skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter's API Terms of Service - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Terms-of-Service

Do not create a bot to promote mass following. Twitter enables users to find and connect with people. Mass following does not help users find interesting connections. Applications found to be promoting valueless mass-following or following-ponzi schemes will be promptly blacklisted. So please, spend your time developing something that helps users find people with interesting connections.
I agree with you, though I am not necessarily talking about "cutting corners", which to me implies slopiness. It's just that you can optimise for a certain environment of use, but if you don't realise that the software will be used 10 years from now, you don't worry about how the usage environment will change.

This isn't sloppiness, it's optimisation - as the old saying goes, the perfect race car is the one that falls apart 10 yards past the finishing line; if it lasts for longer it was overengineered. It's just that in software we don't know where the finish line is - or even if there is one.
Toyota's Robot running[VID]
EDIT: A simple proof to this would be to set your facebook profile to "In a relationship" and go out and add ten random beautiful women as friends. Do the same with "Single" and you will end with significantly lower amount of "accepted".
If the US replaced all of its welfare and re-distributional programs with a negative income tax (sales/estate/corporate/etc taxes would be scrapped as well), the US would be far less socialist than it is today.

There seems to be reasonable evidence that at least some quantity of 'welfare' is beneficial. If that's the case, then the negative income tax can provide that without all the bad distortions that traditional welfare/re-distributions (SS, unemployment insurance, etc) produce. (Alas, we can never escape the DWL of taxation, though).
Interesting analogy, but no.
Finally, some practical advice introvert to introvert.
Pistos1 would've realized it was a joke.
There is no well-known definitive book on the subject that can be understood by the average person.
From the article:

About a year-and-a-half after being laid off, she found herself doing almost exactly what she had done before, only this time for a Pratt contractor. She now earns $80,000 a year.

Ms. Carron said she was not familiar with other programming languages that are more broadly used, so she was lucky to have found a job working on the same project.

This begs the question of what she was doing in those 18 months. Even after 18 months of not using Ada (I assume) she'd be pretty rusty. Surely of all the professions mentioned, programmers have it easiest to update their skills.
Miles per gallon answers a question no one asks - you don't say "I have a gallon of gas, how far can I go?", you ask "I am going 40 miles, how much gas will it take?" MPG comparisons are based on two vehicles using the same amount of gas and seeing which will go farther, which clearly isn't how people think. Gal/100mi are based on cars driving the same distance and seeing which uses less gas, which is more applicable to real habits.

There's also an interesting study done by some guys at Duke (summarized at http://bit.ly/mYpFV) showing how GPM makes it much easier for people to grasp fuel savings than MPG does. Let's say I have two cars, each of which is driven 10K miles per year - not unreasonable for a suburban household. One of my cars gets 35MPG, and one gets 20MPG. I can replace the former with a 50MPG car, or the latter with a 30MPG - for differences of 15 and 10MPG respectively. most people would pick the former.

But in that case, the 15MPG increase would only save 85gal, whereas the 10MPG increase would save 160gal. If you flip the numbers, however, and consider the choices as Gallons per 100mi, it becomes much clearer:

MPG Gal/100mi Savings (gal/100mi) Savings (MPG)

35 2.85
50 2.00 0.85 gal/100mi 15

20 5.00
30 3.33 1.66 gal/100mi 10

The 20 -> 30MPG switch is empirically a better deal, all else equal (since we don't expect our driving habits to change with the new car). Gal/100mi sure makes it easier to see that, though.
Mobile VoIP, will it be disruptive?
Where does it say anything about Dreamit 09?
Ask HN: My site's popular. How would YOU monetise it?
Hey guys, the server bill's getting pretty big now. I'd like to start setting up some paid accounts pretty soon. Apart from crawling people more often, can you see any creative ways to give extra benefits to paid members? Any suggestions appreciated. :-)
Twitter is allowed to protect their copyright. It's a C&D. Not particularly interesting.
I am not sure that this is always correct. In my view, it really has to do with the industry involved and the state of the economy.

I've been layed off twice and both years are my two highest income years. Both lay offs occurred during a strong economy ('99 and '07) when tech jobs were not too hard to get.

Once the economy gets better again (which looks like it's happening), the tech market will come back and in my view, it should be stronger than ever. The big kick off will probably be the Facebook IPO.
Ok I see their "About us"
I've always assumed that there was a backdoor into all of the major Crypto algorithms anyways...
Accidental entrepreneurs a sign of the economy
Same here. I'm looking to replace my aging Dell Inspiron 8600, which is a 15.4" display with 1920x1200 matte finish display. A 15" Mac Book Pro is very tempting but I too wish they would offer a higher dot pitch. But my eyes are older and find myself increasing the font size in code as the day wears on. The alternate is to connect to a large desktop display when available.

