skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OP here -- the numbers are in no way bogus, all sourcing information and methodologies are listed on the page itself (see the bottom left * on each 'slide').

Would love to understand what gave you that impression, as we work hard to build content like this, and hate to see it shrugged off.
How would he do that?

Hastings says the estimate is based on head-to-head competition. If I'm selling streaming rights for property A, I'm going to go with the people who pay me the most. If Bezos says, "But gosh, we aren't showing it to as many people," my answer will be "Tough!"
If you're using Sublime I'd highly recommend writing some Snippets, there's plenty you can write and it gets you digging into Sublime's docs. Helped me get used to Sublime a lot more.
I think its outrages that a member of the board of directors of twitter has absolutely no idea what he's doing on twitter.
I have no knowledge of Dalton's other business then this blogpost, and therefore it doesn't strike me as annoying, just a well written critical analyses of what twitter is doing wrong. I really hate the protectionistic (i.e. stupid) way twitter is doing business and I hope if enough people vocalize it, twitter might do something about it.
I'm sure the guys at HeyZap are good people with the best of intentions, but the issue is that they can't predict the future.

They can't tell you that their servers will be compromised, and all your users will be open game. They can't promise you that they won't bring in a CEO that just wants to get the company sold, and doesn't care about the developers or their customers.

They can't tell you that when they pivot, all your games will be busted. Not because they're hiding this gem from you.

It's simply because they don't know it.

When you roll your own, you know it's going to survive because YOU are responsible for it.

No BS politics are going to force you down an ridiculous migration path you don't already know about, and since YOU are the CEO, you can sell out and not worry about screwing companies who are dependent on your product or service.

Even IF you choose to use a third party, you owe it to yourself to write your own and mirror that data on to yours so that when, not IF, they go down or out, you can flip a switch and you're back in business within seconds, not days.

The deal with GREE stinks of potential currency manipulation, IMHO, and I wouldn't put my livelihood in their hands for one minute. Again, not because they're bad people - I don't know them from Adam, but because they've already shown that they're willing to allow the customer, we developers, to do ALL the work to satisfy THEIR migration to their API instead of requiring OpenFeint to develop a transparent proxy layer and make it turnkey.

Don't indie developers have enough to do already?
There are more options than that. For instance, to obscure a planned increase from $550/month to $660/month, the offer could be two months free: 12 x $550 = 10 x $660.

There's no reason the discount has to be for the full rental amount in a month. To obscure an increase from $550/month to $575/month, the offer could be be $300 off for January: 12 x $550 = $275 + 11 x $575.
His math is completely skewed. 22 sales a month of a service that charges $200/month will generate $343,200 a year (unless he's assuming 100% churn rate).
Planet TEDx
+1 for "iMedium-to-long-static-documents-available-for-purchase" !
True, but the root problem is in education. Our schools are passing out "social media douchebag" degrees left and right - we can expect nothing less.

This is only partially tongue-in-cheek. The balance of information systems operate on trust, just as economies do, and eroding trust at the institutional level is a bad sign.
Reid is saying Amazon is paying half of what Netflix is paying for a tiny fraction of the latter's catalog and an even tinier fraction of Netflix's volume? If that's what he's saying I'm hard pressed to think he actually believes it.

Also, Amazon can afford to lose a bit (probably not a billion, though) on its streaming service if 1) more people sign up for Prime as a result and 2) Prime members buy more inventory from Amazon.
The supply of bitcoins used as currency is fixed while the supply to all other reference currencies are variable in some way or another.

Fiat is obviously variable on the whims of the issuing government.

Gold may be taken out of circulation to make jewelry or electronics (or another use not yet discovered). Ammo and baked beans can be consumed. Bitcoin has no utility value and cannot be used for anything other than as a currency.

Similarly, the supply of these other items can be expanded. An asteroid full of gold could be mined, a new ammunition factory built, or a bean farm planted. Bitcoin has no physical identity, it cannot be reproduced, counterfeited, or grown outside of the well defined properties laid down in the original protocol.

Bitcoin is truly the first pure reference currency. Manipulative games can still be played with bitcoin markets, but the risk of external non-economic events affecting your money supply is removed. A political party can't decide the world needs more bitcoins, a new vein of bitcoins cannot be discovered, and nor can a new use for bulk bitcoins be invented.
Good point! I was talking about startup costs for the first few months of hire as the rep ramps but didn't make that clear at all. I'll update soon.

