sfphotoarts

I wonder how skewed this community is. Within the HN world there is a healthy skepticism about the value of Twitter, yet at the same time support for it, and everyone claims to be getting value from the service.

Outside of this bubble what I hear is that FB subsumed all of Twitter's features a year or two ago and they have abandoned their twitter accounts. Of course this is just my experience and may not be representative in the bigger picture, but having worked on a project that analyzed the various hoses from Twitter what I found was that when you eliminate spam and filter out all the people that tweet less than one every couple of days, the actual number of people using the service (at least for lang=EN) was dramatically lower than the accepted numbers. Possibly the growth is outside of the English speaking world.

Of course there is all the hype around Twitter saving kidnapped children in China and being behind revolutions in the Middle East, but I suspect these are news stories without much substance. Given that Egypt is 165 and China 105 in world literacy ranking (CIA world fact book) I seriously doubt that Twitter plays a role anywhere close to word-of-mouth communications.

That said, who knows what it's worth. If Twitter had come up with the "Like" idea and integrated that into its service before FB did then I might agree with the valuation, but in this economy he who holds the most ad-centric data, and who garners the most user eyeballs and time has the most potential to monetize. And right now that's FB.

most blogs are database backed. this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699780) had promise but it seems to have been both abandoned and gone.

I can write one obviously, but I was hoping to find something that did the layout like pen.io does. Jekyll is close when I looked at it. Maybe I should revisit.

I like this, however, I'd rather this be something I could deploy privately on my own web hosting. I've been looking for a simple cms system when I write plain text files and something like this generate all the pagination, layout and so forth.

first we have to come to some kind of consensus about what is happy. It's not easy to define or all agree on what happiness means.

I work at Oracle and one of the things that took me by surprise when I joined (besides that the coffee in startups is usually much better) was how happy people are. People walk around in small groups laughing and smiling, taking about their projects. I can't talk for everyone, but coming from startups for a long while where happiness is confused with being idle (you're smiling, stop that and code) I am pleasantly surprised at the environment.

I want role models that advance ideas, rather than caring too much about how happy they are. Their ideas are the public side of their persona, the part that interests me, their personal mental well being I leave to them. Was Picasso happy? (Maybe when he had Brigitte Bardot in his studio) - but he still took the art world by storm with pieces like Demoiselles d’Avignon. Was Salk happy, maybe, but a lot of kids born around 1955. I really don't care about rich or famous, but give me role models that do something meaningful.

after watching the video I don't see anything you do that google chat doesn't and quite a lot of the reverse. I wish you all the best but the reason you're having difficulty in differentiation perception is because the products are all very similar.

Having build a chat system, the real problems don't start until you have scale. I'd hate to be using this in a real work environment only to have it fall over when there's a lot of users. Chat is the only time I've ever had to write Erlang code.

who'd have thought that by now, email clients are not a done-deal. It's awesome to see people still bringing out thick mail clients and people liking them. A few years back everyone rushed to move apps to the web for no-install and no-version problems, now we seem to be swinging back to thick-clients, until people once again realize the challenges of such. As the landscape changes and software distribution improves (for example the app store) it once again opens up the door to new clients.

why?

the readability of many modern pages is considerably improved over plain text.

that's because 'online' doesn't do much selective filtering. Lets say you go the symphony (of the orchestral type, not the framework) and meet some boys. You are selecting, let's say you go a coffee shop in the Mission, or Lower Haight, again you are selecting. Sitting in Dolores park on a sunny sunday afternoon automatically selects certain demographics. When you look for boys or girls online you use primitive criteria for selection which results in poor matching. Facebook is a much better dating site because groups are more organic, formed by real people coming together around common values.

I am rather surprised that Julia has any problems meeting boys, I'm sure she could just sit in a coffee shop in the Mission with a laptop (preferably with a few stickers, including the obligatory CC) and be approached by decent young men all day.

doesn't this mean though that you'd have to keep them off the internet in general? It's not like (no pun intended) Facebook is the only forum for expressing one's opinions.

