it appears you have never taken that course or need a refresher." -- First Comment. This pretty much sums up the article. Bullshit.
Speaking only for myself, the diagram makes sense, technically speaking, but it is totally unnecessary and adds nothing to my understanding of the article. It's the type of thing I would expect some manager to ask for because there were no pictures on a given page and it needed to be "spiced up".
Unless platforms like Facbeook or Twitter make a significant amount of money from their devs, the way Microsoft or Apple does, telling their devs to go pound sand at some point is inevitable.
I disagree. I think this is completely wrong. Software didn't use to seem expensive at $0.99. Once enough people agree to low-ball at bargain basement pricing, consumers start to get the idea "so good software should really be like $0.10 bubblegum."

By the way, Starbucks is not a "trustable experience" per se. Also, the point is about frivolous spending, many people are willing to plop $5 bucks on a new snack at the grocery story, not knowing how it tastes or not, but not willing to pay anything for software. I think the author is searching to make some point but defining some concept called "trustable experience" but I'm just non-plused.
Reviewing the most popular X apps is easy. Apps that no one uses don't matter.
I always found it confusing reading about all of them on the same day on techcrunch. One yc startup launching per day gives me enough attention time to learn what they are building and doing. I actually think it's a good strategy.
6 Sales Tools To Grow Your Startup
Lets Reimplement Twitter with a Distributed Model
No, it isn't a "logic fail." It is just illustrating how DISPROPORTIONATE the response to the Assange situation has been, and therefore how suspect the whole process is. Seeing as you profess a fondness for logic, there are two options. 1 - you are being deliberately obtuse, or 2 - you really are that stupid. Either way, there's no point continuing to engage you! Happy travels numpty.
What client devs have actually stopped development and abandoned/shut down their applications in response to Twitter's client TOS changes? I hear lots of griping and moaning it seems like lots of the major client players are developing nonetheless, which says to twitter "keep doing what you're doing."
Grunter owns Twitter
That's true, if the only way you have to market your product is people randomly hitting the app store looking for stuff to install.

Just from the first two pages of my phone: Rdio, Downcast, Google Authenticator, PCalc, Songkick, Ratio, and the This American Life app are all things I installed because I went to the App Store to get those specific apps. (Top Shelf, Star Walk, Flashlight, Fruit Ninja, and Osmos are examples of apps I "discovered" in the app store; those are probably not great app categories to compete in).
مسلسل فرقة ناجى عطا الله الحلقة 30 الاخيره - عادل امام | عرباوى
Gabe Newell Hopes He's Wrong About Windows 8
The data is their real product.
I've just realised I've wasted time on you previously in this thread! Now I KNOW you're someone who can't reason AT ALL - I will be ceasing this pointless interaction. You can lead a wo/man to knowledge, but you can't make them think!
Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept.

This quote summarizes the article. Basically that Alan Turing lived in an imaginary world that was nothing like reality. He was a pretender according to the author. This is a veiled and cheap slight at a great man long after his death.

Using the word 'pretense' when the word 'imagination' should have been used changes the whole meaning of the article. Alan Turing used his imagination as did all the great scientists and inventors have. We will never know his deepest and innermost thoughts but that does not matter as much as we know what they were like. We know because of what he wrote. We know that he suffered greatly.

This article(although more veiled in it's attack) is just another in a series that are quite disgusting in how they distort the social importance of this mans life.
I agree. What would you recommend as a good modern book on software estimation?
I fail to understand how they bubble up to be the top posts most of the time though?
Dolby Enhancing Tablet and Smart Phone Audio
"They care about great experiences."

I think you just made Twitter's point for them. Yes, their current apps have problems, but I think they are really worried about the varied Twitter experience people are having on all of the various implementation of it. If someone has a bad experience on Echofon, they might blame that on Twitter, so I think you are right, and this is Twitters (possibly flawed) way of holding onto that.
Not really an issue with treated/finished lumber.
How the Great Recession Proved the Value of a College Degree
Anybody? Would really appreciate some input...
I wonder if twitter have a $50 app.net account?
It's hard for me to relate to your experience of Starbucks in the US. But in Australia the quality of a Starbucks coffee is inconsistent and typically bad. Australia has a relatively old coffee culture, so most coffee drinkers are discerning.

