skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that the best thing (for the user) would be to allow forwarding of Facebook messages to an arbitrary email account. I really don't get the 'email is dead' thing though. Recently, somebody trying to contact me asked a mutual friend for my Myspace page (I don't have one) instead of my email, phone or IM information.

It wouldn't bother me much if these systems were open. I wouldn't mind having a social-networking ID if I could interact with other services instead of having to log in to each one. I have one mail client and one Jabber client. I could use them to connect to a thousand accounts each, and users of tens of thousands of other providers can interact with those accounts. Oops... this just turned in to a rambling rant.
The Inside Story of a Small Software Acquisition
Jeremy Liew: Will email be dead in 5 years?
I hesitated to post this rant, as I'm far from a mathematician by training, and I'm certain to expose my ignorance by commenting further. That said, it touches on some of the stuff that bothered me about maths around the time I stopped seriously engaging it. That is, axioms as assumptions, and playing games with what appear to be arbitrary symbols (e.g. infinite sets). For me, this seems to stray from a sort of pure, meaningful mathematics I was initially attracted to, and those objections were never met with anything but bluster and appeals to authority.
No, especially because some of the email killers he cites,like email aggregators and integrated email/IM, are still email!
Exactly. The social networks' messaging systems are convenient front ends, but there's no reason that they can't all share data.
You need to read the explanation for the German Tank method (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1824525,00.html) to see the formula used to get 104.
Or socialmoth.
"On the other hand, if you kill a Level 3 platform, you destroy the whole reason people use your system to begin with -- to develop and run custom code."

That's only true for Ning and Amazon's web services, not the other examples he gave. The whole point of Ning is to have custom social networks, so if you took the "custom" part away, then yeah, people would stop using it. Amazon's web services are just platforms, so if you took them away... they wouldn't have a product anymore.

For products that aren't solely platforms, you can take away the platform and still have something people want to use, even if it's a Level 3 platform. All it would take for Facebook's platform to qualify is for them to run third party code on their servers. Even with that, they could decide that the whole platform thing was a bad idea, and you'd still have a useful site. I haven't used Salesforce, but I'm assuming they had plenty of core functionality before they opened up their platform, and that would still be usable. Second Life could just hire a lot of people to build neat stuff for their world and close off the platform to outsiders. As long as your entire product isn't a platform, you don't have to support the platform forever. People might hate you for getting rid of it, but it's still doable.

"I believe that in the long run, all credible large-scale Internet companies will provide Level 3 platforms. Those that don't won't be competitive with those that do, because those that do will give their users the ability to so easily customize and program as to unleash supernovas of creativity."

If by that he means that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and what remains of AOL will have products that offer a Level 3 platform, then sure, that sounds reasonable. But there are plenty of things on the internet that don't benefit from letting people add random new functionality within the product itself.

Take Flickr, for instance. Lots of people use their Level 1 platform to make nifty things. Most Flickr hacks integrate Flickr with some other product or show nifty visualizations with Flickr photos. How would letting people do that on Flickr itself benefit anyone? The data is all that matters in this case. No one who makes Flickr hacks thinks to themself, "Man, I wish my hack could run on Flickr's site itself."

It seems to me that Level 2 and 3 platforms are only really useful in games, where they're nifty but not really a new thing, and two other places: portal pages and social networks. In terms of what makes a Level 2 or 3 platform, social networks are basically glorified portal pages to begin with. They give you a box, and you stick your content in it while perhaps using the site's Level 1 platform to make your content more useful and interesting. If you're not a social network or a portal, you don't have boxes for third party developers to stick things in.

I may be setting myself up for a "640k should be enough for anyone" moment, but I really don't see it.
...set theory is like turing machines and turing equivalence. Important concept, yes. Good to know, yes. Used by most in comp sci, no. Necessary, no.

I have to disagree with this position in regards to Turing machines. This is because the definition of Turing machines leads directly to the problem of P vs. NP. Within the last month, I came across a problem that turned out to be NP-complete, a problem which also involved a very large data set (coincidentally, the problem was set cover). Had I not been aware of Turing machines and the P vs. NP problem, I could have spent hours implementing an algorithm which turned out to be unusable on the large data set I was working with. Instead, I knew that it would be necessary to find a reasonable approximation to the solution using some sort of greedy algorithm, and the piece of software I wrote actually turned out to be useful to the project we were working on.

