skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm what wikipedia calls a "Cold Y" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Y_Generation ), and the only time I ever visit twitter is when someone posts a link to a particular tweet from reddit or something. It just seems like such a time investment, and there are other things I'd prefer to do.
"Eating lunch at your desk is like landing on Free Parking and not taking the cash in the middle."

That's my new favourite quote!
It's "highly effective" in terms of the slacking. Not necessarily benefiting the company.
A more in-depth description can be found in Founders at Work.
Re GM: That's quite optimistic. Most of the money and effort with GM will go into making it a stable employer for as many as possible.

Re Tesla: Quite possibly true, but you shouldn't build infrastructure from scratch to build millions of cars. They should validate their business and market at 2000 units/yr and expand if it works.

Comparing the two, the GM money is to prevent downside, the Tesla is to capture upside. Both are valid reasons for investment and only hindsight will tell if either was a good bet.
GM will use government money to build a mass market car because that is what GM is in a position to do.

Tesla will use its millions to build a luxury car because that is what Tesla is in a position to do.

Tesla is not in a position to compete head-on with the Volt, because Tesla has almost none of the infrastructure that GM has. If Tesla tried to build a Volt competitor, it would fail. If, by some miracle, it succeeded in building a supply chain and manufacturing operation that could turn out hundreds of thousands of cars, it would quickly go out of business competing for a low-margin segment of the market against the largest automotive conglomerate in the world.

The point of Tesla isn't to provide you with a car. The point of Tesla is to develop the technology that other companies will use to provide you with cars later on down the road.

The Tesla Roadster and Model S are big red herrings.
Twitter appeals to the 30-50 demographic because they do not have the unlimited time it takes to deal with Facebook or MySpace. I'm 33 and have a Facebook account that I rarely ever use because it just takes too much effort. I don't want to spend hours buying virtual bumper stickers, uploading photos, or any of the other myriad things that people with lots of free time do on Facebook. I use Twitter as I can and it requires no more of me. Neither is necessarily better or worse, they are designed to do different things.
> A loan isn't exactly stealing.

A "govt loan" isn't exactly voluntary on behalf of taxpayers. You remember taxpayers - they're the folks who are actually putting up the money.
My opinion of his actions (which I think are pretty reprehensible, for the record) don't change the reality of the matter.

The guy beat the system and that will continue to be the truth of the matter unless TED acts (which remains to be seen).
I'm sorry, I'm not suggesting whether he's right or wrong. Like I said, it's entirely possible Musk is wrong, or lying.

What I'm saying is, looking at a pre-revenue startup and calling it "unprofitable" may be a true statement, but it's certainly not an interesting one.
Is there any meatier information on this topic?
If you look, In-Q-Tel has made over 150 investments. There is no better customer for 'Big Data' than 'Big Brother' :)
Not really. I post the occasional tweet (<1/day) and keep up with maybe three friends I have who only use Twitter, but the majority of my social networking is on Facebook.

I'm not impressed with the article's rationale for this, though: Twitter seems more likely to assist in creating a public "self-brand" than Facebook. Rather it seems that that people in my age group seem to like forming tighter, less public social networks. Facebook seems to be popular in my circle because status updates, photos, events, etc. are all aggregated to one place and tightly tied to a selected group of people we want to share with. My personal use-case is keeping in touch with college friends scattered across the country.

Also: most people I know have friends lists that max out in the 150-200 range, which is about what I'd expect for a personal network size. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to aim at a less personal, more public and wide-ranging network. Because of this Twitter seems a lot more useful for building a network, but Facebook is better for maintaining connections... which might be more important for the just-out-of-college crowd.
These are all good points. I never said I want TC coverage, just that I'm in a space where there is no TC, i.e. a relevant site that can send me lots of relevant traffic and that isn't afraid to link to me. People like to gripe about TC all the time, but it's done a lot of people a lot of good.

Your points about having a story are well-taken, too.

The reason why I'd like some coverage is because I spend my days calling up local businesses to talk about sponsoring us. None of them have heard of us. They don't care how many readers I have or don't have. If they haven't heard of me, it's not something they're interested in. Getting a write-up in the press would give me something to point to in that regard.
Thanks! :)

Yep, you're right that Freshlog can send a screenshot directly to external bug trackers; currently it supports 2, namely Lighthouseapp and Unfuddle.

I intentionally navigated to my app to click on the "Area Screenshot" button to take a screenshot for illustration purposes, however, what I normally do and recommend is to use Mac OS X's default screenshot short cut keys: CMD SHIFT 4 and just take a screenshot anywhere, and the upload screenshot HUD will appear.

I do quite a bit of web development too. While having an Firefox plugin is a neat idea, I'm considering developers who would need to take screenshots of bugs across different browsers too :)

Freshlog's website isn't a bug tracker actually, the local cocoa app is the one sending the screenshots to an external tracker.