In the absence of reliable information in a strange town I will always gamble on a the small cafe, as they have to work to get customers as opposed to depend on an advertising budget and novelty style sugary drinks.
As usual, Steve McConnell has done the hard yards of turning literature and research into something readable and instantly applicable.

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...

Every time I estimate for clients I always talk about the Cone of Uncertainty.
Not really fair. The US does rate abysmally given how much it trumpets its free speech provisions, being in 47th place, but Ecuador is in 104th place, with a considerably worse rating.
The invisible
This isn't about avoiding a challenge but about the comfort of using a modern language. Objective C still has you writing headers files for heaven's sake.
Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes
Actually, his study revealed that a specific police station in a small city determined 45 out of 109 rape allegations filed between 1978 and 1987 were "false." I can think of 45 reasons why (male, politically connected) police in the pre-nineties would make that decision.

To be fair, one of those reasons could be because the allegation actually is false.

But the common reason is because men don't want the allegations to be true-- as you have demonstrated in these threads, and have the power, unlike yourself, to rubber stamp them away.
Large companies have canned responses and HR coaches interviewers to avoid providing direct feedback. Given the liability of someone providing inappropriate feedback, don't expect a candid answer. Good luck!
Goko HTML5 Game Platform
From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp.

It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data.

It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root.

It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down.

Proof of concept: https://nstatus.herokuapp.com

Source: https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi

I wrote about the requirements of it here: http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/

edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.
I bought a 3-year micro instance for my personal needs and it's been pretty good.
I'm a happy Picplum user, and have been since launch. Here's why I'm a customer: when I take a photo of my daughter on my iPhone, sending it to Picplum means automatically delivering prints to my parents and grandparents without any additional thought or effort on my part. Snap, send, done.

My wife and I both run businesses, so the probability of us going to Costco, printing five sets of photos, packaging them, applying the right amount of postage, and dropping them off at the post office every single month is 0%.

Picplum is the difference between my family receiving many photos every month vs. none at all.
You're not likely to get it from the hiring manager or the people which interviewed you. However, if you went through a recruiter and have good rapport with him/her, you may be able to get answers to your questions about "why" and what their reservations were. Whether or not this knowledge _actually_ helps you in the future is another, perhaps more interesting, question.
If you have huge exposure to technology through your career, it might make sense to underweight technology in investments. Maybe not as reasonable in the case of technology, but if I worked in something like print publishing, I'd probably not want much additional exposure to print publishing for my retirement.
... or use their recently open-sourced mechanical turk library.
We're not affiliated with the VC. I thought the article is an interesting viewpoint from someone who isn't technical. It shows that there are tools enabling him to do what
he would have previously needed a programmer to help him with.

We want to make DataNitro compelling not just for Python experts, but also for Excel power users that have some basic programming knowledge (from using formulas, if statements, vlookups, etc.). The article shows that we're succeeding on this at least a little.
AmEx is negotiable (though usually it's the most expensive.. and Square cannot offer AmEx exclusivity like Costco can). Notice I said Visa & MC are the standardized, non-negotiable rates.

But you're right, they're not totally non-negotiable. Supposedly very huge retailers like Walmart get better rates. But Walmart does probably 20X Square's volume, even with Starbucks folded in.
Road Cycling Wheels
No he won't. The Australian public see him as a celebrity, and we don't really do celebrity politicians.
How You Should Price Your Product
The interesting thing to me is that the web seems to be a wholly different market than an app store. Getting me to pay even a dollar for an app in an apps store is tough, and frankly a bad bet. On the other hand, there's absolutely no way I'd pay a dollar for any app on the web. I assume that anything priced that low is a best trash and likely malware.