I think that is one thing that really appeals to me about Computer Science. Nearly every core course I have taken has helped me as a programmer and as a computational thinker. I think this is part of the original author's problem with Mathematics education, that so much is learned and discarded, or simply taken for granted without being understood. Everything I have learned thus far in my CS education has been conceptually understandable (admittedly with a little work at times) and has helped me in some way (well, except maybe for that one COBOL course I took).
What ever happened to Shawn Fanning? Nothing. So why is wsj doing an article on him?
An early look at the Techcrunch40
On Facebook.
I think too many people have been subjected to bad e-mail interfaces for too long, especially with regards to spam. Being exposed to a nice interface like GMail or a personally-configured solution with a nice SpamAssassin learning filter would go a long way towards making people appreciate e-mail more. I always find myself surprised when people still cite spam as a major problem, but those are inevitably the people who are using a default install of Outlook or a crappy webmail interface for their school. E-mail might die for these people, but for those of us who know how to actually use e-mail effectively, I don't think it will ever die.
Send a link to the uncov guys.

Any publicity is good publicity, right? But seriously, a social network... for selling things to each other? They're going to tear you apart.
just don't link to http://www.techdumpster.com, that's a banned keyword
Facebook does a lot of almost invisible but extremely smart things. Two examples: when you specify the type of relationship when adding a friend, Facebook uses the info to decide how much information to present about the person in your news feed. Or when two people list themselves as being in a relationship, Facebook will show the most recent picture of the two together (if such a picture exists, and privacy permissions permit it in your case).

Nothing fancy. Just extremely well thought out.
He believes that Apple is not growing even faster because they do not sell as much in retail. He mentions HP. But not DELL, who is #1 and also sells (mostly) through their web site and have very limited in-store presence.

Am I missing something? What's the point of an article like that if his only argument is so weak? I, personally, see exponential growth of apple hardware among my friends and peers.

And I just did not get his "flywheel" paragraph about Vista. Is it going to suck less because of... of what?
The first blurb, about Lincoln, says that he was a failure as a businessman. So apparently, he did give up, and went on to try something else.
Bla-bla-bla... Another healthy dose of "Web 2.0 BS" SMS, IM, chat, blogs with comments and message boards have been around forever: 10 years easy.

Somehow ex-CTO of AOL managed to stay mostly unaware of those things for quite some time.
Oh well, I was hoping for side-by-side code comparisons.
Mozilla also did work, that guy just gave up too soon. Although I am not sure if it is worth any money to Netscape.
and now everything I post is dead, until one of the editors decides to reset my account.

Editor: are there any other banned domains besides tvbydemand?
Well I remembered his name, so the "Shawn who?" seems rather out of place. Shawn Fanning's place in history is irrefutable, I suppose.
Has smart money abandoned U.S. Web 2.0 companies?
Why, it seems Apple is even worse than Windows when it comes to open systems? It seems to me a Linux user would be the least likely candidate for switching to OS X.
I returned my MacBook Pro because it was whining, anyway. A friend of mine had to order four iMacs untill Apple finally could deliver one without severe production faults. So I think Apple should work on the quality of their products a bit harder...

Now I have a Dell Notebook (Latitude X1) which is great, and since it has no fan, it is silent. I wonder when Apple will finally get another subnotebook out of the door.
I think he might be right, because what we see now is that a lot more social interaction in the broadest sense is conducted electronically and produces huge amounts of data. So, at lest, we get a chance to apply algorithmic techniques to these things. However, we're not very far along. It's more complicated to analyse biographies of criminals to devise effective crime prevention/rehabilitation measures than to figure out buying patterns in supermarkets.
Mathematical statements are not unambiguous if you mean anything more than just syntactical consistency, which is by definition meaningless. Maths is a means to make statements about the world and thus depends on analysis and modeling. Modeling is by no means unambiguous as anyone who ever created a data model will be able to confirm. So maths is either meaningless or ambiguous if seen in its application context.

The issue goes even deeper. You could argue that the above argument is a semantic trick, because modeling is outside the realm of maths as a science. But even the formal foundations are in doubt if you consider Goedels incompleteness theorems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAXdel%27s_incompleteness_theor...)

Sorry, the link is broken. Apparently this forum doesn't support umlauts in URLs
The biggest reason is that most Linux apps are ported onto OSX a lot faster than they are windows.

There are a lot of people now that are attached more to open source applications than the platform itself.
Where's the porn?
Talking up the complexity just doesn't cut it for me with this. It's a simple little thing. No way are there "500 different things to do".
Maybe 500 lines of code :)
news.yc is a "social networking" site...

