skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what you have said is true (to sum extent, i think there are 3 demographics though not to)as i have seen people not within those 2 demographics you mentioned have no interest to use twitter, however those 2 demographics are very large. There are alot of people who are students and alot of businesses and people looking at connecting for monetary purposes.

The thing is, when people who do not fit into those demographics sees that it is possible to make money and easily communicate,it drives interest, attention and people not longer within those 2 demographics to try and give it ago. Some may be successful in achieving what they want some may not.

As for the third demographic, lots of celebrities use twitter and i know people who actually just signup to follow and get the latest (semi truthful news as they put it) through twitter. They have a client on their fone and when a twitter comes from kevin rudd, or oprah or whoever they check it, give it a read and get on with their lives never writing a tweet .. ever !

I wasnt a big fan before but after using it, i find it totally indispensable in connecting and finding out what is going on. Hell i clicked on this link through a twitter tweet from @newsycombinator :P
Exactly. It even installs using a documented (by Mozilla) API, hardly rouge. Nor it is hidden or activley malicios. It also happens to be far more secure than IE's ancient ActiveX support.
the "maybe" was for the "china" thing. But it is a big maybe. Here is why

AFAIK Google didn't hand over any user info to chinese authorities. They just merely censored the results. Between getting no access to google and having censored results, even if i was chinese I would have preferred getting the censored version.Why? because google is not used to find the censored topics. It is used more widely to get information on non censored topics. The loss of the world's biggest search engine would have been quite bad.

Also, google stood up to the US authorities when they demanded handing over user info while yahoo and MS happily handed it over.

So in my eyes, google has not screwed over its users or its partners. The biggest crime they may have committed is pulling the plug on some services ot letting some rot (feedburner). But those are free services and if it doesn't generate profit for them, they are right to pull the plug. In most of the cases they allowed the user enough time to get their data off the pulled service.

You can bash google for all you want but I think it is on very flimsy grounds.
I'd put a third category of people in your list.

There are people who have a lot of followers due to them having some form of celebrity. People like Jeff Atwood have talked about how due to their large number of followers they are able to get very high quality answers to questions that they have.

For some one just joining Twitter who doesn't have a "name" in the industry this type of question and answer usage is alot less useful.
Is that 6 "Ask HN" posts I'm unfairly holding back?

Nope. Not unless you're so desperate for up mods that you're going to start posting non-posts.
actually clicking any input prompts a registration form (with javascript enabled)
Evolution may write poor code, but it can accomplish some really cool stuff with it. The human brain, for example. If a programmer had managed to recreate the human brain in code, even if he did it in spaghetti-coded COBOL, people would want to have a look.

Also, evolution isn't always elegant, but it often is. Think of the symmetry and self-similarity found so often in nature.
To me, that's the appeal. You don't have to be unemployed to have 10 minutes a day in which to keep up, particularly when you weigh that 10 minutes spent reading Twitter against the amount of time it would take to maintain individual correspondences.

I'm not a Twitter user and this is perhaps one of the reasons I don't use it. Individual correspondence is important, and I don't think Twitter would be a good vehicle for the types of things that might be communicated in personal correspondence.

That said, it does has its purpose--perhaps I'd rather someone tweet a funny video, link, etc, etc, etc, rather than spamming their entire address book....
The very poor code I'm referring to is in the genotype (i.e., the DNA sequence). You can get an elegant phenotype (i.e., the resulting creature) from a very messy genotype.
The Economist: Open-source software in the recession
Yes. If you're asking that question, then Twitter is lost on you. For now.

It's like happening upon a pad of post-it notes. You either say "Sweet, I have a use for these," or you say "Hmm," and file it away somewhere.

Eventually, you may develop a need that is filled by little bits of paper with weak-sauce glue on the back, and remember about the post-it notes.

Likewise, you may eventually develop a need to episodically distribute short bits if information to a well-defined audience, and you might think "I could do this with Twitter. Or post-it notes and a cadre of flying monkeys."
AAA: The Amazing Awk Assembler by Henry Spencer
"If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Bert Hubert - DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/index.html
The presskit is very interesting to read, and actually has a taste of reason behind having a "Moon Colony."

http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/moon/moon_presskit.pdf
Ask HN: OpenFace - Facebook without privacy?
How long will it be before someone creates a popular browser plugin that when you view any online profile (twitter,facebook,myspace) it displays an unmoderated sidebar that anyone can comment on anonymously. Is it only a matter of time?

JuicyCampus -- even with an awful awful user experience -- went gangbusters. (I'm guessing the only reason they shut down was because they were not making enough money to pay the lawyers -- even though they would have won.)