Edit: Updated now.
You look at Gmail's JS and tell me which function is the "open compose" :)

Someone who can do that would get hired pretty quickly!
> "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true, # trims trailing whitespace

bad for Markdown, as it will delete spaces that are needed for newline, I believe.
Mistakes I made as a young entrepreneur
Hard to say you're a "long time user" if you've only been on since 2010. Been on 6 years, that line made me laugh.
As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party.

For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating.

The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped.

They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.
http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Why-do-some-tweets-have-a-per...

i knew twitter was broken but this takes the cake.
i have been using twitter for years and had no idea.
Not me! The major consumer use case for anything above basic DSL bandwidth is video. That has been obvious for a decade at least. No ISP should be selling fat consumer pipes and expect people to just send the occasional email.

Trying to charge both sides is just monopolist idiocy.
Eh, maybe. Twitter got started after Facebook, but I don't remember seeing Twitter talking about Facebook.
unsubscribing costs U.S. retailers about $5.8 billion per year

Utter nonsense.

/end thread
Genocide? I'm sorry, but that holds no water at all and is plain insulting to the intelligence of this community. A genocide is the deliberate destruction of at least a significant part of a people. Your numbers (if they are even true, I see no sources) do not in the slightest support that.

You really do the Palestinian position no favours by claiming absurdities.
People use Heyzap to install games, so its a pretty good opportunity to promote games to them.

We have a sustainable business model and are not too far from profitable with 16 employees.

We also have an API and will make it very easy for developers to download all the data if they ever want it. Openfeint is unfortunately not allowing that at all.
To me, what's implied by this piece — since it's written by Dalton — is that Twitter is leaving behind an opportunity that he plans to take advantage of. What remains to be seen is whether the thing they're leaving behind can be fully realized.

Do people really need a short-form messaging platform for communication?
The whole advantage of packaging is `pip install mypackage`, which you don't get with a raw .py. and my module has a couple of non-.py resources contained.

I really really really really really really hate DSLs. That's part of why I like Python more than Ruby. I want to learn one consistent language, not dozens of magic keywords that apply only in certain situations. I recognize that there is a place for them, it's just that in my mind that place is called "Ruby". ;)
This happened to me last Christmas! Those guys (it was a woman in my case) are super effective in their techniques. I had absolutely no intention of buying anything as I was walking by. My first mistake was responding to their question as I walked by. My second mistake was not continuing on my way through the rest of the mall.

Luckily, I DID manage to get a refund for the products later. I claimed that my wife was allergic to the things I had bought. The sales ladies were skeptical when they say the packages were unopened, but nevertheless I got a full refund - somehow.
Always wondering why the version '2' is emphasised heavily. Never heard of Sublime Text when it is version 1. The version number is part of the app binary file name. It is the only OS X app in my Mac that has the app name together with version number on the menu bar. Nothing wrong with this "unconventional", just that it will break a little thing when Sublime Text 3 is released. For example to change command prompt linking as in "ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/sublime".
Not necessarily negative, but certainly suspect. He has financial a stake in the outcome of his criticism.

Compare this to someone knocking Apple for something about iOS with the explicit hope that they fix it to his liking.
To a great extent it is a sheer supply-demand problem. I would not take it personally. Would be very nice to get reasons but I guess it is the same as in job and college applications. You rarely know why...
"What is post-pivot Twitter supposed to look like?

The best way to consume “news and information”.
Important content is mostly created by media companies, whether they are blogs, television, radio or movies.

The main reason that “normal users” would write messages is as a backchannel to discuss media events such as the Olympics, Election Coverage, or a new television show. “Normal user” tweets are something akin to Facebook comments.

Even though this backchannel exists, it’s not expected that brands and celebrities are supposed to pay much attention to everything that is said. Chernin himself hasn’t replied to the numerous replies he received."

That's funny because that's how I used Twitter from the beginning (5 years ago).
No kidding - ORCA should've been miles down the priority queue. That tens of thousands of election-day volunteers were wasted on it when they could've been doing more essential things is infuriating.

The Romney campaign didn't build the right thing wrong - instead, they built the completely wrong thing, which is doubly damning.
I think they'd do well to devote resources to making browsing videos less like shopping on Amazon. When I log into Netflix, I feel like a valued customer. They go out of their way to find stuff I'd love to watch and NEVER try to sell me anything. I've payed money and they want to give me a great service.