And as for the point about threading, when someone replies to a screenshot with a screenshot, the reply gets logically indented. Maybe I should rephrase that part.

Thanks for your help comments! :)
Concerning Flash and HTML5
I'm again not sure what the win is with the government running sites like this, versus, you know, making sure the Internet keeps running so that private citizens can set up their own sites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRE...
Indeed. It's quite non-intuitive, but the naive assumption that the last digits are randomly distributed is simply wrong. Here is a V.I. Arnold essay about Benford's Law: http://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/arnold.pdf
I think calling all non-hobos (or all conservatives? I'm not really sure who he's so angry at here) Social Darwinists is a little extreme.

Social Darwinism is an ideology, not a process. We can make observations from a sociocultural evolution standpoint, but we can't really label all the winners in whatever situation as Social Darwinists. I think hardly anyone that votes the way they do does so from a Social Darwinist standpoint; it's more or less an extinct ideology in popular politics.

So I can say that Bob Republican votes against welfare because he's greedy. I can say that greed is an element of evolution. But I cannot say he's a Social Darwinist until he says something like "I'm voting this way so my race/class/gender lives, and theirs dies out."

Furthermore, calling someone a Social Darwinist is right up there with calling someone Hitler. Let's not water down the terminology by putting the label on some ignorant woman in a soup kitchen.
I find myself learning nothing (other than a few high profile startups/founders' anecdotes) after reading the entire article -- maybe someone else can teach me.
The same goes for Emacs and Vim, we should all throw them out as they are not intuitive to use and that they need a learning curve.
Performance Followup from NoSQL Meetup
Wow, talk about a misleading headline....
I suppose "Why Microsoft had to retool the Word UI" wouldn't sound as dramatic.
I don't but I'm from the Swedish generation Y that grew up with social networks that was light years ahead of MySpace. I actually created an account on Twitter as a result of an discussion on HN but it wasn't at all interesting or engaging.

Personally I find twittering too short to express much of anything worth reading creating an extremely high noise to signal ratio. I'm sure it's great for people who are truly interested in what their idol is doing throughout the day but I find it verry difficult to idolize.

Twitter to me feels like a reading IRC but you only get to read one line at a time and even though there's millions of people in the room almost everyone is engaged in broadcasting instead of conversations.

Although I must say I've enjoyed using the twitter search to see what people are engaged in. It's like sitting at a cafe and just observing people, blissful entertainment.

I use Facebook though.
While some may insist that once you delete your Facebook account, messages you've sent and are in others' inboxes, groups you have created, tagging on photos (actually do they, at least does the UI indicate who tagged?) should be deleted, I think it is actually reasonable to expect:

When I delete my account, any files (photos) I have uploaded are deleted. I don't care if I tagged someone in another photo which I didn't upload, it's their name there, not mine. If a message I sent is in someone's inbox, I obviously don't have any control (actually it depends, but let's take it this way).

It's like if I deleted my email account, I expect my inbox to be deleted, not an email I sent, which is in someone elses inbox.
I'm also a gen-y member and this is exactly the same way I use Twitter. I keep Facebook strictly limited to people I have met in person, face-to-face. On top of this I have most of my account locked down so that only friends I mark as "close" can see all of my information. For Twitter I don't mind following some popular developers, tech folks, etc. I also don't tweet that often - I usually just follow those that interest me.
Review my startup: Revizr.  You haven't seen this before.
Measuring & Optimizing for I/O: iostat, EBS and impact of architecture
Why It’s Essential to Monitor Your Brand Online
This is a company that said 6 months ago that they couldn't even do proper cost accounting. From what I've read about them in the past, this is one of the last companies I'd be giving hundreds of millions to.

On the other hand, they seem like they are very close to having an incredible product.
OK, makes sense. If it is triggered from Cmd-Shift-4 then that's good. I might use it. I don't do much development under OS X these days (I use Linux mostly).

We also use Mantis for our bugtracker, which kinda blows. We're considering switching; which bugtracker (of the two you support, or any other) would you recommend?
I was at the talk at TED and was blown away by what he said did. I spoke to some other folks at ITP and they said that he didn't actually train the crows in the way he very explicitly said he did during his TED talk.

He very clearly gave the impression that he had trained the crows following all the steps described in his talk.

I could be wrong about the details, but it certainly wasn't the NYT's fault. They reported it as he described it.
I wonder how privacy on the web would have been viewed if Twitter had become popular first. With Facebook, people expect their information to only be circulated among a small group of people (though practically this has been shown to be unrealistic).

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to thrive on people posting information for the whole public to see. IIRC you have to enable privacy settings yourself. Now, did people in my age group actually want the Facebook-style privacy setup from the start, or did Facebook influence people's expectations?
Fair enough. I agree in general principle (and the thought occurred to me as i was hitting "reply").