It seems to me it has the potential to be very culturally disruptive -- to the point that there would be a lot of pressure to tweak the first amendment in order to ban the site.

Thoughts?
True, but the title is not meant to include a long description of the link, rather, just a title.
Google Wave and Open Science
Have you actually tried it? I don't really understand the "I don't have the time" argument, how much time does it take to type 140 characters?

Also, you could set something up to tweet automatically, just for fun.

The nice thing about twitter is that it is quite forgiving. You don't have to read everything, and you don't have to be always on.
Agree. I've only recently taken a look at live maps but I'm very impressed by the bird's eye feature.

I still use google maps as my default but I sometimes find myself switching.

That being said it's one thing liking a feature when you've had a chance to play with it yourself and quite another when all you've seen is a demo.
Great article.

But Ralph Nader with a slim-jim? Really?
Obama to create White House cybersecurity post
If some work isn't worthwhile, then doing it poorly won't matter in the long run. On the other hand, if it is worthwhile work, then doing it poorly is bad for you.
I have two suggestions that are somewhat contrary to your question.

First, learn to draw. I recommend a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. That and lots of practice.

Second, learn to produce and animate pixel art. You'll be surprised by the results you can get with the retro/nostalgia look. Google will find you plenty of tutorials.

While not 3d modeling, these approaches have low barriers to entry, and what you learn will help your future efforts artistically.
It is XML and XMPP, to say that it is evil would be redundant. A real pity, because the idea is quite neat.
192 lasers onto a pellet the size of a match head and press the “fire” button?
If you see things that way, then yes, DNA code is not very elegant or parsimonious. There are plenty of sequences that don't do anything (as far as we know).
Hallelujah, brother!
I, much like you, never found Twitter even slightly compelling. I even opened my own account and tried to get into it, but I couldn't and I canceled it shortly after.
It's been all over the news lately but I still can't find a real use of it. Not even for searching things.
I remember when Guy Kawasaki started with twitter ("god help me, I am on Twitter" or something like that - he had no idea, like nobody else had). Now he has 125,431 followers and apparently the ability to "kawaski" a site (as I learned from tweetingtoohard).

I think with > 100000 it really becomes a different game. A friend of mine would buy any CD that Veronica Belmont recommends in her Twitter stream. She has > 600000 followers. That is an economic factor.
Hi,

I am using HN to understand from (hopefully) other tech professionals if they have found a way to leverage Twitter. (And have read some good comments already in this thread.)

Twitter is very real-time, that is its power and a core part of its functionality.

So, your 6 generalised analogies on not having time for X misses the point.
That and the Indians gave his conquests a mythological spin, giving him a psychological advantage.
Hm, why not find something to do with the remaining cycles?
A cel shader is a technique for rendering 3d scenes. You still have to have your 3d models, which you might want to buy from http://www.3drt.com/ to get started. A more detailed explanation that should explain the theory to you is this: http://www.tjgalda.com/EducationAndTrain/Education%20and%20T...

Now, i dont think ou can write shaders in python, but you should be able to use glsl shaders in pygame. You shouldn't have to actually learn glsl for most common shaders, instead you can copy and paste from the internet! Example: http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glsl/index.php?toon3
Here's how writing (and other things) are supposed to work now that we have easy publishing on the web:

1. Publish your ideas early and often.
2. Have others debug your work.
3. Track the ongoing conversation around the idea.
4. Iterate.

That's how things should work, blogging in particular, but in practice people think differently about the medium. Many blogs are really bad, without commenters. But some people use blogging for what I'd consider essay writing.

Essays to me are about one person doing the thinking upfront and then publishing after they vetted it; the mistakes they make stay in their heads. In theory, an essay is could finish the issue at hand, but more often it doesn't. I think the best essays do close the issue they address.

I like essays -- I intend to write them myself -- but for a while I thought that they've become outmoded. Why let one person vet an idea in private, when it can be done publicly; it's much more efficient, when done right.

But there's still value in one person vetting they're own ideas before publishing. And some people are just better at creating "seeds" ideas to vet.

I like Greenspuns point about how mediums effect how people judge the veracity of an idea; I agree. There's certain ideas I don't bother posting because I don't believe anyone would believe it when expressed through a certain medium. Nobody would believe a new theory of quantum gravitation that first arrived as a forum post.
The way I described Twitter recently to someone I work with was, "Have you ever used IRC or a chat room as a backchannel during a conference? Twitter is like that but for the rest of life." In other words, if Twitter is lost you you, then you are lost on Twitter. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you don't know anyone who uses Twitter, but you're missing out if people are talking about you or what products and services you use and create.