Comparatively, browsing videos on Amazon feels like I'm in Walmart. I am bombarded with continuous advertisements, reminded that I can buy the movies I'm looking at on DVD and BlueRay (almost throwing the shitty streaming quality in my face), and being sold a Kindle. Is nobody in charge of the user experience for Amazon Instant Video?
That's the Westfield. Same mall as in OP's story.
Ask HN: Can HN share their experience with "off shoring" web development?
I am thinking of exploring the option of "off shoring" some of my company's web development. By off shoring, I mean outsourcing web development to companies/contractors in countries with cheaper rates.
I am curious to hear the HN community's experience, as well as any tips or tricks.
Didn't dive into it in the post, but we settled the survey-entry-mistake hypothesis to our satisfaction by looking only at the responses that were gathered via phone (about 1/4 of the dataset) and finding that the same trends still held true.

Also, I really wanted the grade inflation hypothesis to be true, but I just took another look at the data and age turns out not to be consistently indicative of lower or higher grades for city services.

Thanks for the comment. Both really valid questions/comments.
Here's my Github-themed, less-ugly-than-the-default setup: https://gist.github.com/3164018
I think the OP makes some very important points here. There's definitely a somewhat fixed mentality when it comes to SaaS pricing and it's easy to fall into the trap that you should be charging something akin to 37signals.

Pricing isn't actually something that's as easy to change as you'd believe either. It has huge implications on your actual product, your target market and sales strategy - as the OP points out.

Imagine you were suddenly told you had to charge 10x more for your product. You might initially think it would kill you but think about what that would change. Would it necessarily be a bad thing?

If you're anything like me, it's easy to assume everyone lives in a world where $10 for Spotify is a pretty big deal. My friends moan about that price for unlimited music. $200 a month seems huge to me for anything I'd buy. It's only recently I've fully started to appreciate just how much money enterprise clients willing drop on "simple" products that meet their needs.

I really think there is a lack of good advice on pricing and how alternative pricing strategies could be used to open up new markets for SaaS type businesses. Sure, you may need a slightly "less scalable" sales strategy but with increasing competition in the web-app marketplace, moving to a different customer base with more cash may well be worth a few sales phone calls.
Well sure, but there's always a recursion limit of one kind or another.
XSS vulnerability found on Ebay
Indeed, this makes me think of http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/11/mort-elvis-einstein...
And he was telling them the same thing 5 years ego. And 5 years before that. And 5 years before that as well. I wonder what he'll be telling them in 5 years time, or in 10 for that matter.
Usually I'm immune to mall salespeople, but literally the exact same thing happened to me a couple years ago. Same products, same mall (SF Westfield), same tactics, Israeli salesperson. They've got the formula down to a science, apparently.

The only difference was the salesperson was a cute girl and I was single at the time...
It's not necessarily the inventors who filed it. More likely, it's an Apple patent lawyer. Naming and shaming the inventors is a bit unreasonable as inventors working for large companies may not have much sway over which parts of their work gets filed for patent protection.
At the end of the year, yeah. But at the end of the first month, in order to be able to pay your salesman, he must have done 22 sales. By charging yearly, only 2 sales are needed. That's cash flow.

So yeah, if he does his 22 sales / month, at the end of the first month, you're even, and starting from month #2, you're making money.

Combine this with "It's easier to sell one time a $1000 product than 1000 times a $1 one" and you get the main idea.
To be fair to Chernin, he's a board member, not a leadership executive. Most Twitter employees will never meet him and many may not even know who he is (or the other board members). Smaller companies have a board that's much closer to the employees, where it's not uncommon for senior employees to be in frequent contact with individual board members for advice. Larger companies will have boards that are far more diverse and typically far from the product. For example, Apple has the Chairman of Avon and the former Chairman/CEO of Northrop Grumman.

It's a small embarrassment to Chernin to bobble his first Tweet. The more interesting story is that he's a Hollywood deal maker, and that's more reflective of Twitter's aspirations. While he may have said some stuff about MySpace when he was at News Corp, he's really a media entertainment guy.
People who feel guilty over mistakes make better leaders
An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so that his followers would see it.

Signed up for twitter on the day it launched(I think) and did not know that. Twitter is a painful product to use. It isn't made for humans.

Twitter doesn't have to show a username in tweets; they can easily translate it to the name.

Twitter doesn't have to require each reply to appear like an out of context note. They can easily group them as complete conversations(like facebook allowing comments).

Twitter doesn't have to make lists so hard to use. They can easily make it very similar to facebook(except on twitter there is much more need to use this since they do not filter out tweets).

Twitter doesn't have to insist on this 140 char limit that looks funnier every coming day and result in butchered communication.

Twitter doesn't have to subtract 100 characters if I post a URL that is 100 characters; it could automagically shorten it or not count against the 140 at all. Instead, I am forced to manually use bit.ly to shorten it.

Twitter doesn't have to show me a stream filled with url strings; it could easily show the title of the page or something similar to facebook.

Dear Twitter, PLEASE stop this stubbornness in your product philosophy. It is hurting your users and it is hurting Twitter Corporation.
Having worked in a hospital and undergone HIPAA training multiple times, I can assure you there are pretty strict rules about passing along identified data.

What the drug companies are purchasing is anonymized; they have the data about patient X, but they have n idea who that person is. They are literally purchasing only the chance to pass along a request through your doctors to see if you'd be interested in participating in a study if you meet some criteria.
Good points. I don't say they're the exact same thing, like jellicle does, but I do think they're both propaganda, and for the same result: to make a few people richer and more powerful, via war.

You're right that Americans could disparage the recent war efforts, but if you were doing that to someone with that yellow sticker, you were (in my experience) talking to someone who supported the troops by supporting the war. I'm confident that was the intent of the yellow ribbon.
Even that is not infinite because there is a limit to how much memory you can address. You don't have to bring physical realities into it.
There is plenty of top-grade politically-conservative technical talent in America.

Yes, Silicon Valley leans left in some ways, and politically conservative developers are outnumbered. The Democrats could probably pull together enough people for fifty top-quality campaign teams, while the Republicans could probably only manage five.

That said, the Democrats put together one top-quality campaign team while the Republicans put together zero - and those are the numbers that matter.
Or perhaps Twitter has already figured out that there is no opportunity, and Dalton is mistaken in believing it exists.
Punk Rock Languages (2011)
Hey, Quora got slightly less obnoxious about blocking their content. Finally. Just a week or two ago, I followed a link to Quora and they were still doing the scummy old Experts Exchange trick of blurring out most of the answers.
Long-time Googler will head Silicon Valley patent office
Okay then, why can I scan all your user data without an account or any authentication?

This URL:
http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/users/search?q=mike

Allows me to anonymously see numerous (limited by # of results) users records.

When I choose one from the list and go to this URL:
http://www.heyzap.com/api/v1/users/mike_midkiff/activity

I see all of Mike Midkiff's info. All the games he has, WHERE he played (are you f'in kidding me??????), HOW MUCH he paid, and even his unique ID.

hackers, wake up. Bad engineering is bad.

Only the developer whose game Mike bought should be able to request his information, and ONLY relative to that developers game.

Hell. If someone gets mad at him in game, they can use YOUR API to track him down and beat the crap out of him.

Nice.
I made a dumb site to tell us the age of the Internet in days at any given time.
That's why I'm a casual pirate. I'm not arguing that it works for everyone, I'm saying that they do exist.

I have cable because I watch a lot of sports, as soon ESPN lets me pay for streaming without a cable subscription I will drop it, but unfortunately live sports is the one thing than can not be pirated easily, consistently, and in high quality.
And stay away from Istanbul too!
Reyner's response is the correct answer.
If there's 1000 wallets that only transact with each other and never (or rarely) with other wallets, it might be possible to identify them as an island in the transaction graph - see [1] for an example of automatic graph clustering (I think the image is communities in facebook's social graph, but the same algorithm could be applied to a transaction graph)

Of course, whether that behavior would stand out depends on how other users of the system behave.

[1] http://www.ece.umd.edu/~wenjunlu/images/gephi.png
Yes, I don't want those AWESOME features!
Thank you.
Before the rise of Twitter's own official client, it really was an elegant way to handle the problem of having a minimal interface (i.e. no reply button). But yes, it was basically something you wouldn't "get" unless someone told you, or you used twitter enough to eventually notice that someone's direct-tweet did not make it into your overall timeline.

And the many screwups with direct-messages is pretty well known...

If that riles you up, look at how SMS legacy commands still cause issues:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/one-thing-you-definitely-c...
I tried them two days ago and they were doing the same. Seems like a very recent change.
Good article. $100 is definitely a fair price for a private tutorial session in sales techniques taught by an experienced professional.
Even I agree with you when you say that author comes across as negative towards Twitter. Also, I hate the way he hates brand advertisers and advertising. C'mon, we all need advertising. We all need effective channels to market our products and companies. The problem being digital advertising is completely broken. But that doesn't make whole brand advertising bad!
Anonymous takes down over 550 Israeli sites, wipes databases