If you want me to buy an app in an app store, you've got pretty much the same sell whether you're charging a dollar or five. On the web, if you're not charging at least twenty, I've probably already navigated away.

But with that said, I don't spend much on random apps on the web, either. You've still got to make a good sell. It's just that "low price" on the web is $20.
Says the hipster from Portland?
>It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages.

This maybe true for a lot of tweets. But my stream is filled with live updates of interesting stuff from around the world.

Twitter has been instrumental in getting news out of war zones for example.
Factor 0.95 now available (over 2,500 commits)
The "inapp purchase" can prevent this. Download for free, play a few levels, if you like buy more.

This is the same strategy cut the rope, angry birds, use. They started before inapp purchases became available but clearly demonstrated the concept.

This is the model that works.
Incredible PR coup by the App.Net team to get people talking so much about them.
Bash history expansion
3 Japanese Startup Trends
So, let's see here. You read this post on HN, so that means you have been spending time reading posts and responding to comments like this. That to me is wasting time. Is there nothing else that you need to do right now? You wasted that time. This is his point, and it's a good one.

But every single person responding to his post on this page, even those like me who defend him just don't get it. We have to unplug. We wonder why all of the developed countries have not been producing and China and India are. You know why? Because we are wasting our fucking time on the internet, that's why. You can blame it on the fucking Fed, the fucking banks, fucking Wall Street, the fucking automobile industry, the fucking terrorists, the fucking e-Trade shit and wild speculation and investing in e-shit that caused the fucking dot bomb bubble, but in the end, this shit is our own fucking fault. We are a bunch of lazy fucks, and we need to get the fuck off our computers and do something productive.
Dividing a user's costs by the number of months of service they got isn't fair because it ignores the high risk they took on that the company would go out of business months after they dropped their $500 or $1000 or whatever.
I just mentioned this article to a workmate and he didn't even know who Tesla was =(
^people don't like
I don't think OpenBSD runs on Xen as a guest yet. They do offer NetBSD, not sure about FreeBSD
And its super easy to scroll past announcements that don't grab my attention.
I have lived in Sydney a long time. I agree. Most of it is not that good. But everywhere you go there is usually at least 1 place that you can count on.
I would email Paul Graham; though make it as concise as possible. There is a nice world out there, you just need to go and look for it.

Could you not ask this company to do some sort of negotiation? Surely they can understand your position?
How will they handle console twitter apps (ttyter and bitlbee for example) where formatting can't happen to match their requirements?
It was odd to read "Ok, let’s leave trolling aside" in the middle of the article.

Do we really have to behave like 5 year old kids?
About the size of the blockchain: yeah, it would probably explode. On the other hand, if the dreams of BitCoin proponents are to come true and BitCoin will become the new online currency it wants to be, it will explode anyway.

About the scaling problems.... the bitcoin ecosystem is altogether the biggest supercomputer ever. I think it will handle it somehow.

Of course, the problems like searching in the blockchain for a given address would still be there. But again, thin clients (and, therefore, a slight centralization) are the future for bitcoin anyway.
I recognized Lavazza, so I had to look it up. It's apparently an Italian company, with production in Italy, and seven subsidiaries in other countries (notably not Australia). Probably not the best choice to promote Aussie coffee. The others do seem to be Australian.

By the way, does Australia count as a western nation? It seems to be in the wrong location for that. This is totally tangential to the coffee topic, just something that I found curious.
I frequently 'name a price'; that is, I disclose my current salary without remembering that it locks me in for later negotiation.
If that’s considered "wanting to subvert Twitter", it’s not twitter who’s in trouble. But I suspect (and hope) that’s not Facebook’s end game with subscribe.
The main selling point for bikesharing programs is that they deliver some form of ease-of-mind. The core benefit is, that you don't have to spend any thoughts on these bikes, they are just there - no maintenance, no charring-around, no winter-issues (depending on your region), no theft, etc. But then again I am an avid user of one of these services and might be a bit biased.
There are extensions to "Namecoin", a bitcoin alternate chain, that does things like this. For example: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2273
Storify and Twitter's evolving developer guidelines
Book Written in DNA Code
> I bought the $0.99 Tetris app because it was getting rave reviews. And after just a few minutes, I realized I hated it.