Twitter has been relatively useful for me when I've asked questions I couldn't answer (or didn't have the time to research). I've also answered questions from friends and colleagues about things like citations for articles and recommendations for tools, restaurants and so on. This "social search" aspect makes Twitter too useful for me to stop using it, though sometimes I laugh about how ridiculous some uses of Twitter are.

I've connected my Twitter and Facebook accounts so that my Twitter posts are used as my Facebook status, and for some reason I get a lot more replies to my questions on Facebook.
ESR: Computer Language Trends in 2009
I think it's probably more like trying to understand machine code written by very short-sighted programmer, on an arcitecture that you're unfamiliar with, for which no documentation exists, and which you don't have access to for testing purposes.

I think that's an interesting problem, regardless of the quality of the code.
I don't think the OP was trolling. Maybe s/he is just not as familiar with HN or Twitter as you are? Regardless, I think your response is disproportionately hostile and fosters an ungenerous environment. I find it discouraging that such an unforgiving response would receive so many upvotes.
Use Qt with C++.

Advantages:

1. Solid, stable, well maintained, well tested.

2. Great documentation, a huge library of code to learn from.

3. Batteries included. Web, databases, scripting, everything is painless and simple. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and stuff like that.

4. It's C++, so it's wicked fast.

5. Even though it's C++, it's not as difficult as people think it is.

6. Qt Designer makes designing GUIs simple and fun.

7. Cross platform. If you take care not to tie your app to any Linux-only APIs, you can make your app work on Windows and OS X by simply recompiling it on these platforms.

Pick up "C++ GUI Programming With Qt 4" and dig right in.

Of course, if you wanted to write Windows-only code, I'd suggest C#. If you wanted to write Mac-only code, Cocoa would be the way to go. Nothing beats native.
I don't understand how it matters if it is a documented API. If they are installing something to other software that could have consequences for the user then they should inform the user IMO.
Evolution writes very poor code. So why is biology research rewarding?

Because biologists aren't looking at the code, but the product.

For example, I really liked NN 4.7. It was responsive and consistent. But the codebase was so poor, that they rewrote it - and nuked themselves. Joel on Software wrote an essay about how as a codebase evolves to cope with more and more special cases, it gets more complex and ugly. But that's because it needs to be (according to Joel).

In other words, no one cares about your code. They care about what it does. If it does something really cool and amazing, people will want to know how you did it. What it "does" can go beyond performance and features - what code does can include realizing a new user-interaction approach, or a new algorithm, or a new way to model something. Imagine the jury-rigged prototype of the first telephone, light-bulb, aeroplane - the slickness of the implementation just doesn't matter. The invention matters.

If, one day, we work out how DNA codes for a brain, we may be able to code it better. But what we lack is any idea of how to do it at all. Poor code that works is infinitely better and more cool than no idea.

This is why biologists might be interested in the poor code: How the hell did he do that?
First, know when "your spare time" is. After "completing" something (or just calling it quits for the day), go for it. Doesn't matter what gets "built". Just knowing you've done something enjoyable for yourself, whether it's tangible or not, is an accomplishment in itself. Second, if serious about building something others can benefit from, create that list...a plan in action...whatever you want to call it. Then you can measure your progress until it's DONE. Good luck.
In a production database!?
Not only that. Wolfram's attempt to take Godel's place in mathematics is contradicted by this answer, which is a self referential demonstration that the Wolfram axiomatic system (both the person and Alpha) cannot produce the genius of Godel, and is thus incomplete. Thus, Wolfram merely proves Godel's genius, via the original form of Godel's genius in the first place.

Basically, Wolfram is ingenious at proving his disingenuity.
So the installation of the extension occurs on the next run of Firefox and takes 8 minutes? That does really suck regardless of the whole imaging thing.
Gmail in real-time: Google does the Wave
> Sometimes you have to optimize for your development time first and product

> development goals, and leave the optimization till you get a bit of runway.

That's a typical way to postpone and fall into a trap. Not all optimizations take huge amounts of time. And certainly there are some architectural decisions you can take early on that can save you a lot of wasted time later. The most common is to prevent bottlenecks.

For example, it's not necessary to make a clustered DB from launch day but coding and managing the UI and middle-ware to be ready for a switch to clustered DB usually takes very little impact. If you don't do this and the site becomes successful, re-engineering your whole site to support a new DB is usually close to impossible or extremely expensive. The site ends up in the DB hardware feedback trap just like in the article.

Edit: format fix.
I think evolution writes "good enough" code, if I can put it that way.
It took me 40 seconds of staring at the title and wondering "Who is regular and why is he releasing matter?" before I could properly parse that title.
Ask HN: your favorite obscure Firefox extensions?
Working definition: anything that's not the first page of popular extensions.

