skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using a Mac for over a year, and I've never had more than a few things on the desktop, whereas my Windows 7 boxes sometimes ran into the problem that Shade is addressing.

Seems like OSX is much friendlier to organization and discovery. With Spotlight and tools like Alfred, all my apps and files are pretty much always a few keystrokes away, so storing stuff on the desktop becomes suboptimal.
Perl/Linux, a Linux distribution where all programs are written in Perl
Show HN: The Evolution of Catan World, an HTML5 reimagining of Settlers of Catan
True fact. That's just due to scrolling fast enough to get outside the buffer before the throttled scroll event fires -- if you want, you can turn the scroll throttle down to make sure that doesn't happen, at the expense of doing slightly more computation while scrolling. For Wish Lists, we optimize for people browsing through the feeds, which is generally not super fast. :)
"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"

Exactly. Commonly known as a "turnkey" experience. Something to also keep in mind when developing products or services.

I had such a service business years ago. The main thing we did was offer something and not require any thinking on the part of the customer. We limited their choices, gave them advice, and made things very easy. They liked that. They had less to think about than with our competitors. (We were able to charge more and our quality wasn't really that good.) We saved them time and the stress of making decisions.
I don't have a PO Box, just a gang box inside of my apartment door.

EDIT: but the owners of the pizza place next door know me pretty well, and they have received packages for me before
I had the same question, and I hope you see what I mean when I say I hope I never have to use it ;)--but looking at demo page and use cases it's a v. neat acceleration!
I think this works because you're devoting more energy to the problem than to the sensory and mechanical parts of your brain that will be used to enact the fix. But it's not natural because socially it can look as if you're not 'working'.
So where can I buy some magic beans ;-)
Small as a percentage is still millions and millions of people and tens of millions of requests.
Thanks! That's a great idea actually.
No, the value of a college degree is that, at least when the graduate has taken college seriously, it provides education. You can be smart, successful, ambitious and curious and not go to college - but you probably won't be educated.

The absolute best and easiest way to become educated - if you care about that at all - is through college. This isn't some eternal mathematical truth. It's just that as of today, there are very few ways of getting education without going to college and learning from teachers who know the best way to approach a subject, and who can direct you to things that you in particular might find enlightening.

I think that's the real value of college, and unless you'd otherwise be poverty stricken, this value far exceeds that of the material gains.
The problem with Twitter is that they took way, way too much investment money. Now that we know what Twitter looks like, you could build it from scratch for much less. If Twitter dies because it's impossible to sustain the valuation their investors were hoping for, perhaps someone would build a less ambitious alternative.

Even though the magnitude is bigger, it could be similar to the Digg-Reddit saga. Digg was hyped as the next big thing, took too much money, made extremely risky moves and collapsed. and then collapsed. In the meantime, Reddit slowly built a less ambitious product that eventually replaced it.
This DARPA-funded robot hand can replace its own fingers
Finding the best fitting bra with technology
> Twitter has scaling needs because it has reached beyond
> the scale of SMS and they are trying to store all the
> tweets. SMS networks don't have any scaling needs.

There is no particular reason why storage of short messages would be difficult to scale. Certainly it requires fewer resources than storing an equivalent number of emails, which is a problem long-solved by large email providers.

> Why aren't we thinking of SMS/SMTP/bittorrent like
> protocol to replace twitter?

There are already multiple protocols which would work well for a Twitter clone, XMPP and OStatus being the most prominent.

> Ask HN: Is anybody working on open protocol like
> SMTP/torrent to kill Twitter?

If you actually want to destroy Twitter, then your first challenge is to identify something you can do better, then convince hundreds of millions of people that their lives will be improved by migrating to your service.

The fact that you think Bittorrent would be an appropriate technical implementation of a short-message site, plus the use of "kill" in the title, makes me think that you do not have anywhere near the technical or business skills required to actually implement a competitive alternative to Twitter.
Does YC not like c-corps?
Hello! My classmates and I have created a product and we're trying to decide whether or not to incorporate. The main reason we're thinking about it is because our site deals with people sharing works that may not necessarily be their own property(for example: a user might post a link to a show he/she likes, but he/she does not own any rights to it). Despite the protection offered by DMCA, we were worried we might face legal issues for unforeseen circumstances and figured we should protect ourselves.

On the other hand, we were possibly interested in taking our idea to YC once it has proven itself, but it appears in the FAQ's that YC would prefer we did not incorporate. Can anyone offer some advice on the matter? Much appreciated!
What's most notable about this isn't so much that all the core ideas of git are already in place in the first version. It after all is, fundamentally, a pretty simple piece of software.