Not having the option to be able to go to an insane dot pitch on the Mac Book Pro is helping to keep my wallet shut.
I was in the back seat with my seat belt strapped. And seat belts / air bags will not prevent serious injuries 100% of the time.
The sample size is >1: global warming through high CO2 has been observed on the planet Venus.

2 is not large enough for statistical averaging, though it can improve our confidence in our models.

Our model for radiation poisoning is pretty good, but mechanistically there's no way in that system to easily undo the damage of radiation.

If climate also lacks a path from state A to state B, the models will reflect it. That's a question answerable by a few supercomputer runs (if the models are correct).

Also, it's disingenuous to say that the sample size for climate modeling is 1. We have multiple samples, from multiple methodologies, of the global temperature and the global atmospheric CO2 throughout time. We also have multiple samples of experimental data confirming and quantifying CO2's contribution to the greenhouse effect.

No, we have precisely 1 sample: earth. We have another sample (Venus) in a vastly different region of parameter space. Multiple measurements of a single sample is not a substitute for multiple samples.

To do engineering on a system, you have to know nearly everything about how all of it works. To diagnose a single problem you can narrow down your knowledge a lot more and have much higher certainty.

We cannot conclude that current global warming trends are anthropogenic without excluding all other reasonable factors. Thus, the models must have control over those other factors.

If we had a larger sample (multiple earths, or multiple patients in your analogy), we wouldn't need this degree of control. But we don't have such a sample.

Incidentally, your analogy of dropping bombs on Berlin illustrates perfectly the use of an accurate model. We have accurate models of bombs and their effect on structures and vehicles. The accurate models make engineering (structural, in this case) possible, including the design of bomb-resistant buildings. The problem is now reduced to a simple question: which costs less, reducing the rate of bombing or building bomb-resistant buildings?
Hey guys, the server bill's getting pretty big now. I'd like to start setting up some paid accounts pretty soon. Apart from crawling people more often, can you see any creative ways to give extra benefits to paid members? Any suggestions appreciated. :-)
Perhaps I am not understanding the concept correctly, but this seems just like a linear additive - a distortion - to existing incomes, nothing more, for most people.

The only people for whom it would make a material difference would be folks that are otherwise completely indigent, homeless, etc., and that does hold a lot of appeal.

But it's not going to give every other category of society the freedom to say, not work jobs they hate. The lack of economic survival alternatives isn't the only thing that's keeping people at jobs that pay higher than subsistence wages.

So, it sounds like the following things would happen, among others -- good or bad. Am I completely off track here?

- For people who are indigent, homeless and/or completely unemployed, this would be a big help. However, it would also disincentivise taking any very low-wage job that pays comparably, as long as people who have 'moved up' by virtue of receiving basic income are content with that level of lifestyle.

- That would strip a great, great many service industries in this country - i.e. most fast food, a lot of retail - of their present sources of cheap unskilled labour, requiring them to pay a premium above Basic Income and thus drive up costs for them and everyone that consumes their products and services. It would also greatly injure the competitive position of those firms relative to foreign competitors that do not have a Basic Income requirement. Although the requirement to pay higher wages when operating in the US for those foreign competitors would mitigate that _somewhat_, it would still be a very, very significant competitive distortion that could affect their ability to expand into other markets vs. foreign competitors, etc.

- Other aspects of having to "compete" with Basic Income would create similar distortions elsewhere. It's effectively the same as raising minimum wage significantly; it would encourage more aggressive export of jobs out of the country, where Basic Income does not create a high compensation bar.

- For anyone making substantively above a Basic Income-level salary, it would just add $BASIC_INCOME to their salary, contributing to significant inflation and making just about everything less affordable to people who only receive Basic Income.

- There would be constant disagreement as to just what constitutes Basic Income and how much is really needed to subsist. There's not a lot of consensus as to just what exactly "subsistence" entails. Poor people in America (somewhat understandably) have a standard of "subsistence" that poor people in Third World countries could only aspire to.
That's not the most relevant Wikipedia link you could give. This is called the fundamental attribution error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Google shows parts of Arunachal Pradesh (India) in Chinese Language
Too late. Most of us already started. But we will take advise on how to grow profitable.
check out what google is doing with orkut:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JNgKNRSgm0

this is comparable to the facebook "like" feature, but goes a step beyond.
I was asked not to talk about their affiliation with DreamIt quite yet. :(
But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process.

