skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very true. In a group of 23 randomly selected people, there is just over 50% chance that two share the same birthday. Two great articles about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html

Don't tell that to astrologers, otherwise they might make Mars align with Jupiter and that will crash your code with an unknown exception.
I know what you mean - I have the same problem. For me, it's worst with television: I can't have a conversation with someone if there's a TV on in the same room. I'm not sure if this is the opposite to the flashlight simile, or just an example of an inability to direct it at will.
If you knew me, you'd know I don't waste my time writing stuff I don't believe in. I don't blog very often. So yes, I obviously find all of those cases useful, and again, I frankly don't understand why you don't see their usefulness.

> So how being corrected for writing what you doing is useful to you?

In the specific example, it saved me hours of time.

> Or feeling of being more connected - is that useful?

Absolutely. It makes me happier and more productive.

> Or repeating your FaceBook status - is that useful?

Absolutely. For the same reason Facebook status' are useful!

> Or spreading links, which you admit to be not working because of not enough followers?

That's not what I said. I said you need a lot of followers to make is useful, and I have about just enough for it to be: "I don't really have that many, but with the amount I do have it is enough..."
Keep it up, good work!
I think the number of vacuous articles about Twitter is partly due to its sudden popularity (obviously), but also because it's harder to discover the use of such a service. Sure, it's largely used for inane updates, but obviously it can have some interesting uses, such as keeping up with very current news/trends and social activities (ie: going to the bar at X, anyone up?).

However, to find out about these uses can take quite a bit of searching, especially if the reporter doesn't know anyone on Twitter. Granted, this is supposed to be the author's job, but I can understand that they wouldn't want to waste their time on what appears to simply be a worthless fad.

Really, I think the only way we'll see a decent article on Twitter is from someone who's used the service for a while, and has actually taken the time to find the signal among the noise. However, as most of these articles were probably pumped out within a few days due to deadlines, we won't find something like this among the major newspapers.
It is also highly auspicious that if you sum all the letters in "stephen hawking" you get 160, which is also the sum of all letters in "extra potatoe".

Coincidence? I think not. I tried to alert CNN.com to this, but they are apparently hushing it up.
Is that more sarcasm? Seriously, I can't tell.
Never. But, living in NYC, I walk around a mile in 15 minutes, each way to and from work, every day. I also walk or bike any time I need to run errands.
Maybe the past tense refers to trickjarrett's childhood.
Number of famous scientists/thinkers * at least 2 (birthday, day of death, could probably include other significant days in their lives) leaves an awfully high probability that most days line up with someone famous. Divide that by the number of years people take as significant (probably any mulitple of 50) and the number is reduced somewhat but still for someone so rational it seems odd to always bring this up.
DavidSJ,

The courses all teach you the same kinds of things. It's not exactly snake oil, but it's not something that's easy.

I took one of these years ago, as a kid, and got little out of it. Why? Because I didn't practice. Here are the main things that I recall from the class:
1) they trained you to read groups of words rather than individual words
2) they trained you to use your peripheral vision to increase the size of those word groups
3) they trained you to stop and recount what you just read, every couple of pages or chapter.

That was about it. It was about practice -- which most people don't want to do. There are no tricks; like anything else, getting better at reading speed + comprehension takes a lot of practice.

However, it definitely does help to be cognizant of the different techniques they teach, so that you can practice yourself. And, just like programming, you need to set aside time when you can actively practice these techniques. And practicing this stuff has generally made the reading itself less enjoyable, in my experience.
From looking at the conclusion of this post, and also the other posts that were linked to, it seems like this person writes about twitter so that they can get more followers.

You shouldn't have to convince anyone but yourself why you would use a service like twitter.
Is it just me or is this script quite resource intensive? Pulls processor load to 95%, on my acer netbook with firefox.
Really, that's not my goal. To back that up, I removed the links. I generally like placing links, because I think they give useful context. For example, the link to the old post tells you when I came on twitter and why.
<3 Revolution Cafe. Last time I tried to go to one of these, I didn't know who anyone was and if they were for the meetup. I know it's corny, but should there be a designated meeting color? Orange?
Because authorities wouldn't be able to get hold of Google's search logs or anything like that.
Dan?
Ask HN: Why do I have to type print "x: "+str(x) in Python?
Why can't Python just be smart enough to cast x automatically (like every other language I work with)?

I imagine there is a not-bad reason, as Guido is pretty damn smart, but it's beyond me.
An astrologer may also tell you the moon is in void of course and to wait until tomorrow to make your release :]
I'm glad I'm not alone :)

Interestingly, I find that this tends to affect the men of my family more than the women. My mom, sister, and wife don't seem to have this problem at all. While both my dad and brother all suffer from an inability to hold a conversation if the TV is on.