What shocks me is that that README was written literally days after the kernel project's license to bitkeeper got revoked.
yeah I experimented with NUM_BUFFER_PAGES and SCROLL_THROTTLE and I am sold :)
thanks for building and releasing this!
Twitter should have been little more considerate in its communication with its developer community. Anil Dash made all that sound comforting/positive. A must leason for all platform enablers.
This essentially boils down to "any content sourced from the api must be displayed unmodified, in its entirety, and be properly attributed." It's a pretty standard thing across the entire internet. really, the only strange thing is the insistence that the author's username must be on a separate line from the tweet.
Go Go Gadget
http://word.bitly.com/post/29550171827/go-go-gadget

Posting like this as the actual URL was instantly marked dead, presumably because it has the name of a URL shortener in it.
"intellectual death" is a little hyperbolic, I think. I too know people who spend little to no time on the internet and seem to be quite intellectual, informed, functional, and happy.

It's the people that get their "information" from daily doses of "I saw it on the internet" that worry me, to be honest. Some people I know that spend the most time on the internet seem able to tell you a lot of stuff they read and saw, but are not able to apply much intellect to it.
After reading the Innovator's Dilemma, you start seeing this effect everywhere and it applies equally in people's careers. I think it's probably the same principle as the law of diminishing return - you're getting less and less out of your current path but it's still more than some other perceived endeavor.

Perhaps there is some disruptive thing Twitter could do that will eventually disrupt their current advertising model and be a true billion dollar business. It's possible they don't see it (or less likely, there is NO path for them to get where they need to be) and so they're letting it be known that they're planning on extracting increasing rents from their current income streams.
OT - I can't help but mentally shorten code snippets with underscore/whatever. For example, I see this -

for(var index = 0, length = listItems.length; index < length; index++) {
listItems[index].remove();
}

and I think to myself -

_(listItems).invoke('remove')
> I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs

Devs already have a twitter-like firehose, and it's even open source, identi.ca
Spring Data – One API To Rule Them All?
This observation reminds me a lot of my time at Twilio. I think it comes down to whether you have an owner mentality.
I'm thinking that YC don't like incorporated companies where the IP is tied up in the trading company, rather than licensed to the trading company by the IP holding company.
I could be wrong.
No problem, I'm glad you enjoy it! :)
This is roughly the 5th article on a "Revolution in Game Theory" that I've seen and not a single one of them has successfully described what the so called revolutionary strategy is.

Here is a direct link to a PDF of a paper defining the Zero Determinant Strategy. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2666v1.pdf I don't really understand it. Neither do journalists it seems. Can someone explain?
Can someone please fix the link? It is currently taking us to the Guardian's mobile site and this is an awesome story that people shouldn't miss out on. The future looks awesome.
Possibly an invalid correlation. All of those people who went to college also have more affluent families with better connections (I know many college grads that are still working for their parents or friends of their parents...doing paperwork jobs that their psych degree has nothing to do with). Also, a better graph might be to show what a person's debt looks like after college, how long it takes to pay off, etc.
Piss off, Twitter. The "proper" way to display your shit is not at all.
I used Funders Club to make a small investment and it worked flawlessly for me. It has document signing and wire transfers built in. After reading legal documents for a few hours, it took about 3 minutes to make a $2500 investment in virool.com.

I am completely impressed by what the Funders Club has built. It is easy, complete, and actually works. Kudos to the team.

I unfortunately missed the $250,000 cutoff, so I'll get to see how they handle the overage or reimbursement.
The Problem is the Users Trusted Twitter
Why Abortion is Wrong, My Opinion??
I was also shocked when I read this article. Didn't know those boxes don't exist in the US. They are quite convenient!
>Why is a coin toss any more random than a specific language gaining traction? It's called "(extreme) sensitivity to initial conditions." Many of which are neither observable nor predictable.

Because my argument was not about a "specific" language.

It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era.

That the C-capability language was C itself, well, that be more or less random.

But that people DID need a portable, close to the metal, constrained with regards to memory use, pointer using, simple to create compilers for, close to assembly language at the time because CPUs and memory were constrained, that was not random, that was a necessity.

And, no, there wasn't "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions" to that. The initial conditions varied at the ten odd years it took for the language to gain traction. And Lisps (including CL, Clojure etc) have been going up and down since the early sixties. It's not like some initial condition set the tone, tons of decisions, several of them important and with predictable consequences set the tone.
Except 100,000 is not a lot of user tokens. In fact in the iOS world (where apps often cost $0.99) you could easily be failing if you only have 100,000 users.

And you don't mention the 200% cap on new users. That's not "many third-party Twitter clients have dedicated user communities and passionate developers, and with focus on keeping in step with our evolution, they should continue to thrive with their audiences." That's more like "third-party clients should stop developing, like now. There is no future for you with twitter".
It's inspiring to note that Bill Press is 64 years old, and Freeman Dyson is 88! Here's a more technical explanation, gleaned from http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2666.