I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?).

Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge.

//edit (to reply to this bit):
If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family

There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".
From a user's perspective, the suggestions have gotten much better over the last two years.

What I think Netflix needs to focus on now is its search. It really is horrid, especially when one considers that it has such a small corpus to index. For instance, a search for "biography scientist" has as its first result "Biography: Harry Potter Kids". On page 3 you get a result about "Biography: Earth" which is somewhat related, and almost to page four you get "Weird Science." There are plenty of biographical videos on Einstein, Netwon, Galileo but one just can't find them.
Knol is Google trying to Cuil Wikipedia
Will the standard Windows 7 wallpaper look rubbish on the screens of tomorrow?
Adsense would be a good place to start
I would say register with a site like Quantcast.com so you can publicly quantify popularity of your site. This gives bloggers and businesses easy access to your numbers. People like to talk with popular sites.

You might want to check out Chris Anderson's book on Free: the Future of a Radical Price as a good source for brainstorming business models.
I don't think you'd be able to get people to pay for premium features...what would they be anyways?
I do have 1 idea:
Sponsored tweet placement. Companies are probably willing to pay extra money for certain tweets to get special placement.

Besides that you should get retweets/replies working, i wanted to RT a few things and got put off by the coming soon box.
This study of the "Wedding Ring Effect" (abstract only) suggests otherwise:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/hn2ufdx4rruyllnc/

The results show that women do not find men signaling engagement, or being perceived as having a partner, more attractive or higher in socioeconomic status. Furthermore, signs of engagement did not influence the women’s reported willingness to engage in short-term or long-term relationships with the men.
The purpose of quality education is to avoid acquiring a skill that will get obsolete quickly.
Which of course may be the fundamental problem of the matter. It seems that Dawkins thinks so.
Sure, but the judge can hold you in contempt for anything. There was one judge who put his entire courtroom in jail because someone's phone rang and nobody admitted to it. He is no longer allowed to be a judge.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/a-judges-inexpl...

Anyway, this is why there exists deniable encryption. The example cases usually involve someone beating you with a rubber hose, but contempt is a much more realistic outcome. So you spend a day or to in jail, "decide to remember" your key, and everyone thinks you have done them a big favor. In reality your cache of bomb-making plans and maps of the white house are still several enctyped volumes deep. It looks like you were coerced into cooperating, but you actually didn't.

The contents of your mind are a bitch -- nobody knows them but you.

But really, in real life, the state would have to prove that you don't actually have an unformated drive containing random data. I have a few disks like this; they once contained useful data, but I since upgraded them, and now they are useless. They were overwritten with random data, but at one point had real data. Do I risk indefinite imprisonment for this? Hopefully not. (The government mandates that government agencies keep their unwanted disks in this state.)
Even for something as trivial as this, this is just one of those weird cases where you look around at the world, and want to yell, "what the hell is wrong with you people"?

I don't understand why anyone would own a glossy screen.
Most helpful thing I found is to ask ask people about themselves. A corollary is to avoid referring to "I" , "me", and so on. (Not always so easy of you've been spending a lot of time on your own, doing whatever drives you.)

Most folks a) like to talk about themselves (or their interests), and b) are flattered that someone is interested.
Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like "why did it fail?"

I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.

Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve.
You might want to check out the story behind HotOrNot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not

They were in a similar situation and according to Wikipedia, they sold in 2008 for a rumored $20 million. They started in 2000 and I believe they made a deal with their internet service to reduce cost.
Me too - using Gmail + Gears w/ Safari 4 Fluid app, and a dock badge 'inbox count' userscript. Google will tell you you can't install gears with safari 4 - but it works.
"The largest wage losses are typically for workers who had long tenures at their previous companies."

A small justification maybe for my tendency to always be switching companies, especially in the boom times. One, people are more likely to hire you when employed. Two, you force yourself to get a broader experience that makes you more valuable when times are tough.

Quit before you get fired
That's not really proof of this. Randomly friending someone of the opposite gender is usually interpreted as a creepy attempt to pursue someone. If they're in a relationship, that motive has to be incorrect. Maybe it's someone you know from somewhere, or someone who likes your work. In that mindset, accepting the request is far more likely.
How to Back Up Your Full-Size Flickr Images by Set
I'm being sued by Twitter
My understanding of Friedman's position was that the negative income tax was a politically viable (if unlikely) system that would be an improvement (more freedom, less socialism) over the social programs we currently have. Not that he thought the negative income tax was the "ideal".
Wouldn't the cluster have a certain minimum size to hold the index data? So it's not going to start at one server and scale up, it's going to start at hundreds.