What i don't like is the presumption that homosexuals, or members of minority groups enjoy special favor under the law, when in many cases they do not.

I find more frustrating the fact that people seem to assume that it is law that creates discrimination, and that things would be fine if there were no laws which recognize discrimination.

But it's not the opinion being expressed that i find offensive. People are perfectly entitled to be wrong (and i will dispassionately argue against their incorrectness). What incenses me so, is the presumption, and assertion of opinion as fact. Trying to seize the grounds on which a discussion takes place (which could also be called "framing") is obnoxious/rude/etc and indicates either a serious lack of consideration or an attempt to argue in bad faith.

So i'm sorry to anyone who i pissed off (hee, half-hearted apology), yes the point could have been made w/o the ad hominem. I did however want to indicate my derision, beyond the fact that dude was wrong on the facts.
Ask HN: Please review our startup Euraeka.com
Euraeka.com is an artificial intelligence search discovery and recommendation engine for news. The site is entirely algorithmic but its ranking mechanisms are based on human preferences. Euraeka uses a massive machine learning model trained on the preferences of million of users about what news are worth reading. However, it also includes objective metrics of content quality based on natural language processing. The objective metrics are used to dampen down the propensity of the crowd to get swayed too much over controversial fads. In fact, we can measure controversial topics directly and you can use the sorting mechanism to get Controversial, Engaging or Popular news. One of the most important features of Euraeka is its deception detection mechanism. Again, using natural language processing techniques the site can detect deceptive intent in news articles. We think this feature is something long overdue in the news market - i.e. a barometer of lying essentially. Along the same lines the site can also detect political bias in news (liberal/conservative). Finally, the site also can learn a user's preferences and will recommend news based on those preferences.
Any feedback on features or user interface will be appreciated. More detailed info available at http://www,euraeka.com/faq
Participatory democracry perhaps? What if sites like these became the democracry? What if your vote on sites like these actually decided policy rather than simply informing your representatives about how you think? Then the government itself becomes an unnecessary middle man and the algorithm becomes the government.

"It may not sound like a revolution if government officials simply listen more to members of the public, but it’s not really that revolutionary if the opinions are then ignored by the bureaucrats. Ms. Noveck is clear that none of her efforts is meant to create a sort of direct democracy.

There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have, she said. But she said that the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account."

I don't see why we should stop short of direct democracy? If the technology allows it, why not?
Actually, and this maybe just be anecdotal evidence, many gen y people only use Facebook for maybe a few minutes at most each day. We get on, look for anything interesting, update status, post or reply to someone if needed, and that's it. I think only a portion of my contacts actually spend time with the more in-depth features such as managing pictures and using applications.
Maybe this'll help you understand - Musk is not getting venture capital, he's getting our money.
Nigerian web start-ups to watch
The Nike Experiment...the Power of Personal Metrics
Don't forget Marshall Mcluhan. He said tools and media were an extension of man as well.
This isn't a joke, But I thought 18-24 year olds were generation X?
'Warrior Gene' Linked To Gang Membership, Weapon Use
There's a problem when your software doesn't fit into an existing category. You have to simultaneously explain what it is and why it's good. Revizr reminds some people of Track Changes in Word, and other people of wikis. It's neither, but a whole new way for readers to communicate with writers.

No matter what you think of Revizr, I'd like to say thanks to the HN community for pointing me to so many useful places on the web. I'm also grateful to YC putting on Startup School '08 which gave me the confidence to work on this full-time.
me too I am surprised that bridge is so scarcely played among hackers. I find that learning a bidding system is not so different from learning a programming language.
A lot of people are just inherently contrarian. When something crosses a certain popularity threshhold, it's disqualified -- that simple. I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that it exists. I find that I'm that way about everything except the indispensible.
Clever British plug design.
AOL's AIM iPhone App Is Getting Awesome, Disruptive To AT&T
"What are the odds that Chris parlays this into a startup or a nice research position somewhere?"

Any research institution dumb enough to hire him based on work like that is probably not one worth working for. What he showed on stage was approximately the first 3 weeks of an undergrad computer vision project. Anyone who knows anything about AR knows that.
develop for android, then port to iphone/etc if you feel the market is there for your application and it is worth your time.

android has the least restrictive environment, and is taking off in a huge way. the market isn't quite there yet due to the small number of android handsets available for purchase (and stupid carrier exclusivities if you want to argue it) but the more people that hop on this bandwagon, the better it becomes for everyone.

also android as an OS was built for phones sure (google was trying to find a way to increase its mobile search market) but the low overhead and high level of customizability and the fact that its free is leading to installation on a myriad of other devices.

i can't wait till i have android running in my car, just bluetooth to it from my phone and be able to monitor all the internal systems, maybe even upload a new build that i downloaded from carforums last night to make it run more efficiently and shit.
No, Generation X usually refers to people who were born between about 1960 and 1980.
Yeah, I tried hard to word my comment to be the 'my company went under' kind of luck rather than the genetic lottery kind of luck, but I couldn't do it and be succinct.