Each prisoner dilemma round has four possible outcomes: CC, CD, DC and DD (C=Cooperate,D=Defect). We study probabilistic strategies which depend only on the previous round, so for instance, P(player 1 plays C at round i+1|CD was played at round i)=0.3. From the paper:

Such games can be described by a Markov process defined by the four probabilities that characterize each of the two player’s strategies [9] (because this is an infinitely repeated game, the probability to engage in the first move–which is unconditional–does not play a role here). Each Markov process has a stationary state given by the left
eigenvector of the Markov matrix, which in this case describes the equilibrium of the process. The expected payoff is given by the dot product of the stationary state and the payoff vector of the strategy. But while the stationary state is the same for either player, the payoff vector–given by the score received for each of the four possible plays CC, CD, DC, and DD–is different for the two players for the asymmetric plays CD and DC. Because the expected payoff is a linear function of the
payoffs, it is possible for one strategy to enforce the payoff of the opponent by a judiciously chosen set of probabilities that makes the linear combination of determinants vanish (hence the name ZD strategies). Note that this enforcement is asymmetric because of the asymmetry in the payoff vectors introduced earlier: while the ZD player can choose the opponent’s payoff to depend only on their own probabilities, the payoff to the ZD player depends on both the ZD player’s as well as the opponent’s probabilities. This is the mathematical surprise: the expected payoff is usually a very complicated function of six probabilities (and four payoff values, for the four possible plays). When playing against the ZD strategy, the payoff that the opponent reaps is defined by the payoffs and only two remaining probabilities that characterize the ZD strategies.
Zip File Quine
Another problem with this data is that it doesn't show percentages of college educated people, the total number of people in employment with college degrees has also been growing. The right metric is to look at percentage unemployment in each of these segments, not total numbers.
> all the good coffee is made by Aussies

Hold on a sec. What about Italians?
Would love to see a screenshot (or picture?) of that!
Nothing, just an explanation of what I meant by estimate.
Sure. Unfortunately, the UN doesn't seem to be all that interested in this sort of problem that I've seen.
Interesting, I've never read that book. But that's a nice take: your feedback loop isn't functional enough to notice diminishing returns. Putting it on my list.
Tweeters to Twitter on API edict: Twits
Do you have sources or is this pure speculation?

I live in a foreign country but when I come home to the USA to visit, I still see mostly teenagers working at fast food restaurants.

The thing is, most managers at minimum wage jobs wouldn't want to hire a college graduate. They would feel threatened since they probably don't have a degree themselves.
Loading their demo linked from the word "on" froze my browser for about 20 seconds. Scrolling the page afterward was horrible, very jerky and laggy.

I have noscript installed, but all scripts on that page were allowed.
A separate example of very advanced strategies in the simplest game: Rock Paper Scissors Programming Competition

http://www.rpscontest.com

Personally I think it is somehow ahead of these academic researches in some sense.
the hustler, self-starter, and entrepreneur is the last person who should forego college. college is one of the most efficient places to learn the lessons of millennia of hustle, starting, entrepreneurship that proceeded you.

it is also an invaluable place to make important personal and professional connections with professors and fellow students.
> People hate buying things they'll regret

They also has been found to regret less when they buy the experience[0], which is what coffee in Starbucks is more about. I wonder where do apps fall—are they things or experience? Or does it depend on how you market it?

I guess it's pretty hard for an app to offer unique experience, in comparison with a coffee shop.

[0] There were studies, paper posted here on HN some time ago (“If money doesn't make you happy…”)
Wow.. I guess I am late to this thread. But have any haters here actually tried to use Makr at all? I second Koji - when you're not just passively watching, but contributing is when the real fun begins! You become part of a conversation, almost a little competitive fun to outdo your friends. Not something you will find in random cat picture sites.
I think you might have a point there. It appears to me now that my OSX desktop is only messy because I share it with my Windows VM, where the desktop is pretty much the goto place when you want fast access to your latest files.
I think jellicle makes a good comment on this issue, as he usually does on education policy issues. The chart shown in the submitted article does not "prove" that college degrees have economic value, in and of themselves, up to the present value of the lifetime difference in earnings between degree holders and people who lack degrees.

The report underlying the chart

http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/CollegeAdv...

goes into more details. I have followed the writings of one of the report co-authors, Anthony Carnevale,

http://chronicle.com/article/Minding-the-Midpoint-Where/1288...