But of course, I could be completely wrong, not knowing anything about how Google works.
So what happens if your hands (which you presumably use for programming) stop working and you are unable to do your job? Should you lose all your income, be kicked out of your house, and forced to beg for food? (And eventually get sick, not get medical care, and die at the age of 28?)

I wouldn't want that for you, and I wouldn't want that for myself.

Humans created a society for a reason, and it wasn't so that we could each keep everything we earn and have a slightly bigger flat-screen TV. The collective protects the individual from Bad Things that can be devastating for that individual, in exchange for a tiny bit of each individual's earnings. With that tiny bit, we can also build infrastructure that would be otherwise economically infeasible for a private entity to fun (or for each individual to build himself), but is beneficial to society at large. Roads, public transportation, the Internet, etc.

Assuming that everyone should live in isolation ignores basic human biology -- we are a social animal, and we need the collective.
One of my teachers freshman year was talking to the class about his friend, he would often start a conversation with strangers he met at bus stops (as an example) with a question like this: "What kind of music do you think you like?"
Now some people turned into interesting conversation, while others, sadly, told him to piss off. But the point is, it's an interesting way of how to get strangers to talk to you =]
Php Code Generator
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Interesting. Another study with a different finding. Now there is some scope for methodological discussion about how the data were gathered and interpreted.
> Across ten world regions, 57% of men and 35% of women indicated they had engaged in an attempt at mate poaching, … people who mate poach are more likely to be low in agreeableness and conscientiousness than those who do not.

Interestingly, it seems that while women prefer it, they do it a whole lot less than men. And that men that are in a relationship may be more attractive, but the women they will get will on average be less nice...
Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.

Yes. But there was probably too much corporate inertia to shut it down within forty-eight hours after it was opened to public posting, by which time it was a huge embarrassment.
Are you rejecting the social contract entirely?
How many people who work today would be content with simply subsisting on their stipend? Who would then pay taxes? Would the burden be too great for the workers that remained? Almost certainly, I think.
"Research on human preferences does show that women rate men as more desirable when they are surrounded by other women, compared to being alone or surrounded by other men. Conversely, men rate women as less desirable when they are surrounded by other men, compared to being alone or surrounded by other women."

In other words, men are undesirable in heterosexual culture.
So we conclude that, if you're a guy, your only hope is to find a hot bisexual girlfriend and then surround yourself by women that she likes.
That's unbelievable. However, it reminds me of an open platform something or another which invites developers to make applications which can be rejected for ridiculous reasons.
-I make that connection because it is absolutely ridiculous to have an api and then to on turn on people like that.
Hi Guys,

Yes bad choice of words 'sued' - threatened with legal action is a better choice of words, sorry first time being 'threatened with legal action so freaking out.

this isn't a case of "change the name" they are telling me to stop selling the software!!

So tweetlater, twollow, twollo etc etc Did they also receive the same email tonight?

You know as much as i do from the pdf.

As for the domain name - someone on the twitter dev list ran a quick search. They stopped counting at 21 names.

A quick Google search reveals...

twittercounter.com
twitterfall.com
twitter-friends.com
www.twitter.ca
www.tinytwitter.com
www.twitterbuttons.com
www.accessibletwitter.com
twitterfeed.com
twitterpatterns.com
www.twitterlocal.net
www.twitterbackgrounds.com
twittergallery.com
twitteranalyzer.com
whentwitterisdown.com
destroytwitter.com
blog.twittervotereport.com
twitter.pbworks.com
twitter.polldaddy.com
twitter.alltop.com
twitter.infinityward.com
twitter.grader.com

and the list goes on...

I'm open to all suggestion on how to handle this legally without costing money - lol i gave the application away for the first month, just started charging as had so many requests.

Would prefer not to stop using it/selling it as plenty of people are finding it beneficial.

Cheers,
Dean@MyTwitterButler.com
the "netscape.com's Jason Calacanis" was kind of a giveaway.
Uh, the linked document doesn't say he's being sued. It says they are going to cancel his API access if he doesn't do what they want.

But anyway, the part about demanding that he "stop ... offering techniques ... for others to aggressively or automatically follow" is scary. According to Twitter, you can't even tell people how to automatically follow someone? Frightening.
I don't know if "sued" is the right way to describe this, but demanding transfer of a domain name seems to go beyond a normal Cease & Desist to me. They ought to be able to rename and set up a redirect without further infringing on twitter's trademark.