I think the challenge here is remembering this when I next want to create a survey, not something I have any immediate need for.

this misses the point, if you hard-code the result then still the other languages are more concise.

I don't have facebook so sadly cannot play, my girlfriend does but I don't see any upside is showing this to her :)

from reading how it works, it seems that it might be a good idea to offer some hints to bias the match, possibly with location or something that doesn't identify you but hints at you. 'Someone in your state adores you...' that kind of thing. Find something in common, analyze 'likes' for example. 'Someone who also liked Twilight adores you...'

"one time a woman asked me to troubleshoot her connectivity issues. Sorry, lady, but I’m trying to work here."

I stopped reading at that point.

What is the justification for believing this? What should we understand? I don't think anyone can really understand fads, its like why is one song so catchy and others not, quantifying that is very difficult. Why should facebook win out currently over the other social networks is an interesting study point,m but I fail to see why we should study facebook if that was your point.

you're not measuring how busy a place is, but rather matching demographics between foursquare users and the various museums.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that foursquare check-in's is a very poor proxy for this kind of venue. For bars/clubs and coffee shops maybe, but you're measuring with the wrong stick. Having said that, it does seem to confirm common sense (that most places are busiest on the weekends and mid-week is quiet).

Is the engineer that discussed this still an employee I wonder....

Although the article doesn't really reveal anything that any person with reasonable skill in the art of clustering, machine learning et al would not easily guess.

wow, if they didn't come from such big companies I doubt anyone would pay the slightest attention, the idea alone makes me want to yawn, then I started watching the video and gave up.

How many times have people come up with these super new way to make people collaborate better, only to find that it doesn't work. The last innovation in this field that made any real impact on team collaboration was in the 70's - email.

I hate to make such a banal comment, but when I see things like this I cannot wait to redesign my website and use this ultra-cool technologies. After programming for 25 years I am grateful to this plugin and the developer(s) for the excitement that playing with the demo just gave me. Buried under all those years of coding standards this rekindled some of the feelings from the kid in me that would eagerly look forward to the next issue of E.T.I. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_Today_International....

I don't believe this was OT, the poster made it clear how it related to the article; that the BBC has an obligation to their funders (the British taxpayers.)

Does it matter? Isn't the point to read these ideas and to as with all good ideas they get told in many forms. As with art movements, perspective shifts and whole genres of the arts move in unison, from performing arts to fine art. Unless as is the case with some ideas, the medium is the message, then the format used, be it a nice comfortable paperback or a think hardcover text is of no importance.

agreed on the current, and the new one seems broken.

I would assume because its very well insulated from above and warmed by the earth's core from below, but I'm not a geologist.

that jumped out at me too, but one has to think that a bunch of clearly dedicated scientists (I'd have gone home at -10) would have given thought to pumping CFC's into a pristine lake.

Let's hope so

I'm curious, having been away from Java for a few years, are there competing libraries that I should be aware of before using something like this?

why not automate this, have a job run when an article is submitted to cluster it and if the cosine similarity is very high to a previous submission in the past n months reject it? Seems pretty easy for such a traffic'd site.

Is that Gizzable that's overlaying the annoying box of like/vote tools making it difficult to actually read the page? There's no drag capability so it doesn't mask the content??

why would the founding team leave with $75m worth of Google stock on the table, all they have to do is show up for three more years.

Given a choice between a nice job at Google with a multi-million dollar salary doing the thing you love with the resources and infrastructure of Google behind you vs going it alone, the choice seems (no matter what the terms) like a poor one. It's not like Path have any really ground breaking technology. How defensible really is the idea?

thank you - it was a good product, but sadly the company melted down, took something that worked and decided to spend a year re-writing it in COM; meanwhile portal sits like Yahoo! came along and eat their lunch. A disastrous CEO that turned down a huge exit opportunity was replaced with an equally disastrous one that spent most of his time worrying about what particular rain forest he wanted chopped down to have this desk made from.

I worked for one, Pointcast

what a bad name, it's hard to even search for them. Turning down $100m was insanity, and the friction between co-founders will very likely fester and be terminal for them.