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/302016/mellowing...

for years, and his earlier writings include reports on college access for low-income, high-ability students,

http://tcf.org/publications/2010/9/how-increasing-college-ac...

showing that colleges preferentially admit by ability to pay rather than by intelligence or ability to gain from college studies (a finding consistent with the advice given by consulting firms that advise colleges on admission practices)

http://www.maguireassoc.com/

so that the job-market success of college graduates does not show so much that college education as such improves the qualities of workers as it signals to the job market which job applicants were most advantaged before college age.

Many college students are actually academically adrift,

http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/academically-a...

and Carnevale is a thoughtful writer about what both colleges and the students who attend them have to do to gain the best benefit from college attendance. So when I submitted this link (which was emailed to me by a local friend this evening), I was hoping it would gain the several thoughtfully disagreeing comments it has gained since I posted it, so that we can distinguish the benefits of attending college as such (which still need to be enhanced in the typical case) from the signaling effect of being admitted to college (which indubitably has some strong benefits in the job market, varying by college major and by industry).
Factor 0.95 now available
Question: is there anything stopping an app from using an invisible embedded web view to pull content from Twitter, mimicking a plain browser, and then scraping the content from the DOM as a poor man's API?

It would be tedious as hell, especially now that Twitter is all-Ajax-all-the-time, and it would be a moving target as they made changes, but could Twitter really do anything to stop it?
It's just that as of today, there are very few ways of getting education without going to college

I'd say this was mostly true 20 years ago, sort of true 10 years ago, and utterly false today.
Actually this is just the first self-hosted revision of git, but impressively that was apparently only a few days after the actual project start.

http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg24141.html
Five Plugins that You Don’t Want to Miss on Your WordPress
isnt http://www.picwing.com/ on the front page of ycombinator? Doesn't that do this?
Samsung to expand its research and development operations in San Jose
What's this alternate definition of "pig latin" that he's referring to?
Marco's analysis doesn't make it sound all that reasonable: http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes

I'm concerned about the rules about embedding a tweet. So now there'll be all this widget stuff on websites when all I'm trying to read is a quoted tweet? I guess this move is to let Twitter track my behavior across the web (http://dcurt.is/twitter-is-tracking-you-on-the-web), but I worry about its impact on other sites that use the API.
Prepare to have your mind blown! :)

Innovator's Solution is probably the better book (same ideas expressed, but more in-depth thinking on how to fix it inside your company by Christensen).

It's a must-read by startups because it puts you in the right mind-set of why your crappy little MVP can possibly disrupt powerful incumbents.

Thanks for your article - I've been enjoying your posts!
> We deny people many rights for the simple reason that they abuse a lot of them.

There is a vast amount of elitism embedded in your thought process. I don't fully disagree with your view point, but that line of reasoning scares me. We sell the poor lottery tickets hand over fist, but I get to buy a $2800 lottery ticket with better odds.
Yeah I agree... I'm still working through the concept and I've landed on the Coadcademy for Fitness and Nutrition.
Having the right attitude doesn't always lead to success, but having the wrong attitude always leads to failure. There is a positive correlation between those who are strong willed and determined and those who complete college, which most likely explains why college graduates tend to fare better in the workforce – graduates generally all share that same attitude, whereas non-graduates are a mixed bag.
Maybe they are lesbians.
Beg to differ.

Whenever I walk through airport security, I have Osama to thank for the millimeter wave inspection. And for the pain of raising money from non-accredited investors I have hundreds of historical and would-be scammers to thank. Bad guys make us limit our freedom.

Although we ask the government to protect us, they usually mess it up by ham-handed regulation. At the airport, the big show makes us feel safer, even though some experts say we aren't. The same thing has been going on in finance for years with Congress and regulators asleep at the switch with no idea how to control the bankers. They lack imagination and incentives.

We need to completely rethink regulation for investment vehicles. The goal should be to improve post-issuance transparency. Real transparency.

First thing we need is a live feed of transactions logs. All of them. Dirt cheap these days. No fancy accounting, I'll model the company myself thanks. I can share models with fellow investors. I/you/we can sell modeling capability to investors. More sunlight--less corruption, less risk.

The lack of transparency and disclosure that may about to be enshrined in Regulation A is like handing out the box cutters on the airplane to al Qaeda. The threat is not you or me. It's scammers. Right now about all the protection Mom will have is the SEC banning "bad actors" years later--if they get caught. Just like they caught Madoff. Professional financial accounting? Enron's books were audited by a top firm.

Instead regulation should require you to show me the money, continuously, with timestamps, please. Oh, and send me my government mandated Salesforce.com login too please. Let's do for banks too. Make it fair for everyone.

OK, now you can sell my Mom your stock.
In all seriousness, what year is this thing from? I honestly can't tell if this was someone's idea of a joke in 2000, or if this is someone's idea of a joke in 2012. Both seem equally plausible!
That's awesome! Is that from underscore.js?