Of course, that's a pretty small sample set.
They aren't actually tracking these torrents though, unlike TPB. I can see where people are attempting to make the parallel (and why), but it really falls flat when you consider that Google is only being used to search for torrents, not store them.
Neither sarcasm, nor direct statement. Just a way to stop argument that would lead us both nowhere.

We have different beliefs. I'm not planning of convincing you to my point-of-view (it would pretty much be impossible and also useless for me, I'm not running a religion) and your arguments don't convince me.
Just get out of the way
In other news, the invention of the automobile cuts horse and buggy driver's wages by 100%. Ban automobiles!
See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/:

Explicit is better than implicit.
H1Bs live in two parallel universes. People in one never meet the people in the other.

The H1Bs who work at Google probably get paid a pretty decent wage (though even then, the restrictions on how and where they can work, as well as the difficult in changing professions, probably does still drag down wages relative to what they would earn if they were totally free agents).

The H1Bs at the body shops are often paid miserable wages, and these visas are used without question to fire Americans and replace them with foreign nationals. Keep in mind that 7 of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are actually Indian Outsourcing companies.

Here's a link to the story about the usage of H1B (the link is msnbc, but the original story was on businessweek)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/

Here's a link to an NPR segment

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1424156...

According to Ron Hira (from the NPR) link:

"infosys was certified by the department of labor meeting the prevailing wage requirement to bring 100 computer programmers in at $9.15 an hour. HCL America got 75 programmers at $24,000 a year."

The real debate is how prevalent the two camps are - Microsoft and Google insist that the H1Bs are exceptional engineers who couldn't be found "at any price" in the US, and who create huge amounts of wealth. They would tend to claim that the abuses are minor, the kind of thing that happens in any complex system.

Opponents, on the other hand, tend to say that the abuses are widespread, and that very talented engineers are a small minority of the H1B workers.

For the record - I believe that talented engineers from overseas are exceptionally valuable to the US and should be allowed in without all the indentured crap. However, I believe that recent evidence demonstrates that the abuses are extremely widespread, and that the H1B has greatly reduced the appeal of engineering careers at a time when the US desperately needs to ensure a steady supply from within its own population.
I really don't appreciate this kind of post on hn. Do you think there haven't been enough submissions about twitter ?

And besides, I've always found rude submitting links to his own blog.
I never understood the pirate bay defence that they are like google.

Google never hosted torrents or trackers, Pirate Bay's entire existence is for hosting torrents and trackers.
Convince you of what? That I don't believe myself that I find Twitter useful in those cases?
Like a torrent, a search engine tells you where to find the information you're looking for. I think its a bit of a stretch, but I'm guessing thats the general idea
Ballmer, IBM reportedly surprised by Oracle-Sun deal
What a fatuous comment. Automobiles didn't themselves lock foreign workers into abusive contracts. H1-B worker visas aren't an evolution of the market; visa and foreign labor terms and conditions are as old as foreign relations.
Unfortunately that takes companies back to the old days of being a hostage to their vendors.
Sigh, this is related to the Pirate Bay trial. The pirate bay does more than providing "search" for torrents.

They provide hosting for the torrent files and also they are running trackers for the torrent files. The torrent network is backed by these trackers, this is a key difference between Google and them.
>>> x = 1234
>>> print "x:", x
x: 1234
Wow, HN has indeed changed. I thought it would be interesting to the community. Sorry. I'm basing that on previous stories and questions like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182755
Pirate Bay hosts torrents which use many different tracks - not only The Pirate Bay's. And a .torrent file in that sense is similar to a link.
I suggest you read up something about the raise and fall of US automotive industry: Detroit used to be no less "startupish" than SV is today: thousands of engineering startups have flourished and vanished over relatively short period of time. The history of Detroit is one of several reasons why I don't take Paul's views on special role of SV seriously: Valley isn't something we haven't seen before. If anything, it is declining:

Valley startups no longer represent the cutting edge of computing innovation at large [as they did in the 80s], they have mostly escaped competition by hiding in relatively narrow niche of "English-speaking consumer Internet" very much like Detroit has been hiding behind big SUVs. And "release early, release often" web sites are no different from body-on-frame SUVs: their tech is so well understood and simple that Chinese can produce cheaper and faster copycats of facebooks and twitters in a matter of months within an original launch.

When they'll learn to market them properly, they will build their own data centers in San Antonio, TX and the similarity with Detroit will be complete.
Have we arrived in the post-Windows era?
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According to searchyc.com, sixteen twitter-related links were submitted since yesterday. This is really too much, and besides, 90 % of the links say the same thing.
You should consider that before posting or maybe delay your posting.
Nice article, but like many things, this just touches the surface and adds little enlightment.

Being really good at many things, especially programming, requires deep involvement. This is the polar opposite of "posing".