If you see the quote I included, it's clear the author wants us to think the homeless are 'just like us,' but to me that seems dangerously counterproductive. If I were homeless, you could give me a laptop and wifi and I could get back on my feet. That won't help someone who's schizophrenic or drug-addicted.
Where do you get this data on millions of users?

The name is impossible to spell.

The misleading, engaging, etc filters are interesting, but kind of hand-wavy. It's not apparent why and how "Miami Heat's Dwyane Wade sues ex-business partner for libel" or "The SEVEN SECRETS of SMART PARENTS" are "misleading" (and compared to what?).

You need an information/interaction designer to go over the site and make the important things important. Right now nothing really catches the eye.

on /faq: "ulterior motives", not "alterior"

Good luck!
TripIt Goes Pro, Launches Premium Flight Monitoring And Alerts
If he indeed was just demo-ing something he built using existing libraries and a simple tutorial he found online ... that is a far cry from being able to claim he was demo-ing a piece of software he "wrote".
I make my own, though on occasion it's embarrassing to have sci-fi alien noises issuing from my pocket.
From the TED site, posted by one Matthew Trost:

I want to let everyone know that TED is working quickly to fix the missing acknowledgments.

We're speaking on the phone with Chris Hughes, who sends his sincere apologies for neglecting to mention FLARToolkit and Papervision3D on stage. When Chris showed us the software off stage at TED, we jumped at the chance to show it to our audience, and swooped him up to the stage after a very short prep time! He was also careful to mention that he based his project on the work of many others in his TED Blog interview.

This is such an astonishing development in software, and we want to make sure those who participated in it do not feel cheated. We're going to add prominent acknowledgments to the video and our blog posts so our audience is clear about the work and talent that went into the toolkits that were the basis for what Chris presented. If you have any questions or further suggestions, please contact me -- we're listening.

Sounds like a lot of noise about not much.

I'll side with Chris Hughes, against the overly pedantic, on this one. It's hard enough to say anything in 2 minutes. To say it right and without making slips is not something I'd expect of anyone other than a PR professional.

Before you say "but he clearly said that..." think of how much pressure you'd feel standing on the TED stage with just 2 minutes to make everyone go "Wow!". In those conditions, your brain will naturally be focused on something other than making sure everyone gets a mention.

Edit: for those pointing at the blog for evidence, I doubt Chris Hughes wrote that blog post himself. It was probably based on his talk and some quick chatter with the writer. So it's just an amplification of a slip.
Lighthouseapp has nice versioning of comments, check if that suits your needs well.

Unfuddle on the other hand has 200MB storage for their free accounts, they're pretty nice to use too, check out their plans:

http://unfuddle.com/about/tour/plans

Trac and FogBugz seem pretty popular too.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with any of these issue tracker companies
direct democracy = mob rule. if we had direct democracy in the united states, sept 12th: we would have nuked someone. if iraq had direct democracy after the american invasion, surely, a good part of the population would have been killed.
SitePoint Spins Off Website Marketplace As Flippa, Upsets Users
Ask HN: How to bulk transfer ~50 domains? (+ Registrar suggestions?)
So, I've been using GoDaddy without incident for about 6 or 7 years. About 2 months ago, my credit card was compromised, so I got a new CC number. I immediately updated all of domains at GoDaddy to use the new number (about 50 of them).

Today, I get an email from them saying that three of my domains have been canceled and I have to pay a redemption fee to get them back. I email support with a, "Uh, wtf guys?" and they say my CC was declined when they tried to auto-renew (wtf? their crappy backend told me that change that gone through!) and that I had a grace period but didn't renew -- I save all my emails and never got one from them about these domains (I get a ton of email from these guys, but often have noticed that it's sort of random -- some domains will generate an email when they auto-renew, some won't ... but whatever, it had never been a problem before).

So now I can't afford to stay with GoDaddy and risk losing a more important domain (like, railsforum.com), so I need to transfer to a more reliable registrar.

Two questions: 1. Any suggestions for registrars with competitive pricing, good support, and that don't suck? and 2. Bonus points if it is easy to transfer ~50 domains. It'll be a pain in the butt do have to do these each individually.

I have considered just opening a reseller account via Tucows OpenSRS and selling domains to myself. Seems like that is what Facebook does... anyone have any experience doing that?

Thanks!
It's not a permanent label for the age group... it was originally used to describe 18-24 year olds almost 20 years ago. This crap is pretty subjective but I would guess gen X is now in their mid-thirties.