Autocopy - automatically copy selected text to clipboard

Googlepedia - wikipedia results along with google searches

AutoPager - breaking my own rule, but this one's awesome
I'm not sure about his thesis, but I like his evidence. e.g.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend-to...

"Being poor is caring about your friends" (paraphrasing)
No, that's not what it "basically means".

Firstly, the incompleteness theorem (there's only one) is not about computation but about proofs; specifically that there are some things within an axiomatic system which are true which cannot be proven such within the system itself.

Secondly, this does not mean that these things are unprovable, period. For instance, Gödel showed that you can prove these things perfectly fine, you just have to use different system. But this system will have its own unprovable statements.

Thirdly, computability was Turing's domain, not Gödels, and has to do with the kinds of algorithms you can use to perform proofs, not the system the proof is for. For example: second-order logic (SOL) can prove things about first-order logic (FOL) that FOL cannot prove about itself, but both systems can by utilized by a universal turing machine.

Fourthly, there is no known thing that cannot be proven, period, which is obvious for us humans.
>"Who is regular and why is he releasing matter?"

Trolling or not, this is the funniest question I've read all week. This article hearkens back to a lesson lifted from The Cathedral and the Bazaar [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...], which was 'Release Early, Release Often'
I would expect military facilities and corporate headquarters have more security measures then locked doors. Still a very interesting article.
I was assuming in a modern "cloudy" setup, processing power and storage is all kind of fluent. Or if it isn't yet, might be worthwhile to make it so? They could set it up all with virtual machines and stuff?
Google promises not to sue you (or rather gives you a license so they can't sue you) for violating any of their patents while implementing the Wave Protocol. Unless you sue them.

Pretty standard for open specifications backed by large companies, I think.
Ask HN: How to create your own Wave server?
Upon reading briefly through the draft of Wave's protocol, it's apparent that XMPP Core is used for the server/proxy. I am a bit unfamiliar with XMPP, so I had a few unanswered questions.

Their protocol uses some custom iq/request, iq/delta, iq/error, etc. XML markups. What I'm interested in doing is setting up my own Wave server (independent of a client) and see if I can get a working system out of the draft.

So, does anyone have a good starting point for this project? I thought about djabberd (as it self-proclaims itself as extensible): http://www.danga.com/djabberd/
AS Number: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2072
Very nice idea. Could be a great way to keep contributors coming back to the site.
Looks like we Erlang people can remain as a cool underground movement.

Thank you ESR.
The article's more than 18 months old. So while its interesting its a bit dated. I'd like to know what Mr King thinks now and how he feels the short story has fared since '07.

My personal belief is that the short story, and maybe even the poem, is on the verge of a comeback based on the rise of the eBook in Kindle/iPhone format. I think soon we'll see business models whereby its reasonable for an author/poet to sell an individual short story or poem. And that people will pay to read them on their phone or eReader.

OTOH I'm biased since short form is the sweet spot for my textflows technology!
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/too-many-tabs-firefox-add-ons-t...

That's what i use to manage 50+ tabs. The list is missing firegestures & swifttabs.

links:
AutoCopy - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/383

Googlepedia - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2517

AutoPager - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925
That was my first parse as well. Did anybody get it right on the first try?
Check this out:

http://github.com/JackDanger/wave/tree/master
The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
Evolution writes excellent code, because it is understood perfectly by its intended audience.
Next time, try http://www.searchyc.com first.
You did not just gain credibility by saying "50 is too late for him to fix things".
Tabs Open Relative
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1956
I'm not sure what this has to do with privacy. If anything, anonymous trolling is more private, not less.

Web annotation has been done and discussed, as has anonymous "stupidity of crowds" decision making.
http://131.193.153.231/www/issues/issue4_10/margolis/index.h...
http://www.avantart.com/personal/nototv/saynototv.html
http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm

It seems to me it has the potential to be very culturally disruptive -- to the point that there would be a lot of pressure to tweak the first amendment in order to ban the site.

Somebody has a big ego. In reality, not enough people bother to install browser plugins to matter. Also, the first amendment may not be as strong as you think, with laws already in the works trying to stop cyber-bullying:
http://techliberation.com/?s=bullying
I'm fairly sure tab mix plus does that.
Abduction: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3408

Let's you take a picture of a part of your page by rearranging a square. Helps so you don't have to go to paint or photoshop to crop your recent screenshot.
Atari losses top $319 million
That looks like it's just a client for Wave. That can be pretty much anything (just has to interface with XMPP). The tricky part is having the server store+forward (if the client is online) each action sent by the other servers.
Did you know that Autocopy just changes "clipboard.autocopy" in about:config to true?