It's easy to pose and talk about eyeballs or algorithms or third normal form. But tell me what data is in column 4, which programs change it under which conditions, and what that effects. That takes deep understanding. Which takes focus.

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
It is harder to be a programmer now than in the old days because now you have to be an artist. 20 years ago every app looks horrible and so your horrible-looking app blended right in. Today, the designer that can barely code has a serious advantage over the programmer that can't design. It's a lot easier to learn how to program than it is to learn how to design beautiful things. With open source we can all copy each other's code but everybody will hate you if you copy another person's design.

Nowhere is this more evident than Android vs the iPhone. Android's design philosophy is all about utilitarianism. Accordingly, the G1 and most Android apps are incredibly ugly. If you install an ugly app on your G1 then nothing really changes. The iPhone is about design first, utility second. If you install an ugly app on your iPhone you've made it worse than it was without the app. Now, look at who is making money: iPhone developers creating eye candy, not Android developers building unique useful apps.
Ah no not what I meant; thatapproach would be on a par with trying to stop 9/11 (aka bad).

I mean NOW, in the modern day, find Osama then jump back a month or 2 and provide the military with the date / time / location :)

Theoretically then you are not affecting the "past" provided the US military dont arrive till after you make the jump back in time.
What Good Are Economists Anyway?
Right. No download link anywhere. Just abstracts and citations. Seems suspicious now...
That was my intended use of it. My apologies for not writing more clearly.
I was under the impression that Israel had really weak copyright protection. I thought that basically file sharing was allowed, or at least not prosecuted, unless it was commercial.
> Jira is also included in this $5 offer too (we use that too - our testers/business analysts love it)

Really? They do? That's surprising, because the last 3 places I've worked with Jira, everyone hated it. I always felt like it was a super-configurable, really lame to use issue tracker.
YouTube - A Narrative History of BSD by Kirk McKusick
I recently emailed Oracle to give me a quote for Berkeley DB, so I could use it commercially.

The response? Absolutely None!
It "turned out" to be auspicious because Stephen Hawking wasn't born a physicist. When he became one, then his January 8 birthday "turned out" to be auspicious.
Your sarcastic summary is pretty inaccurate. It's up to the readers to determine if Gabriel's examples actually demonstrate usefulness, but it doesn't help that you mischaracterize his examples. Here are some corrections:

1. Your summary doesn't even really make sense as a coherent thought. The author actually says that he showed up 8 hours early for a meetup and a friend told him of his mistake. IMO not wasting a lot of time wondering where everyone is is useful.

2. Gabriel never says anything about not being able to remember what he's doing, and your implication that he's a moron is pretty ridiculous. Incidentally, a lot of people use twitter this way.

3. In the article itself he mentions that someone gave a bug report over twitter. Again, this is another common practice. Even if the author hasn't yet found any useful tweets (he has), he undoubtedly will in the future.

4. Your comment is ambiguous. Gabriel mentions that twitter is another tool for communicating with customers. Believe it or not, when people are interested in a product or service they like to get updates about it.

5. Gabriel doesn't use Twitter itself as an ice-breaker, but others' tweets. "Hey, nice to meet you. Yeah I started following you because of what you wrote about ninja turtles. I like ninja turtles too!"

6. ...

7. Completely inaccurate. Author wrote, "I don't really have that many, but with the amount I do have it is enough to get benefit when spreading news and links about my company or otherwise."
Yeah I should make different images. But check out the applications link in the page. It will point you to list of examples of the plugin.
I'm posting this only cause you asked, not to start flame war. Like I said don't want to convince you to my opinion (and it would be impossible).

...convince me that Twitter is more useful than harmful (especially to your time and self-assessment), I'd rather have 1 real-life friend and 1 real-life enemy tell me their opinion about my startup, than any sampling of random 1000 Twitter followers. I might prefer opinion of HN readers (smart guys here), but not the ranks of people reading Kutcher's tweets or things like fart-tweeting chairs. I tried reading the smartest folks, but even they struggle to tell some coherent thought in 140 chars. Then it turns out, those guys aren't really there, but rather ghostwriters. And Shaq. Who as great basketball player as he is - isn't exactly the mastermind. So, who else are Twitting? Oprah. Give me a break.

Twittering is just another way to passively entertain yourself, like TV. Just like TV remote - you have to press a few buttons occasionally and show goes on - a lot of fluff-fluff-fluff, then maybe something useful and then again 59 minutes 45 seconds of fluff. Hardly worth spending hour to go through fluff (commercials in TV case or what your "follower" ate for breakfast or who he's in petty war against who to reach 1M followers in case of Twitter). It's just not worth the time spent.