And you only have to experience this once to "double-negate" the gamble. One time is enough to make a user realize that it's still a craps shoot. Reviews online are often a very weak signal for quality.
I was also trying to figure out the business rationale for this move. Their 2x2 chart gets us relatively close to understanding their strategy. Here's what it looks like:

- Twitter doesn't want to own analytics for business or consumer players.
- Twitter doesn't want to own engagement for businesses.
- Twitter DOES want to own engagement for consumers.

This seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. Since businesses are the ones who actually pay twitter cash, I would have expected them to try to own the whole left side of their chart, and leave developers to create new innovations for the whole right side of the chart. What would you have to believe in order for this to be a good idea? Some possibilities:
- Twitter thinks that developers will ruin the consumer experience, slowing their growth.
- Twitter thinks that businesses won't pay them unless consumers are tweeting on twitter.com
- Twitter doesn't think that analytics or business engagement services will be lucrative enough for them to invest directly in.
- Twitter thinks that if the developer community spends its effort in the top-right, it will distract the community from innovating in the other three quadrants, where Twitter wants to see more development to unlock more business-driven revenues (This one is a real longshot, but I'm trying to be comprehensive)
- Twitter doesn't care about users tweeting or consuming tweets if they aren't on twitter.com (I'm still struggling to figure out why this is bad for twitter -- any thoughts, HN?)
It's because it's the ASCII version of the STL format. (horror!) A binary STL would be about quarter to half the size. And there are other open formats that would be smaller and perform better than STL.

The reason why I didn't futz around with it too much is that I'm still working out whether HNers and 3D modelers would find it useful to version control 3d printable models.

I could spend a long time optimizing transfer times of models, but it'd be a pity if no one wanted to use it in the first place.
Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am.

I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he will become our cheap (free) PR tube.

But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data stream".

Just my version/2c.

edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc. Bottom line: stay away!
Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for them. And Myspace was never big in non-English speaking markets.

Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.

App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!

EDIT 1: Grammar

EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.
which is why, thankfully there are hardly any Starbucks left.

Although I noticed one has just opened up on Elizabeth St. I guess they still attract tourists looking for something they know?
Not just the wrong font, the whole list box is a mess. The spacing is the biggest thing, maybe then the font.

I'm at the developer-who-knows-bad-design-when-he-see-it stage, which is frustrating 'cause I what doesn't work and sort-of why but I don't really yet know how to fix it. Well, at least partly...
The facts are there, but, I believe, if you're a hustler, a self-starter, an entrepreneur - You're going to make it work for yourself, one way or another, with or without a college degree. Because it's all you know.

Likewise, if you don't have passion, you're going to have a much harder time competing with other degree-holding passionless people. You know, the kind of people that spend 8 hours/day blindly applying to shit on Monster.com instead of doing something different and standing out.
I don't see the part about this change dooming Twitter in the article.

You have an interesting point about commoditization, however. It makes me think about the IM space and all the different services there.

As for eyeballs, I think a Twitter competitor can do what media companies do — pay for certain celebrities, authors, speakers to move their microblog to their service — do a few of those, and you'll start to have an audience.
It was my mistake, not yours. Didn't elaborate the correction because writing essays on an iPod Touch is inconvenient.

The proof is obvious. If consumption exceeds production, necessities run out eventually. "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money." Of course Spain and Greece are more complex than this, but the short version is too many people rely on too few producers; it's not that productivity went to zero, it's that production minus consumption did. The USA is facing the same issue, and driving up hugely infeasible debts to forestall the inevitable.

The point of YCombinator is to work real hard on something clever and create a valuable business and reap the rewards; not motivating if those rewards are taken and given to those who do nothing for them.