Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/16/twitter-drop-dead <comment><USER2> This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them.

The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.

I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point.

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is _nothing_ preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).

<comment><USER3> Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for them. And Myspace was never big in non-English speaking markets.

Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.

App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!

EDIT 1: Grammar

EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.

<comment><USER4> >Twitter on the other hand offers good UX

Every time I go to twitter in a browser I want to punch whoever designed it in the face. It is by far and away the most annoying site I encounter on a daily basis, which is impressive given that all I want it to do is _display plaintext_.

<comment><USER5> So much this

I figure out they have 2 designers there, one really good and one that doesn't have the slightest idea of UX and design

Case in point: the way DMs are notified to the user. That's right, in the previous web version _it wasn't_. And this version is better, but not great

<comment><USER6> Doesn't it send you an email if you get DMs?

<comment><USER7> I've turned that off, because I tend to get notifications in my clients. There's no good Windows client yet though, so when I'm on my gaming machine and don't have my phone handy, I use the web client for tweeting, and I never notice DMs.

<comment><USER8> I like Echofon a lot. Their Windows client is essentially just their firefox plugin running as it's own app, but it's pretty good.

I especially like that I can sync all the tweets I've read between my Windows machine at work, my iPhone, and my Mac at home. I don't know of any other app that works for those 3 platforms and has syncing.

<comment><USER7> I'll give that a try, but I don't care much for Echofon on any other platforms.

There is a service called Tweetmarker (<http://tweetmarker.net>) which some clients are now using to flag your last-read location amongst other clients on other platforms (e.g. Osfoora on Mac and Tweetbot on iOS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5 years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple! It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or Pakistan as it is in New York or London.

Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple, geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012.

And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.

<comment><USER10> Would love to see a screenshot (or picture?) of that!

<comment><USER11> A short video clip would probably go viral on YouTube

<comment><USER12> Here you go: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM>

<comment><USER11> Love the graphics! Excellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am.

I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he will become our cheap (free) PR tube.

But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data stream".

Just my version/2c.

edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc. Bottom line: stay away!

<comment><USER14> Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.

<comment><USER15> Square and payment systems in general most certainly do have network effects. For instance, I don't have a Discover card because it's not worth the hassle of checking whether each merchant accepts it.

Network effects are the lion's share of the justification behind Square's Starbucks deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If Twitter's business is threatened by third-party apps, why not charge for an API license? I also can't quite understand why developers expect a free API from services like Twitter and then complain when something changes?

What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you) releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around "here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if someone could break it down.

<comment><USER17> I agree with you. Google's model is pretty good with most of their 25+ APIs having free tiers. Free is nice but being in a real business relationship feels better to me because it is more likely to be sustainable. Microsoft's API marketplace has the same solid sustainable feeling.

If a business idea requires free use of other people's services then think of another idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The large swath of discussion seems to be focusing on App Development, which is probably the hardest hit.

However, there's another area that has gotten me wondering, non-app, non- client based websites using the API, in reference to the Display Guidelines..er Rules.

This is the bit specifically.

"Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API"

So lets say that I go to GitHub and grab a little jQuery plugin to pull in my tweets on my personal portfolio. Does that also mean I have to make sure I include my own avatar, my username, Tweet actions, and twitter branding, among other things? What if those elements are unnecessary to the design or intention of what I'm doing on the site?

And then there's the fact that all of these jQuery plugins are going to have to start implementing authenticated access (if they weren't already, which many seem to not be.) I don't have access to data on the matter, but I would surmise that there's a significant number of personal and portfolio sites out there pulling in tweets that are either not authenticated, or are modifying the tweet display in some way. All the ones I've interacted with have settings for turning avatar display on or off, or unlinking hash tags or links, etc.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER19> From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp.

It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data.

It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root.

It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down.

Proof of concept: <https://nstatus.herokuapp.com>

Source: <https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi>

I wrote about the requirements of it here: <http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/>

edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.

<comment><USER20> Sounds like what you are after is buddycloud (<https://beta.buddycloud.org>), lets list its win points:

\- open-source \- open-standards \- free \- federated

Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish.

Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers (admission: I am on of these developers).

When you join up you can find me at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER21> This looks really interesting. Is there a page on the site somewhere that gives a high-level overview of what it is and how it works? The wiki has lots of technical details, but nothing I could find that you could email to a decisionmaker and say "you should read this."

<comment><USER22> /me nods. I'll write something up this weekend. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wouldn't have as much immediate issue with this if Twitter's own clients were acceptable - they are not. And this is an asinine move either way.

<comment> k-mcgrady Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?

<comment><USER24> The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!

<comment><USER25> Not really a valid reason. What is it about the client that needs to be updated?

<comment><USER26> Amusingly, it doesn't even use Twitter's own picture service for photos attachments which is a year old at this point. It still uses yfrog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see this ending well for them. Alienating the very developer base that helped them grow as a platform early on is a huge mistake.

As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.

<comment><USER28> But who is keeping app.net from doing the same thing once they killed Twitter and reached a size where they can say: Thanks for all your friends, now get off of our platform.

We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still able to communicate with one another.

A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth, Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced implementations like status.net and others alike.

The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unless platforms like Facbeook or Twitter make a significant amount of money from their devs, the way Microsoft or Apple does, telling their devs to go pound sand at some point is inevitable.

<comment><USER30> Facebook makes a lot of money from their devs.

<comment><USER31> Not nearly enough, by all accounts.

<comment><USER32> Zynga accounted for 15% of Facebook's revenue in Q1. Although Zynga's contribution declined compared to last year, payments and fees revenue (mostly from apps) doubled over last year to $186 million. That's not an insignificant amount.

Source: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of- faceboo...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-facebooks- revenue-in-q1-down-from-19-a-year-ago/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact.

Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you.

You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves.

The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.

<comment><USER34> Twitter had better take a long, hard look at Joel's old essay on Platforms: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html>

Declaring war on your third-party developers is shortsighted at best, fatal at worst.

<comment><USER35> Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer ecosystem.

Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than email apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.

<comment> eric-hu It seems to me that if Twitter were able to offer their API freely to devs at zero cost to themselves, they would do so.

Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's hosted on Github [1].

Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian. Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a better solution for their problems.

[1] <https://github.com/plans/> all plans offer 'unlimited public repos'

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla > bla bla...

Translation: so that we can charge even light API users.

This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.

<comment><USER38> At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.

<comment><USER39> If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What client devs have actually stopped development and abandoned/shut down their applications in response to Twitter's client TOS changes? I hear lots of griping and moaning it seems like lots of the major client players are developing nonetheless, which says to twitter "keep doing what you're doing."

</comment><comment><USER41> Developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how the ultimately destroy the business or livelihood of these developers.

Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform keep will prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but spread the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. They won't tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut.

They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a- lo...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lottery- and-60-of-developers-dont-break-even/)

[http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are- fail...](http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like- its-1999/)

I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without being dependent on them and that is the way to go.

Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own- bit...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.

<comment><USER43> _> It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages._

This maybe true for a lot of tweets. But my stream is filled with live updates of interesting stuff from around the world.

Twitter has been instrumental in getting news out of war zones for example.

<comment><USER44> Yeah I don't know why Twitter gets so much hate. It is similar to Reddit: What you get is what you subscribe to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wonder how they got the bright idea to advocate limiting the quadrant named "Consumer Engagement".

Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.

<comment><USER46> The blog post is actually annoyingly ambiguous - do they want to limit _all_ the stuff in the "consumer engagement" quadrant, or just the "traditional clients," while encouraging other sorts of "consumer engagement" (they mention, and don't make clear if they're in favor of or against, Favstar and Storify).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> can't say I blame them really. They have a product, they have the infrastructure to support it....why shouldn't they have right of first refusal on how to monetize the thing?

Seems to me that developers are getting all pissy because they can't have free reign to a platform that isn't even theirs. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Twitter doesn't care - they don't need the developers as early adopters anymore and it must be a fair old strain to keep the api infrastructure supporting them when the resources could be more profitably used building something else inside the company.

</comment><comment><USER43> Utter hypocrisy that they're discouraging third party clients, after having acquired one.

app.net suddenly looks more attractive.

<comment><USER48> app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5 years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does the same shit need to happen before people realize the only long-term solution?

<comment><USER49> The possible difference there is that app.net has both a business plan (sell access to post to the service) as well as a feedback model if they do something stupid (people will stop paying them).

<comment><USER48> Sure, that's a difference, but a rather incremental difference IMHO. Not nearly as big a difference as federation and open source, which is what we really need to break out of the walled gardens.

<comment><USER50> How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any. Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours.

The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage automatically?)

In an ideal world I agree, but that's not where we live.

<comment><USER48> There are many. Email is a particularly notable example. Luckily, the technology sector wasn't run by "entrepreneurs" back when email was invented, or we would have wound up with walled gardens there too (Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users and contacts can't be exported, etc).

<comment><USER50> Interesting point, although I don't consider email a platform like I do Facebook or Twitter. While there's no central database, there's a means of determining where the right server to talk to lives attached to the username.

We'd need some sort of DNS-for-handles in order to implement something similar for a new protocol, unless you want your handle tied to a domain (in which case you've just remade email with a RESTful API and a length limit)

<comment><USER48> Look into StatusNet, it's a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Twitter isn't very big in my circles, but of those that use it, _none_ of them use the website.

<comment><USER21> And this is why Twitter wants to kill the third-party clients. Twitter has decided that ads are going to be its revenue stream. The only way they can guarantee you see their ads is if you use the website or an official client. If nobody uses those, nobody sees the ads, so Twitter makes no revenue. So they have to get your friends onto the website or an official client to stay alive.

This logic assumes, of course, that Twitter's web app and official clients are good enough substitutes for the third-party clients that if the third parties go away people will use the official clients rather than just stop using Twitter altogether. Which remains to be seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Couldn't Twitter just arrange a price for "business" usage of their API? The main people getting affected by this are other clients or other intensive uses of their API, but those very people are most probably trying to make a profit themselves (HootSuite for example) so why not just charge for the API and so leave the restricted API for free use. Or am I missing the point?

</comment><comment><USER53> "In the "good" quadrants are bullshit terms like "Social CRM", "Social analytics", and "Social influence ranking"."

Not bullshit, these are demonstrably useful products for people who want to utilize new traffic sources in the interest of making money or growing their business.

"But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good."

ummm...ok? Utility is in the eye of the beholder...Twitter is a B2C product, so they're going to try and limit the number of competing services that are stealing B2C market share from them (why would you expect them to be ok with people using alternative Twitter apps instead of the official one?)

Now, Twitter is not a B2B company, so it makes sense that they would allow those types of services to continue. It's quite possible they're allowing B2B services that are utilizing the twitter platform to continue operating because they plan to acquire a few of them in the future to try and actually make a profit one day.

<comment><USER54> This must be the Twitter analog to a Voight-Kampff test, because "social CRM" and "social influence ranking" seem to me to be the fuel for spambots, mindless marketing accounts, and other general filth. The MBA behind this plan would probably stand outside his bakery demanding payment for people stealing smells.

<comment><USER55> It's fun to bash social media douchebaggery, but I've come to the conclusion that opting in to thinly-disguised ads might be the best use of Twitter. It's not good for conversations (see Branch) or for actual socializing. I guess Twitter is also kind of good for ranting, trolling, and bragging (see RKOI), but those might be even less productive than advertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Why wouldn't they just just charge heavy non-client API users and offer (cheap?) paid plans to users who want to use third party clients, leaving the rest to use an ad-supported web interface? This is the best solution long term which wouldn't really piss off anybody or nuke the ecosystem, while embracing the realities of running a business.

</comment><comment><USER57> So from the "fantastic" quadrant scheme, basically they don't want users (which they re-labelled as _consumers_ ) to actually use (engage with) the service, instead they want:

1\. "consumers" to be analyzed

2\. Companies to use the service

Well at least it's rather clear what the new and future values of Twitter are.

<comment><USER58> It's not that they don't want users to engage with the service, it's that they want as much control over that interaction as they can possibly get away with.

Cynically, the more garauntess they can give to the other three quadrants, the more money they can make from them.

More positively, things like requiring reply/retweet/follow buttons with embedded content encourages more interaction with the service.

If a (lazy) journalist makes up an article from collating a few tweets you're now encouraged to reply, retweet and interact with twitter right there rather than using the Facebook Connect comments system at the bottom of the page.

Their value to the other three quadrants is interactions. They're not stupid enough to intentionally reduce that, though one could argue they're not going about it the best way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Is this more evidence that they haven't completely figured out their own business model yet?

</comment><comment><USER60> I don't know if this is the worst thing that Twitter could have done, but it's probably fairly high up there. I wonder what people like Tapbot and thinking right now, they're grandfathered in for some very, very specific agreements but they know that one misstep and they'll end up out in the cold or paying a fortune.

But then what does that mean for a Tweetbot user like myself? Less incremental updates? One day the application breaks? Who knows, too early to tell.

I'm mostly surprised Twitter isn't just leveraging the fact they are pumping out that many requests and slipping ads or promoted tweets or promoted tweeters into the API stream and making cash off that. Seems like it'd make sense.

</comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. The writes that come from these third party apps (that enable messaging multiple people, or queuing/delaying tweets) might throw a wrench in their system if it doesn't follow the natural usage they've designed it for.

The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network, something that third party apps could interfere with.

<comment><USER58> > I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load.

Wouldn't an easier solution for that be to tighten the rate limiting for posting?

> The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they > eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network

I think that's pretty much it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Why couldn't Microblogging work like email (or Macroblogging)? Some people email through some provider or host their blogs at wordpress.com, others host their own. Big bloggers pay a lot for their infrastructure, amateuer bloggers get free blogs supported by ads.

Still not sure if Twitter isn't just blogs that include a friends list and a reader (kind of like Tumblr, which seems to be taking off, too...). And the short messages.

<comment><USER63> There is something like that, and it does work. But... does anyone know _more_ sites that support OStatus? I know of these:

<http://rstat.us/> <http://identi.ca/> <http://status.net/>

Which is nice, but not really much. Wouldn't it also make sense for, say, Wordpress or phpBB (or any and all other blogging and forum software, these are just examples), to also support OStatus? Everything that has content and updates, basically. Why not build OStatus apps instead of Twitter apps? Am I missing something?