In my opinion - if you want opinion on your startup.. Add UserVoice. Do you want to promote it? Buy ads or do some smart marketing that doesn't require money. Using Twitter you're just following the herd which spends 99% of their time on useless reading of other peoples... let's call them.. thoughts.. or Re-Thhooughts in many cases.

Once again I remind you that this is my BELIEF and I couldn't convince you of that and you won't convince me of opposite using arguments you presented. So, let's just move our own ways.
>>> print "x: "+x
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects

To my mind, "x: "+x is ugly. Perl style "x: $x" makes more sense. But I don't speak python, so my opinion is meaningless.
One difference between VCs and Entrepreneurs
What's this, somebody created a Google Custom Search over the torrents tracked by thepiratebay?
Just to shed some light, this is a Google Custom Search (http://www.google.com/coop/cse/) tool someone's set up. As previously stated it's fairly redundant in the presence of TPB and other trackers as it doesn't actually track torrents.
I must admit I like having some time off too, away from all those distractions. But on the other hand, if I don't have my cellphone, emails, meetings, ... I often feel out of control because I don't know the status of issues.

I like to think there is a time for everything, and as said in the article, I think people with ADD sometimes just don't manage that time correctly. Of course I'm not saying ADD doesn't exist, but sometimes I do think it seems to be(come) a real buzzword for some people.

And it seems logical to me people tend to find it hard to be focused, we are living in a fast world, maybe sometimes too fast and demanding...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=568033
The Richard Wiseman color-changing card trick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE

is a good example of selective attention.
Rob May* wrote this three years ago about the same topic:

Is Concentration the New Competitive Advantage?: http://www.businesspundit.com/is-concentration-the-new-compe...

He goes onto saying how reading every Digg post, or looking at every new Web 2.0 startup is basically a complete waist of time.

You feel like you're actually learning something, but in reality the info you're learning is "junk" knowledge (unless you're a VC looking for an investment opportunity - but by the time it hits TechCrunch or Digg, it's probably too late to invest anyway).

*Rob no longer writes for BusinessPundit.com. He's at CoconutHeadsets.com now.
"goes off to check his twitter feed for something more interesting"

I think the entire point is, despite the already low bar this article has set, you won't find anything. When I used Twitter, I sure as hell never did.
Sadly I don't think we'll avoid major climate change. But on the other hand, the Sahara was green and full of lakes and rivers once.
Oh Ok I see. It appears (from the dearth of quoted text on the linked article) that they are running both a tracker _and_ a seed. The seeder is for their customers only, because then they don't have to pay for upstream access. The p2p connections stay within their network. They don't want to seed normally because they don't want to connect with non-customers, and being choosy like that would make them appear to be a bad peer. So they use this second tracker to inform their customers of this special seeder and of each other. Sounds like a win-win to me.
The Ins and Outs of Growing a Business
My first reaction upon seeing the headline was, "duh!"

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ill
I have the same problem, so I've had to do things to cope with it. Fortunately, I have an office with a door at my work now, and that helps tremendously. At home I have a room to work in where I can shut the door and not hear the TV. When I need to concentrate, I shut down the Twitter, E-mail, and IM clients, and any other things on my computer that might be distracting. I only run programs related to the task at hand.

I have also found that a daily time of quiet prayer and meditation is helpful. If you don't believe in prayer, some other kind of meditation will probably help, too. Lately I've been incorporating MP3s from pray-as-you-go.org, which are very well done short sessions of Ignatian guided meditation incorporating beautiful music.
> It has yet to be monetized.

Incorrect. It has yet to become profitable.
Right, torrentz.com has been around for a while they provide the search, and aggregate all the trackers found for the same torrent across different sites. However they don't host the trackers nor do they store any torrent files.

Torrent files in themselves are not illegal. They are simply pointers, its the trackers that are at fault. Trackers facilitate the ability to download illegal content, where torrents and a search engine don't in themselves, they just link to trackers.

On the same note... Go google :) I just find it funny.
This is very interesting, it shows there is much research to be done in this field.

A windmill is not just a windmill, if you see some can offer the same results with far less numbers it's twice as good since you don't need all the extra resources and maintenance!

Some people tend to forget that in order to create a windmill you ask a lot of nature too, so just placing a lot of them doesn't help, you have to place the correct one on the correct place.
First, I don't believe the article was meant to be persuasive. As the OP mentions, he's had people ask him about how he uses twitter and he wrote the article to answer that question. I don't understand why you've assumed a confrontational attitude from the get-go.

Second, this comment is more useful than your first. Even though it's not responding to anything in the actual article, you at least give your opinion and reasons for it. As opposed to writing, "THIS ISN'T USEFUL!!! COME ON!?" Your comment is also useful to me personally because I find twitter useful and seeing your objections to it has caused me to think about and clarify my reasons for appreciating twitter.