I'd try to lose that buzzword, but the concept of making sites that users can communicate over is still pretty solid.
Your blog is very optimistic. You'll need that:)

This is an interesting topic. I'm always trying to learn more about what other people do for publicity. I get really tired of all the bs stories with the founders who claim that they just told some friends and then woke up with ten million users the next day.
But there isn't any ambiguity in the theory of evolution.
YouTube-killer may have big gun
On the other hand, the history of computer products is littered with "perfect" systems that lost out to good systems released earlier, and accomplishing most of what people want.
this could be technical... getting users to use the product or service/page. my newest venture is a little different... B2B... so we'll see how that goes.

also, my answer is relevant because with more users comes expansion. my social networking site (before the phrase was coined so feverishly) started with 10 people initially signing up. i had launched the day prior to my vacation and didn't return for 2 weeks. word-of-mouth spread it like wildfire and when I returned... 20k people has signed up. with that however, came the server and bandwidth bill (I was using a shared hosting plan). technically, it made me broke for time (fixing everything that broke and eventually broke during my transfer to the dedicated server) and financially it drained me (back when dedicated servers cost and arm, leg, first born and your dog fluffy). =P
The German tank method relies on a unique probability density function created specifically for the task of estimating tank production.

It takes into account factors unique to tanks, so you'd have to define your own distribution for Goolge's gadget servers to make a correct estimation.
But news.yc doesn't call itself a social networking site. There's a big difference between sites that happen to allow people to communicate and interact with each other, and sites that list "we're a social network" on their FAQ as a reason why they're different from the competition. The latter tend to be much lamer.
If you seriously want to launch this service you'll need to be ruthless about who you target. You're not going to get anywhere by playing nice and focusing on a handful of sites.

Target everyone and anyone. Then go back and do it again. Marketers typically try to make 3 impressions on a person for any given product or service.

And as others are mentioning press releases are pretty ineffective. I find it's always best to write a personalized email even if you're just changing some boiler-plate text. Personalized emails create a sense of obligation to respond.
What's the brown bar at the end for? Is that "all other languages"?

Also, I would say that they have missed off the other prime dynamic language, ASP, and in fact all the .NET languages.
Live demo for  jsHotKyes
I think the last one is "Ruby (mix)" but the X axis label "Language" took its place. Instead of adding the MS languages he could just prefix the title with "Open Source" :-)
Justin.tv breaks live flash video streaming record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel%27s_incompleteness_theore... redirects to the right page.
Usually there was some other complicating factor, like massive over-charging. Meanwhile better systems have come from behind (Word beats the entrenched but poorly ported Wordperfect at the DOS/Windows changeover).
I generalized my personal experience. It may be different for different people, but I'm tired longer the more I use stimulants. But I've also had one to two cups of coffee in the morning every day for about four years now. If I drink more at other times I generally feel worse for a longer period of time and don't gain much in the way of concentration.
This is typical press release-type posturing. It's not like there's a published record of concurrent Flash streams somewhere to measure against. They hit a very high number for their site and then arbitrarily declared it record. A bit delusional or naive I think.

Regardless, 14,000 is an impressively high number. All the more if they're doing it with a custom Python RTMP server implementation for $100. Totally worthy of the Amazon prize.
I'm sure open access to facebook messaging will come eventually. There's no rush because facebook is the market leader and most people don't realize there is something wrong with having to log into facebook to reply to messages.
http://www.buzzshout.com/
http://www.launchfeed.com/
Social networks on Ning with collaborative blogs - write posts
Google Ad-words
Put a link in your email footers
Make some good comments on Techcrunch with a link to your site
You'll be surprised. As you approach "perfect", the number of details for any given task increases exponentially. That's why perfect is unattainable.
This is the right rack. I sent them a mail a few months ago to do so but didn't got any answer though.

I would now suggest to do the same for young people who had success in making their dream come true: startup, band, art, business, job, invention, science, etc.

The message should be: we are normal people, like you, we had a dream, tried it and it came true. They'll hit another gold vein because the emulation it provides is addicting.

Continue the good job.
I don't think I've gotten more than 50 hits from a TechCrunch comment, and that's when I get first post. It still won't hurt to make as many comments as you can on popular blogs with a link back to your site.
I voted this up when I got to the end of the first page of the story and was hooked and looking forward to rest of the story. Then I saw that they haven't been written yet. Unvoted, if I could, for leaving me wanting more.
This post seems like a pretty transparent attempt to justify his procrastination. It's a really easy trap to fall into. Actually releasing to the public is like selecting the "Hurt Me Plenty" option in Doom, it's not an easy thing to do.

My partner and I took turns emailing this quote to each other as a reminder to keep ourselves intellectually honest:

"Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you're working on something that isn't released, problems are intriguing. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that's precisely why people put it off. They know they'll have to work a lot harder once they do." -- Hardest Lessons #1
I actually like the simplicity and usefulness of this website. Congratulations Aaron -- well done!!
Could you explain where the difference comes from ?
Why is email "overly former" ?
Providence Geeks returns this Wednesday the 19th
I think the thing you're meant to do is the thing you find yourself unable to walk away from. For Lincoln that appears to have been politics.
Sorry. I meant to say "formal."