Or are there other, similar standards/attempts? Because to be perfectly honest, I STILL haven't found the tutorial that just "tells me what to do" to go from offering an RSS feed to supporting OStatus, I'm kinda dense when it comes to these things. I need code examples :/ It can be pseudo-code, but it needs to be complete, instead of just a high-level verbal description ala "first you implement subhubbub, oh, and then there is salmon". I digress, but any and all hints would be appreciated. After all, it's for a good cause ^^

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Well it's not like alternatives don't exist. Of all the popular social media services, twitter has got to be one of the easiest to reimplement, it's only social inertia that keeps Twitter going. (Which says a lot about the power of social inertia.)

As usual what is needed is a decentralized approach, but that always takes time to catch on even if it can be made to work.

</comment><comment><USER65> People keep talking about Facebook and Myspace, but they lack(ed) full-on third-party clients, so what I'm wondering about is the LiveJournal comparison.

LiveJournal too had and has third-party clients. And though hardly popular in the English-speaking world these days, it's still going. But I don't think it has similar guidelines. So what's the comparison?

</comment><comment><USER66> _In the "good" quadrants are bullshit terms like "Social CRM", "Social analytics", and "Social influence ranking"_

Would he rather they put one-paragraph labels on each quadrant? Sometimes phrases that sound like MBA buzzwords (and might be MBA buzzwords) are actually useful too.

<comment><USER34> I think he'd rather Twitter take a firm, unchanging stance as to their policy toward third-party applications built on the Twitter-as-a-platform concept. The buzzword-filled doublespeak in their blog post serves only one purpose: to intimate change while keeping their future options open. Unfortunately, that makes their policies (current or otherwise) about as firm as a loaf of bread.

<comment><USER66> If so, he didn't express it that way. It just sounds like an unnecessary sideswipe.

Anyway, I think the matrix does make it more clear than just saying "we don't want 3rd party twitter clients...and some other stuff".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I always had the impression that bands and musicians made myspace what it was. Seriously, they seemed to have every single band you could think of. That in combination with the Google Search results deal (which still seems to be running) was a winner.

</comment><comment><USER68> Did anyone manage to extract API key from the official Twitter client?

</comment><comment><USER69> I wonder how Twitter's developers are feeling about these changes... Devs tend to be pro-openess, I imagine this to have a bitter taste for most of them.

</comment><comment><USER70> Are people missing the fact that _existing_ Twitter clients can keep their token allocation _and double it_? And new ones are limited to 100K only _by default_ (they can ask for more)?

Since when did people consider unlimited access to Twitter's API an unalienable right? It is _their_ platform, and _their_ API. It's also completely free.

Twitter is absolutely free to limit usage of their own API however they wish. If it means they want to change the rate limiting on their servers, I see no problem with that.

<comment><USER71> No one is arguing they aren't in their rights to do this. I mean sure a lot of people are indignant about the fact that Twitter became what it was through the ingenuity of the developer community, and without them Twitter would never have grown to its current size, but that's neither here nor there.

The bottom line is that Twitter's communications make it clear that they are grasping at straws for their profitability and that no developer is safe if they think you are capturing too much value. Obviously you always run a risk building on someone else's platform, but Twitter's direction and language around this would make any developer a _fool_ to start anything new on that platform.

<comment><USER70> But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Twitter has _always_ been grasping at straws for profitability, and they have _always_ been in control of their platform. Would you have _not_ been a fool to build something on Twitter last year? You would just be _betting_ that they wouldn't introduce limits in the future, vs. knowing those limits today.

<comment><USER71> Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now, but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has completely reversed that.

Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Now I am convinced that I will never depend 100% on a third party platform/API for a serious business.

</comment><comment><USER73> The reason: they found out that it's hard to make money when users can trivially strip out your ads.

</comment><comment><USER74> Twitter are being shits, but as a developer on the Twitter platform, what could you really expect?

</comment><comment><USER75> If app.net gets the userbase, i.e. the people I want to follow, i will be over there in a flash.

</comment><comment><USER76> Has anyone considered that twitter is actually pretty stupid?

</comment><comment><USER77> If I can't use Hootsuite, I can't use twitter.

<comment><USER78> enterprise clients was one of the things in the 'good quadrants'. I'd assume hootsuite may well fit that description.

<comment><USER77> Hope so.. even if they have a high follower count

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> The writing is on the wall though; Kinda has been for a while. I think this is why App.Net might actually get some traction. People will move when that's where all the cool features are, and none of the crappy ads. Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER80> This is why I don't base my entire business on someone else's platform. They could make one little change and destroy your entire business overnight.

</comment><comment><USER81> I wonder if twitter have a $50 app.net account?

</comment><comment><USER82> Grunter owns Twitter</comment>


Do you really need a tablet? - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/26/do-you-really-need-a-tablet-in-2018/ <comment><USER3> It's always interesting to read these articles. As is often the case, there are some good points and some silliness for the sake of an interesting narrative. However there's actually a much more interesting story in there.

Yes global tablet sales are half PC sales, but it includes detachables and convertibles of which only a small fraction are used regularly as tablets. Probably only two thirds of these 'tablets' are slates or see regular use in tablet mode.

Meanwhile those PC sales include a ton of laptops. IMHO a much more interesting contract is a direct slate to laptop comparison but that's hard to tease out of the press releases and summaries of the data. It odes look like overall laptop sales probably exceed tablet sales by about double though.

Looking at Apple though, we see the opposite story. They sell significantly more than twice as many iPads compared to Macs. No wonder they are doubling down on pro features for the iPad to prop up the ASP, but they're also aggressive at the low end with an entry level price at $329 including pencil support. I really don't think they see the iPad as being a small niche. For them this is a diverse and differentiated market segment.

</comment><comment><USER4> We hardly ever use our iPad's anymore - kids use the newest one (old one is unusable except for Netflix) to stream YouTube and use Facetime (gaming chat) and not much else. Bought them Kindles last year, can't remember the last time they last used them. I started using one as an eBook reader which given their lack of power, is basically all they're good for. Wife has one of those jumbo iPhones so she doesn't require a larger device.

I expected the iPad to revolutionize computing, and interfaces - <USER2> it ended up being a "second-class" device.

<comment><USER3> I use mine like crazy, but it's true our kids use their phones more than the tablets.

I think the numbers don't bear out the surface analysis here though. See my other comment, but basically the story for tablets generally is not the same as the story for Apple. High powered pro iPads with advanced features continue to do well, and those can't all be going to new users that don't realise how little they will end up using them. I went from a 6.5" iPhone to a 5.5" because it's much handier and an iPad is a better larger format device. Larger phones have killed the Mini though.</comment></comment>


Nutrients for better thinking (google tech talk) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PA-buwI3q4&feature=sub

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised this didn't get more discussion. Why not?</comment>


Fixing HTML Widows - <AUTHOR> http://thatsmyfrontend.com/fixing-html-widows/ <comment><USER2> > best non-back-end solution ... It's probably best to fix these before they > even get to the browser.

Sure. But if you want to do this before "they even get to the browser", it's _not_ going to be a "non-back-end solution". Anything that happens before your content gets to the browser is back-end by definition.

If you control the blogging software and/or the template, it would be trivial to replace the last space with   when rendering the page. Good ol' string manipulation, maybe a regexp or two. No need for JavaScript. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody already wrote a WordPress plugin to do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Anything that happens before your content gets to the browser is back-end by > definition.

Huh? I didn't think that was in question.

> If you control the blogging software and/or the template, it would be > trivial to replace the last space with   when rendering the page.

No disagreements here.

> I wouldn't be surprised if somebody already wrote a WordPress plugin to do > this

I'm sure there is too[1].

[1] [http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp- typography/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-typography/)</comment></comment>


Monetary Policy Is the Root Cause of the Millennials' Struggle - <AUTHOR> https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/monetary-policy-is-the-root-cause-of-the-millennials-struggle <comment><USER2> I think this gets a lot right, but it's poorly reasoned.

For example, the author talks about a "massive labor supply shock", but doesn't really address why this massive increase in labor supply wasn't offset by an equivalent increase in demand for labor. That's crucial. Otherwise, the labor supply shock would not put downward pressure on wages.

He also mentions the effect of floating exchange rates but doesn't bother to write even a single sentence on why that's directly relevant (maybe because it increases global competition driving down wages and driving up expected profits? I honestly don't know).

The author also conflates asset inflation with consumer inflation, implying that moderate consumer inflation somehow helps the rich at the expense of everyone else, when in fact, it's just the opposite.

In general, I would say that monetary stimulus does increase inequality, but fiscal stimulus can have the opposite effect.

However, the author mysteriously doesn't question why governments have preferred monetary stimulus over fiscal stimulus. That would be far more revealing.

This analysis is superficial at best. It gets enough right to be mildly interesting, but misses some pretty key points.

Nice to have a reminder why I don't waste my time reading financial analysis newsletters.

<comment><USER3> >implying that moderate consumer inflation somehow helps the rich at the expense of everyone else, when in fact, it's just the opposite.

it is?

so: Moderate consumer inflation helps 'everyone else' at the expense of 'the rich?'

How?

I always figured:

1\. inflating the money supply[0] has a usual consequence of price inflation[1].

2\. rising prices disproportionately affects the poor who must spend a greater percentage of their income on needed goods.

\--- to sum: Monetary Stimulus = highly regressive tax \---

[0] "monetary stimulus"

[1] assets and consumer goods

 _edited_ : formatting

<comment><USER4> > rising prices disproportionately affects the poor who must spend a greater > percentage of their income on needed goods.

Inflation has a cause, and often that cause is beneficial to the working class. For instance, a rise in the minimum wage or increased workers' union power would increase prices, and disproportionately benefit the poor. If assets don't increase in value, inflation erodes the wealth of the investor class.

<comment><USER5> > _Inflation has a cause, and often that cause is beneficial to the working > class_

While what you are saying might be applicable at other times, it does not follow that inflation can only be caused by things good for the working class.

Current inflation seems to be the result of an ongoing housing bubble, and other mandatory finance-based expenses. This is decidedly _bad_ for the working class, or really everybody who doesn't already own the inflating assets.

This inflation also seems like the direct result of the overt policy to erase the natural deflation of manufacturing and technology to keep everyone working "full time", when human labor is needed less and less.

<comment><USER4> > This inflation also seems like the direct result of the overt policy to > erase the natural deflation of manufacturing and technology to keep everyone > working "full time", when human labor is needed less and less.

A low minimum wage combined with in-work welfare benefits essentially subsidises labour for employers, and is deflationary. Inflation would be naturally higher if not for such government policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Short version of the argument:

The constant low (but steady) inflation that we now see as normal under the 2% inflation targeting in a major contributor to the significant rise in prices for interest-rate sensitive assets. (Interesting tangent: John Taylor on why he selected 2% as a target: [https://economicsone.com/2018/01/09/the-feds- inflation-targe...](https://economicsone.com/2018/01/09/the-feds-inflation- target-and-policy-rules/) )

<comment><USER6> Except inflation is actually significantly higher the basket is just poorly assembled and exclude major drivers like food gas real rent and most importantly medical costs

<comment><USER7> I am curious what inflation would be with universal healthcare, a healthy amount of affordable housing, primarily renewables for energy, and EVs negating the need for gas/oil. It feels like central banks are going to lose against technology deflation, but I'm not an economist so I can't say for sure.

<comment><USER3> I suppose it depends on how those programs are funded/achieved. If they are funded via something that acts as monetary stimulus (just print the money to pay for it) then I imagine there would be a heavy burden of resulting inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Volatility works out for people who save (who park capital in liquid assets that aren't doing work in order to have wheat for the eventual famine). These guys. They save, short like heck when the market is falling, and swoop in to save the day. What a great time to be selling 0% loans.

Personal Savings Rate (PSR) stratified by greatest generation and not greatest generation is also relevant. Are _relatively_ fixed living expenses higher now? Yes. Is _my generation_ just blowing what they could invest into interest-bearing investments on unnecessary stuff from Amazon? Yes. And expensive meals and drinks.

How have corporate profits and wages changed?

In their day, you put you gosh-danged money aside. For later. So that you have money later.

And that is why you should buy my book, entitled: "Invest in things with long term returns: don't buy shtuff you don't f need, save for tomorrow; and other financial advice"

Which brings me to: the cost of college textbooks and a college education in terms of average hourly wages.

By the way, over the longer term, index funds are likely to outperform funds. Gold may be likely to outperform the stock market. And, over the recent term -- this is for all you suckers out there -- cryptocurrencies have outperformed all stock and commodities markets. How much total wealth is being created on an annual basis here?

Payday loans have something like 300% APY.

How does 2% inflation affect trade when other central banking cabals haven't chosen the same target? "Devaluation"! "Treachery"!

</comment><comment><USER9> Kinda.

It's true that monetary policy is pushing up asset prices, so that while there is little to no inflation in consumer goods and wages, the real costs of education and housing have increased.

This is kinda like a pincer movement on the well being of the millenial generation.

That being said, being part of a depression isn't that great for welfare either.

At the moment, there just aren't many credible alternatives to 'zero interest rates forever' monetary policy, and so the phenomena described in this article is likely to get worse before it gets better.

</comment><comment><USER10> > This constant inflation helps to explain much of the rising inequality in > the United States, as well as the rising costs for interest-rate-sensitive > assets like education and housing.

This goes against my current understanding of inflation. I thought that high inflation benefits _borrowers_ (ie not the upper class) because it reduces the effective interest rate of loans. Is this taking that a step further and saying that the reduced cost of borrowing money actually increases asset prices because of inflated demand, resulting in increased wealth for asset- holders and unobtainable prices for asset-purchasers?

<comment><USER11> It only benefits borrowers with outstanding loans, created prior to the inflationary period. Most of what would be considered the millennial generation most likely didn't buy houses and such prior to the recession and the start of quantitative easing etc.

<comment><USER12> s/housing/college/

Millennials would benefit from higher inflation, so long as that inflation was reflected in wages.

<comment><USER3> wages seem to be the last thing that rise with general inflation, and as such don't rise as much as other prices, especially the ones mentioned: housing, schooling.

I think the data bears this out, looking at 'real wages' vs inflation-adjusted cost of housing/schooling.

I could see how other sorts of stimulus would be preferable in this case though. All depends on who gets the benefit of spending new money on old prices.

Going back a comment, it depends on if you got into the loan (school, house) before the inflation. Or locked in a low rate. Always nice to pay back money that's worth much less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's worth pointing out that concurrently with the breakdown of Bretton Woods agreements were the OPEC oil price hikes. The change in price of energy contributed a huge amount to the change in price of everything else.

In addition, in the US, we had the "guns and butter" years of the Great Society and the Vietnam war. One can only pump so much fiscal stimulus into an economy before one gets inflation.

All these things mattered.

</comment><comment><USER14> The USA benefited economically by taking over from Great Britain & France control of world trade, then economically subjugated the other countries involved in the agreement. It was going to break down eventually. The fact that Bretton Woods lasted as long as it did is rather impressive. The USA was the only country to benefit from the agreement. It was only begrudgingly signed by the other participates.

<comment><USER15> Bretton Woods ended in 1971.

Edit: More info: [https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm](https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a massive number of boomers who saved a big ol' pile of money. You can't save money without someone else willing to borrow it and they still want it to be worth something when they go to retire. They are a large voting block so they pushed policies to make that happen.

My guess is that boomers on the tail end are going to get screwed when they no longer have the political power to support those policies and the millennials cast off the yoke but the boomers on the leading edge will do fantastic.</comment>


Developers, help review this article - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/posts/review/5718cb9cf0b39a120087aec3 <comment><USER2> From the guidelines:

> _In Submissions: [...] Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is > misleading or linkbait._

The original title is: "The easy way to integrate Stripe payments in your app, website or elsewhere". I'd reduce it to "How to integrate Stripe payments in your app or website.".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. Makes sense. Would you be open to rate/review it on Airpair?</comment></comment>


Surprising properties of floating point computations - <AUTHOR> http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/28/14/29/PDF/floating-point-article.pdf

<comment><USER2> Summary: Don't expect floating-point computations to be eaxctly reproducable down to the last digit, even within the theoretical bounds of precision guaranteed by IEEE 754, mainly because there is leeway in mapping language constructs to hardware operations, and thus compiler optimizations can cause different behaviour for apparently identical operations.</comment>


ESNC2041217 Critical Security Vulnerability in PwC ACE Software for SAP Security - <AUTHOR> https://www.esnc.de/security-advisories/vulnerability-in-pwc-ace-for-sap-security/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5i6jag/pwc_sends_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5i6jag/pwc_sends_legal_threats_to_security_researchers/)</comment>


Lazarus Lake, the Man Behind the Barkley Marathons - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2392166/barkely-marathons-lazarus-lake <comment><USER2> They're running right now if that's not obvious; the best way I know of to follow along is [https://twitter.com/keithdunn](https://twitter.com/keithdunn) (includes bonus kitten/puppy content, but mainly it's blow-by-blow coverage of the carnage unfolding)

<comment><USER3> Yep and only one person left in the run. He's on lap 4 of 5 which he has to finish by 9:23a

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/47040763](https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/47040763) is related, via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530092).

Also, from 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14026697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14026697)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14873639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14873639)

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember watching this on netflix a while back, [https://www.netflix.com/title/80076413](https://www.netflix.com/title/80076413)

It was like 75% failed the first day.

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing this article leaves out about Laz is that he is a fantastic writer. I relish his race reports and updates. But sometimes he writes about other events. Here's a taste:

her spot

if there is one thing you relish as a coach, it is leaving your players with memories. sure, playing ball is not the most important thing in life. it is a small piece of a life.

for the kids who play it seems much larger than it is. because their life is yet short. the many years, the many important moments of adulthood those are still in the future. scarcely even imagined. playing ball is the first thing they have that is entirely their own. their place is not made for them by their parents. it is something they have to do for themselves.

i used to think that it was a good thing to try to get every kid that one big moment. that one at bat. that one free throw. that one moment where everything was on the line and it all depended on them.

i learned that was not what every player relishes. most want to play a role, to be a part. to make big plays and take part in big wins.but that split second, where everything rides on you...

and you know it...

that is not for everyone. as a coach you must know your players. and ask of them only what they have to give.

the most important thing as a coach is to teach the lessons of life. to teach the value of hard work. how to win with class and lose with dignity. how to be proud of giving your all no matter if it was enough how to be part of a team and play your role, whether or not it brought personal glory to take satisfaction in doing your part, not in the praise that comes with it.

and no matter what their role, you want them to leave knowing that they were good. having memories that will last a lifetime.

i love the girls state in 4 days i get to see everything that is good about sports and everything that is good about the next generation coming up. the girls bring with them exquisite skills, incomparable teamwork. the game is often as much art as sport.

and i also get to share, vicariously the joy of competition. on the crucible of competition, every player shows who they are. these are great teams, and great players, or they would not be on this floor on this day. yet every game one team ends with the thrill of victory and the other ends their season with tears; hopes for the coveted gold ball dashed.

this is a story about one girl on one team on one day.

and it is also the story of every girl who ever takes the floor.

45 is not a star. her team has star players the players that everyone sees the players that get the headlines. 45 is what they call a role player...

people sometimes use that term as if it is an insult. the truth is, role players are the heart and soul of a great team.

no matter how bright your stars might shine everything they accomplish is built on the foundation of the role players that support them. being a role player is not easy. when you advance a level in sports every player was once a star. on a high school baseball team, almost every player was a shortstop and/or the cleanup batter in little league. on a high school basketball team, almost every player was a point guard and/or a high scorer in jr pro. for most kids, moving up means adopting a new role on the team. for some kids it means going home to a momma that says; "you can shoot as good as x, you should shoot more." or a daddy that says; "you can handle the ball as good as y, you should be the point guard." what not every parent sees is that every job is equally important. it is the player who must understand they are still just as important. they just have new responsibilities.

as a coach, i always saved the praise when we went over a game for the player who fought for position on rebounds, who drew the charge, who locked his man down on defense. we never even talked about scoring. i always felt like, when someone's job was to score, that had its own rewards.

45 was a solid player on a very good team. i saw her and her team's other role players' blue collar work all week, and it was no accident that their team was playing in the finals.

at 5-10 she was big enough for her post position. she didn't tower over people, but she had excellent body control. she was a ferocious defender, and a dogged rebounder. like every player on her team she showed the marvelous skills of a lifetime of preparation, and the unbending will to win of a champion.

their opponent in the championship game was every bit as good as 45's team. they had knocked out the 3-time defending state champions in a huge upset in the semifinals.

sometimes after a game of that magnitude a team has nothing left. not this team. they had come on a mission to bring home a gold ball. and they would not be denied.

the game was exactly what you would expect when two great teams that refuse to lose meet on the floor, with everything on the line.

the game went back and forth. first one team gained the upper hand, and then the other. and as the score seesawed, the roar of the crowd went from one side of the gym to the other. and then back again.

every basket, every rebound, steal, foul, or blocked shot. hell, every pass was magnified a thousandfold.

the other post, 42, was a big star. a prolific shot blocker, with silky smooth moves on offense (and a deadly outside shot) by the last quarter she was playing with 4 fouls.

so, down the stretch, 45's team had relied on 33. a little wisp of a sophomore point guard, with the heart of a lion 33 just would not be denied. time and again as the last minutes ticked off the clock she had somehow managed to weave thru the tall timber to the basket slip the ball thru invisible gaps in the sea of arms trying to deny her shot and bank the ball in off the glass.

going into the last minute, 45's team trailed. time and again 33 had worked her magic to keep them within a point time and again the opponent had answered. until at the last possible moment, they finally got a steal, and brought the ball down with a chance to take the lead.

the coach called timeout with 8 seconds on the clock down by a single point. the play he called would decide the outcome of the game, the season, and for the seniors on the team, like 45, their careers in basketball.

everyone in the gym knew what was coming. they would get the ball to 33, and she would take it to the basket. everyone likewise knew the opponent had two objectives that i know they went over in their huddle.

first, deny 33 the ball. and, if she managed to get it, force her left. she was not as deadly effective from the left side.

despite the opponent's best efforts 45's team got the ball to 33 and the last 8 seconds of the season began to tick away. walled off to her right, 33 reversed directions and came back to the left. it was almost too easy to turn her.. the opponent scarcely noticed, they had 33 going left, just like they wanted.

altho she had a man guarding her 45 had taken a position on the left wing, just beyond the arc of the 3 point line.

maybe, given time to analyze the situation, someone would have asked why she was out there, and not in the post....

but only maybe.

after all, she had not taken a shot during the entire game.

besides, that kind of time did not exist. the clock was under 5 seconds, and 33 had found a tiny gap in the defense to drive down the left side of the lane. 45's defender peeled off, to join the remainder of the defense trying to thwart 33's drive to the basket....

instead of taking the ball into heavy traffic, 33 whipped a pass to 45. face up square to the goal, and completely alone.

a coach has to know his players and give them the chance to find greatness in themselves. he has to know the player who will relish the chance at that one unforgettable moment when everything is on the line, and it all depends on them.

45 was one of those players.

there was no time for 45 to think about where she was not then not at that moment.

no time to reflect on all the practices all the games the jr pro, and travel teams, middle school and 4 long years of high school. to contemplate all the wins and losses, the joys and the sorrows, the good times and the adversities.

no time to think of the thousands, or tens of thousands of times she had practiced this exact same shot. countless times imagining taking it in this exact situation.

no time to realize that this was the last time she would ever touch the ball in competition.

because every player has their favorite spot to shoot. they know it. their teammates know it. their coach knows it....

only the opponent does not know it.

i am betting 45 was in that exact spot.

45 caught the ball cleanly and released her shot as smooth as silk. and why not? i am sure this whole maneuver has been practiced between her and 33 thousands of times. drive and kick catch and shoot. we all do these drills. every team that plays does these drills. dreaming of the day we do it with everything on the line.

i was in a perfect line behind 45 when she released the ball. and there was never any question that it was true. the ball did not so much as brush against iron. it scarcely tickled the nets, and then the buzzer sounded as it dropped to the floor.

45 had played her final role.

the stats will always read 1-1, 3 points.

but stats will eventually be forgotten. the moment will live forever.

god, i love this game.

[https://mbasic.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=17279833606...](https://mbasic.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1727983360680592&id=100004068348429)

<comment><USER7> Incredible - got goosebumps reading that</comment></comment>


Cmapit GIS Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://cmapit.io <comment><AUTHOR> Search for arable land, document your result for further analysis and more. a simplified GIS terminal, data services.</comment>


No Free Inference Lunch – Cog. Sci - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27489199?dopt=Abstract <comment><USER2> Full Text: [http://pcl.missouri.edu/sites/default/files/p_7.pdf](http://pcl.missouri.edu/sites/default/files/p_7.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just tweeted by Neuroskeptic; if this has implications for the recent issues with fMRI studies, I hope someone smarter than me will let me know.

<comment><AUTHOR> By "recent issues" I mean [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032269)

Thought this might be interesting for people that know the No Free Lunch Theorems from classification/optimization too</comment></comment>


Is this the end of the 'about page'? - <AUTHOR> I recently had a life changing experience. It goes counter culture to product market fit theory. Having spent two years testing product ideas, I was stuck with no traction or connection to any originality. Trying to engineer and force out solutions to make it in startup land and keep up with the tech joneses. I hit the wall.
Until I encountered a 'Personal Brand' that literally shattered everything it is to have a personal brand / about you page / personal website. For the first time in my life I don't cringe at the notion of personal brand. My product was born out of this encounter. 'About you' pages will never be the same after you read this https://storytella.io/thestorytellastory which was inspired by this https://thekanyestory.com/. Both are 15 minutes each read. Highly scalable, deeply meaningful. I am confident your mind will be blown.
I challenge everyone in Hacker News to write their own personal story as if their life depended on it. Whether you ever publish it or leverage it for public use is up to you. The process itself may just take your breathe away. <comment><USER2> This type of pseudo advertisement doesn't work on HN. You should just do something like "Show HN" and cut to the chase and ask people to give feedback on your app instead.</comment>


"Open Source" Accelerator NCombinator Launches - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/10/open-source-accelerator-ncombinator-launches-after-founder-is-denied-by-ycombinator/

<comment><USER2> Trademarks, trademarks, trademarks. YCombinator might be a generic computer science-y word, but it has a well defined brand meaning in this niche...</comment>


There are too many video games. What now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-many-video-games-what-now-indiepocalypse <comment><USER2> there are too many youtube videos, now what?

<comment> a-fried-egg medicate

<comment><USER3> There are too many medications. What now?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird? - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ <comment> xkcd-sucks Early psychedelic associated people who were not weird: \- Alexander Shulgin, chemist who discovered and ate whole families of psychedelics over a long life, and who was always described as being practical, grounded, warm, and human \- The CIA employees who were exposed to LSD during that era, remarkably few of whom went off the deep end \- Owsley Stanley, pioneering sound engineer and production scale LSD chemist who also was not into woo-woo crap \- Albert Hofmann, the guy who discovered it

The "weird" ones cherry-picked in the article didn't do much except loudly promote extravagant claims about said drugs and push their own personal brands-- They were the instagram influencers of the era, in a sense.

<comment><USER3> Owsley moved to Australia because he was convinced a super cyclone was going to freeze all of north America and that would be the safest spot.

He also pretty much ate only 100% meat, and blamed the cancer that formed in his throat in his later years on the few vegetables his parents made him eat as a child.

But no woo woo crap =)

Interesting thoughts by Owsley: [http://www.thebear.org/essays.html](http://www.thebear.org/essays.html)

Info about the storm he predicted: [http://worldnewstrust.com/ice-ages-cause- of-glaciation-a-the...](http://worldnewstrust.com/ice-ages-cause-of- glaciation-a-theoretical-treatment-owsley-bear-stanley)

<comment><USER4> For those unaware, Owsley was the focus of the Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Psychedelics permanently increasing your _openness to experience_ sounds true to me based on my own experiences, however not in the way that the author seems to be fearing.

It's not some subtle unconscious change. It's a conscious choice to be more open, in certain ways, based on the new insight gotten from your emotional psychedelic experience. It's a freshened perspective on life.

As for the examples of believing in astrology, aliens, doing yoga, or constructing models of consciousness. How weird are these really? To me these seem like viewpoints that regular Joe will discuss in a pub. Some, e.g. modelling consciousness, aren't even irrational, but I've personally found that almost everyone has at least one irrational pet idea anyway.

Psychedelics could certainly amplify your own beliefs, but I'm not convinced it can easily create new ones. It can make you more open to the idea of being honest about your thoughts, including sharing your alien theories.

<comment> castle-bravo Right? For me it was like: MOLY SHEET! I don't /know/ _anything_. What do you do with _that_ dropped on your head? You can't rule anything out on the basis that other people would find it hard to swallow. If you've got a few extra watts of processing power in your head, you can take some wild ideas really far before you even have the chance to bounce the idea off someone; it's very likely that you might actually transmit the kooky memes you've been gestating, especially if you're a charismatic like Leary. Anyway, a sizable fraction of those crazy psychedelicists ended up having fun as happy cult leaders - <USER2> can fault them if they haven't caused harm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What, is being a Ron Paul supporter in the new DSM? I've never tried psychedelics myself, but I find OP's descriptions of weirdness to be feeble at best.

Quantum consciousness as far out? I earnestly believe that it's irrational to thing something that so greatly impacts and is impacted by the physical world as conciousness is somehow not bound by physics. It's perfectly rational and proven with multiple experiments that quantum particle pairs act synchronously across space(time). If conciousness is based in physical reality, then it is an emergent property of quantum mechanics.

At times my spouse and I have experienced an undeniable and unexplainable shared thought or emotion without communicating with the 5 senses. We have commingled so very much matter together that it's most reasonable to assume some entangled particle pairs get split between us. I've encountered a plethora of antecdotes from others along similar lines- really without seeking them out.

Does constructing that type of argument ensure that I am 'weird' like the article suggests?

Maybe I ought to try some mushrooms and see what other weird ideas I'm missing out on?

<comment><USER7> > At times my spouse and I have experienced an undeniable and unexplainable > shared thought or emotion without communicating with the 5 senses. We have > commingled so very much matter together that it's most reasonable to assume > some entangled particle pairs get split between us. I've encountered a > plethora of antecdotes from others along similar lines- really without > seeking them out.

It's a common experience, but that's not a maximum likelihood explanation. I've often been able to trace this kind of synchronicity to the both of us having just seen something in the environment, that then triggered similar thought patterns.

There are so many possible explanations that fixating on some quantum mumbo jumbo (without being able to do the math, or create a statistically meaningful test) is just magical thinking.

<comment><USER8> I think you hit the nail on the head. At our core humans are pattern recognition units, we're solving environmental puzzles all the time, and sometimes we solve this puzzle in the same way as the person next to us, and both have a similar leap of logic that seems to defy rationality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> clearly the author is not hip to _The Human Evasion_ by Celia Green. Those guys were just all OK with choosing a slightly different reality, because the mainstream reality tunnel is also equally flawed, and less interesting

      Human beings live in a state of mind called 'sanity'
      on a small planet in space. They are not quite sure
      whether the space around them is infinite or not (either
      way it is unthinkable). If they think about time, they
      find it inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is
      also inconceivable that it did not have a beginning.
      Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing to 'sanity',
      which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon and deserving
      more recognition.

[http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/humevas.html](http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/humevas.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> > In fact he tried 1000 micrograms of it, one of the biggest doses I've ever > heard of someone taking.

If this is at the threshold of your knowledge in this area, there's a heck of a lot more to learn. This whole article, with some interesting facts about a few cherry-picked researchers, emanates naivete.

<comment><USER11> It's also funny that the author mentions Ram Dass who tells the tale of tripping on LSD for several weeks at a time in his book 'Be Here Now. In his biography 1000ug is painted as child's play for some of the early explorers.

<comment><USER9> 1000 ug aka "Heroic Dose".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Innovators are weird to begin with. Otherwise they couldn't resist the social pressure to be normal, get a 'proper job' and so on. Living on the edge keeps their minds active and creative. Plus they expect pushback for their innovations. So they're going to be militantly weird in some areas, maybe compensating for this by concealing their proclivities elsewhere.

(This makes sense if you consider that the greater part of being normal is trying hard to _appear_ normal.)

Now psychedelics are personality-altering substances. As such they have the potential to make you considerably more weird or less weird than you were to begin with.

It follows that _psychedelic innovation_ entails a double whammy of weirdness. It would have been enough to push a proportion of the pioneers over the edge.

</comment><comment><USER13> OP forgets that Kary Mullis did most of his acid binging in the 70's and invented PCR in the 80's. So even if it did turn him into a crackpot, it didn't prevent him from doing useful work.

</comment><comment><USER14> I offer an anecdote: as a young person I struggled with many of the self- actualization how to be happy type problems that young people do. I was depressed. I was never formally diagnosed, but I would wake many days and simply have no desire to assert any form of existence. I would just not get out of bed because there was no point.

I would then later have an LSD trip where I would "trip out" and lose touch with reality. During this, while tripping out, I would get into an altercation involving five police officers in rural Georgia and be arrested and sent to jail and charged with resisting arrest, battery against a police officer, and numerous other charges. The ramifications of this in my personal life were great. While I was being arrested in reality, in my trip I would also encounter many personal emotional demons. At one point I was tased in reality, and in my trip I interpreted this to be death and I would think to myself "this is all that I have become by the time of my death?" In my trip I would feel the physical sensations of being dragged away by my arresting officers, and I would experience this as the arms of Satan dragging me to hell as payment for all of my past sins. As I would be cuffed in the back of the police car being toted off, I would hear the laughter of everyone in my life who I had ever cared about echoing through the cosmos, ridiculing me for my ultimate failure.

Once I awoke, I could not recall any of this. But, as I came to wrapped in a prison blanket with my head resting on a drain set in a cold concrete floor next to a metal toilet, I could certainly perceive the seriousness of the situation I'd landed myself in. This forced me to consider the events in my life that had led me to this. Eventually, stoked by the story of the tow truck driver who towed the car I'd driven into a ditch that initially caused the police to arrive, of the epic Jackie Chan figure who waged war with five lumbering policemen, my recollection began to form. I realized that the demons I'd encountered in my trip were "real", insofar that they were amplified mental manifestations of constructs that had already been there. This much was not new information, at least not on all levels. What was different about this encounter with those demons, in addition to their relevance to my circumstances of being charged with five serious crimes, was that I had the context of my drug induced shifted consciousness. Any previous attempts to change these behaviors had proven too feeble to be effective, my methods used were too shallow to reach towards the roots of my problems.

With the benefit of knowing that my sober reality was not the only possible or perceptible version, I began to deconstruct the thought processes, patterns, and software that ran my cognitive experience. It was this realization that enabled me to rewrite my code to better serve my greater goals. Today, I am a confident and successful engineer with only a single misdemeanor (lawyers, a good one is worth it), who is bounds happier and who feels much more in control and in touch with what he wants and how to attain it, and who believes in his ability to actualize. I will spare you further corny details of my current improved state and let you form your own judgements. In writing this post a fitting metaphor strikes me — a psychedelic trip is much like allowing someone with an entirely different set of opinions to do a radical (and temporary) rewrite of your personal software. When running it, it will confuse you. Everything will seem novel. But you will begin to see the other ways in which code can hang together. It is a rearchitecting. And if you have only ever been exposed to and developed using a single paradigm of architecture, then well I shouldn't need to explain the benefits of this. But be wary, because in this temporary rewrite, it is possible you will forget the product spec to which your software is built and be unable to distinguish between a feature and a bug. Another metaphor that fits is that for personal growth a psychedelic trip is much like a car for a physical trip — it is not necessary to travel the distance and it will help if driven correctly.

<comment><USER15> That's a crazy intense trip story. Glad it ultimately lead to some positive self actualization. You should expand on the experience and post it to erowid.org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I'm intensely skeptical across-the-board, why is it that the psychedelic examples in this article (aliens and so forth) are outrageous and signs of insanity... but commonplace beliefs like, and this is my personal pet peeve, astrology, is a norm? And I apologise if I offend someone in advance, but what about religions? Guys come back to life, angels, prophets. All that stuff is in the same category. And yet, that's not lunacy. But Ram Das is.

Here's a thought that isn't novel: societies dictate what's sane and what's not. Not rationality. Thank (insert deity) for science and its methods.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think this article is unfair in dismissing Robert Anton Wilson offhand. RAW was an interesting character who created a body of interesting work. He definitely punches above his weight in cultural impact, and was certainly 'open to experiences' which the writer seems to be somewhat astounded about. Indeed, some of his best work could be considered as a guide to how one can programme oneself to become more 'open to experiences' whilst developing a healthier sense of scepticism and discernment about those experiences.

</comment><comment><USER18> a companion post: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/05/is-pharma-research- wors...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/05/is-pharma-research-worse-than- chance/)

 _Here's one hypothesis: at the highest level, the brain doesn't have that many variables to affect, or all the variables are connected. If you smack the brain really really hard in some direction or other, you will probably treat some psychiatric disease. Drugs of abuse are ones that smack the brain really hard in some direction or other. They do something. So find the psychiatric illness that's treated by smacking the brain in that direction, and you're good.

Actual carefully-researched psychiatric drugs are exquisitely selected for having few side effects. The goal is something like an SSRI – mild stomach discomfort, some problems having sex, but overall you can be on them forever and barely notice their existence. In the grand scheme of things their side effects are tiny – in most placebo-controlled studies, people have a really hard time telling whether they're in the experimental or the placebo group.

Nobody has a hard time telling whether they're in the experimental or placebo group of a trial of high-dose MDMA. I think this might be the difference. If you go for large effects – even if you don't really care what direction the effect is in – you'll get them. And if you go for small, barely perceptible effects, then you'll get those too. The dream of the magic bullet – the drug that treats exactly what it's supposed to treat but otherwise has no effect at all on you – is just a dream. The closest you can come is something with miniscule side effects but a barely-less-miniscule treatment effect._

</comment><comment><USER19> You could ask the same question about all people from a long time ago. Why are William S. Burroughs or William F. Buckley so weird (in our modern eyes)? They're not really weird. They were perfectly normal in their historical context and environment. We are going to look weird to people in the future, unless they're wise enough to avoid dismissing our ideas just because they don't mesh well with their culture.

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure being a heroin addict and shooting your wife in the head was not "perfectly normal" even in the 50s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't call Ram Dass weird, but the others certain are. Especially that "amplified DNA of deceased famous people like Elvis Presley" stuff. So why exactly did they went this loon? Too high dosages? Or did they just realize they can imagine wildly and market that for profit?

</comment><comment><USER22> It could also be that there were just weirder ideas floating around at that time, too.

</comment><comment><USER23> Two things were less stifled/eradicated: creative thought, and pure drugs.

</comment><comment><USER24> Because they scrambled their brains by taking too many drugs in the name of 'spiritual enlightenment'. I've personally have friends--previously really smart rational people--who've gone off the deep end after taking a few too many hits of acid.

Psychedelics can be great and all, and though I've never indulged myself I can see why someone might benefit from doing so. Your neuro-chemistry is altered in such a radical way that you're bound to see yourself and the world from a radically different perspective. The problem with prolonged use, I think, is that that radically altered state eventually becomes your normal state and you lose touch with reality.

<comment><USER25> I think this is a wholly unfounded post. Please provide sources if you're going to make bold assertions like:

"Your neuro-chemistry is altered in such a radical way that you're bound to see yourself and the world from a radically different perspective."

Anecdotally, on my end: I have seen and been involved with many similarly smart people, who were also heavily, heavily involved with psychedelics, to no ill affect.

<comment><USER26> I don't think it is unfounded at all. Over the years I've known many victims of psychedelics. There's a guy in my apartment building who lost his shit on a bad acid trip 10 years ago and hasn't been a productive member of society since then.

I've used them, but it's really impossible to say whether or not I have suffered ill effects. No control subject. The author of the original linked essay points out that they produce large permanent changes to personality. That's a really big deal, and potentially very bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alan-crowe The article assumes a two way split: normal versus weird. I think we need a three way split: solid-normal, cozy-weird, out-there-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category is really weird, you just cannot see it.

For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Fucking hoarders! So they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop hoarding. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.

Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place.

So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold- storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.

Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

Well, shit! I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there :-P". Let's abandon concerns about me having to change my mind again when I learn another little bit of history. The story so far has virgin-birth as cozy-weird not out-there-weird in 300 AD. (Which neatly gets me out of voicing an opinion on whether it is any kind of weird in 2016.)

Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%.

I'm feeling really proud of myself for providing three examples of cozy-weird. If you think about it, I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal :-)

Anyway, there is a two way split normal(2) and weird(2). There is a three way split solid-normal(3), cozy-weird(3), out-there-weird(3). Here is how they line up

        weird(2) = out-there-weird(3)

        normal(2) = solid-normal(3) union cozy-weird(3)

For some psychonauts an important motivation taking LSD is the hope that one can break through to reality in the sense of becoming able to see what is so strange about the cozy-weird.

SSC asks "Why were Early Psychedelicists so out-there-weird(3)?" (my translation).

That seems like a really tricky question because it is so hard to see what happened to the cozy-weird. Lets define weird(3) as the union of cozy-weird(3) and out-there-weird(3). Suppose some-one trips on LSD and realizes that you should respond to the volatility of agricultural output with laws that favour ware-housing and cold-storage. Suppose it goes further and they think that alien space bats are attacking Earth with stupidity rays and that is why there are laws that oppose ware-housing and cold-storage. That is a solid helping of out-there-weird, and a worthwhile reduction of cozy-weird. Did total weird(3) go up or down?

The previous paragraph ends with a hanging question. I've no idea whether the early psychedelicists had any success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy- weird. Time for a case split.

Case I, the early psychedelicists had no success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird. If so, this is in itself a reason not to take LSD. Seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird is one of the motivations. If others have already tried it and it didn't work, then it is time to try something else.

Case II, the early psychedelicists had some success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird. Then there is an upside to balance the downside of perhaps becoming out-there-weird. Also there is an extra contender for why the early psychedelicists got so weird. Seeing the strangeness of the cozy- weird is mentally destabilizing. You can still share solid-normal(3) stuff with normal(2) folk, but the cozy-weird(3) stuff is a barrier between you, making each think that the other is a bit daft. What happens when you are cut off like this? Does the loss of social anchors set you adrift and at risk of becoming out-there-weird. Does the experience of seeing the strangeness of the cozy-normal directly unsettle you, making it hard to know what to trust and how to judge things? The existence of the cozy-weird makes things very complicated.

<comment><USER26> I guess it's worth noticing the author of the essay is pretty weird himself in any number of ways.</comment></comment>