Email seems formal to people who have never communicated socially on the internet via anything other than facebook.
The critical mistake in their approach was to use a lame def of web 2.0. If you define something in terms of the buzzwords that were hot in 2006, it's not surprising if you see lower numbers of deals in the years before and after.

We haven't seen any decrease in appetite for deals among VCs. If anything an increase.

In fact, wasn't there just a story saying that valuations had gone up alarmingly, leading to fears of a second bubble? Higher prices imply higher demand.
"rich Internet applications" is definitely my favorite technology.
Microsoft suffers stunning EU antitrust defeat
VM is generally considered for servers, but I'm interested for desktop clients.

I would like to have one VM for off network developments or document editing where I can ensure viruses, spyware or trojans are unable to contaminate the system.

I would like a VM for web surfing, where I could easily throw away the VM and restart with a fresh one. Same for mail or other internet applications.

I would also like to have one VM dedicated to do security sensitive tasks like monitoring my bank accounts and so.

Now browsing reddit can result in installing a trojan or whatever that puts all my applications in danger.

Pushing this logic a bit further, we can see that the logic is to go for a more lightweight desktop with eventually more smartness on the remote service than today. But also to combine multiple OS on a same machine. Such systems would work as well on lightweight hand held devices as on big PC with 128 CPUs.
Think you've got what it takes (join the CIA)
Internet Crime Is Big Business
About the only advantage of the lack of democracy in the European Commission is that it's very difficult to buy people who have security of tenure...

I don't know that the term "stunning" is wholly appropriate (yes, I know it was Yahoo's choice) - perhaps "comprehensive" or "thorough" would be better, as I don't think anyone in the EU was particularly surprised at the outcome. I found what happened (or not) in the US much more confounding.
A third type of leverage isn't really leverage. Some people say you can leverage fame or popularity.

(?!!)

No wonder marketing software is 'some kind of freaky black art' for the man.
Wow, it didn't even cross my mind that the quote was a "bash" on social sciences. My title picked on sociology because it seemed like a clearer case, but the quote lumps evolution among the "ambiguous sciences" as well. I very much agree. I also think that evolution is much more beautiful than anything I've seen in Maths so far.

I found it interesting, because it's the first time I internalized that ambiguity prevents long chains of arguments, because fuzziness is multiplicative (so to say). As a corollary, if social behavior was not ambiguous, sociology would be potentially just as deep as physics.

The quote actually has very little to do with the rest of the book. It was merely a prelude to their discussion on the evolution of societies, which is one of the Major Transitions.

The last remark is cool too, "it may be that no operative theories are possible in the social sciences", because it applies to biology as well. We do have some operative theories on evolution, but there's absolutely no guarantee that every phenomena has a simple holistic explanation. As far as I'm concerned, we still don't have a proof that evolution (Darwin's axiom) could lead to complex structures. We just have a lot of very convincing hand-waving.
But for those of us who've been online since before Netscape was founded, email seems natural and adaptable (it can be either formal or informal).

Having said which, the usefulness of email has been quite eroded by the small number of sociopaths flooding it with useless ads for dubious products in what can only be a calculated effort to destroy it altogether.
First, I do think that modelling is in the realm of physics, biology, etc. Mathematicians might make unambiguous statements about these, but they never claim that the model is a good representation of reality.

Second, Godel's incompleteness theorem is about incompleteness, not ambiguity. The statement x = y + 10 is unambiguous in the sense that all mathematicians would always interpret it in exactly the same way. There is no question that x = 12, y = 2 is consistent with that statement, and x=y is not.
A Hacker's resume (Jon Lech Johansen)
Well any sentence of the form "people from country xyz are so and so" is quite stupid, I am sorry. I never said Iranians are terrorists. But there are probably terrorists in every country. A few weeks ago some terrorists were caught in Germany, I think at least some of them were Germans, too. But that doesn't mean that "Germans are terrorists". Irakians are not terrorists, either.
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Why do people become attached to their products 
I think this is just one issue that attaches people to their products.Nevertheless this is a nice starting point to think about this. What are the products that you are attached to, and why do you think you are attached to them?
I think this is just one issue that attaches people to their products.Nevertheless this is a nice starting point to think about this. What are the products that you are attached to, and why do you think you are attached to them?
I just looked at eser.org. Neat-o. Have you thought about adding a comments/ratings system or features matrix?
quite an impressive resume
I've been developing web apps too long to be confident that I can say how easy it is to learn. Post a web app you've made and at least I'll have a little data.
Coding Horror: You're Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly