NDjango: Django templates in .NET - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/ndjango/

<comment><USER2> I, for one, welcome a django-like templates for .net -- Especially since it's open source.

I looked for exactly this half a year ago, and couldn't find anything. I ended up writing my own template language, which i never would have done if there was a good option out there already. I'll probably open source my template language also, just in case anybody finds it usefull.

It's actually one of the bad things about .net: the open source community is much smaller than for other languages. Usually when you need something (like a nice template language), you have some commercial options and very few open source projects -- if any -- that hopefully are still maintained and up to date.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's really funny, if there is _one_ thing that I would like to see improved in Django it is the templates.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be lovely to have Zope-like templates in Django? BTW, are the licenses compatible?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can use this for your Views in ASP.NET MVC. I like it a lot better than the default ViewEngine and better than the popular Spark engine, because it separates markup from template constructs better and it also has Django's awesome set of filters. Very cool.</comment>


Show HN: Overlap.me - a new way to meet people & share your identity online - <AUTHOR> http://www.overlap.me/blog/introducing-overlap-dot-me <comment><USER2> Does this really overcome awkwardness? I don't think awkwardness is ever a function of not having enough common interests. I've had brilliant dinners with girls who've had zero interest in theoretical physics, and yet, I talked about it for a good half of the dinner. Reciprocally, I have very little interest in shoes, but I've been fascinated by explanations of shoes.

Yet, there have been times where we share the same interests, but the other person is especially boring. It doesn't matter what interests you share, if the other person can't elaborate on their interests or offer insight/comments.

Also, sometimes I like talking to people with completely different interests. One of my favorite persons actually is my exact polar opposite. We get along great, but we share 0 common interests.

I'm pointing this out as a consideration factor, not because I don't like your project. I think you do have a good start... but feedback never hurts? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, feedback is most welcome.

It's not that you need to have a lot in common with someone to get along. The hypothesis of the app is simply that the least-awkward way to _begin_ a conversation _is_ by starting out with the common ground you share. From this warm introduction, it's then easy to move on to other topics.

And, the awkwardness I'm trying to overcome is the small kind--how to make the first comment, how to send that first message. I personally find blank message screens intimidating.

<comment><USER2> If this works out as you expect, I'll definitely be looking forward to it. Your problem identification is spot on, even if we have different thoughts on the solution!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really, really good idea. Much time has been spent discussing separating different parts of your social life, but the idea of doing it based on "shared secrets" is great.

A big obstacle in my mind is duplication of overlaps, e.g. 'I read Hacker News' and 'I read HN'. The both mean the same thing, but if two users click "Me Too" on the different versions, they won't see the common interest. People may be tempted to just add a new overlap instead of searching for an existing version, especially as the number of users and possible overlaps grow. Hopefully you can find a way to have the community help aggregate overlaps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, this is definitely a problem that will need solving. Aware & thinking :).

<comment><USER4> I would recommend a user curated feature to that marks 'overlaps' as duplicates that then get sent to some human to moderate. Similar to user curated spam or inappropriate material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the simplicity of this. Here's your biggest problem I think: I just filled in a bunch of overlaps (which was kind of fun), but that's probably all i'm going to do right now & I'll likely forget all about overlap.me by tomorrow.

Somehow you need to get back in front of me--say next week--with some reason I'd want to return.

<comment><AUTHOR> A big challenge is simply having enough users to give you the sense that when you're bored or lonely, you could rely on Overlap.me to help you find connection.

I figure "small wins" -- like the initial fun of joining your first overlaps -- are a step towards building this critical mass. They don't encapsulate a long-term value proposition, but they get the site part-way there.

Some of the early testers found the service quite addicting and were returning every day to see who had joined the overlaps they've created. So another opportunity might lie in building more of an experience around this sense of belonging/community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been thinking about this space a little too & seeing your site reminded me of a tv clip I saw some time ago that compared the western and eastern approaches to social networking.

The western approach was described as bringing your real life network online (fb etc)[1] and the eastern approach was described in terms of sites that allow people to create temporary ad-hoc networks based around shared interests. The example of this given in the program was mixi.jp which is apparently huge in japan.

This latter approach seems to be closer to what you are trying to do. It'll be interesting to watch how far you get with this, so please keep posting to hn to keep us up to date.

[1] This description works for fb but I don't think it really applies to twitter.

</comment><comment><USER7> First marketing message received!

"You like data visualizations? Check out my company!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Please be sure to mark spam as spam

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing I don't understand when I sign up:

 _Should I use a pseudonym or my real name?_

In general, I prefer to use my real name. However, if personal sentiments of mine will be shared publicly, then I prefer pseudonymity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've gone back-and-forth in my mind about this. At the moment I have my real name on the site, but I don't think it's necessary.

When you meet new people in real life, names are only given after a certain amount of trust has already been built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are you the founder? (If you are, we have 11 things in common!) This is a really neat idea, and the post does a good job explaining it. I just signed up and I'm playing around.

A brief note: the "Show me [Safe for all ages|Moderate\Unsure|Restricted] overlaps" is awkwardly phrased-- if I select Restricted, is the site gonna be all sex, all the time, or will I still get the unrestricted overlaps?

Also in that little settings pane, having to click OK after selecting from a dropdown is annoying-- I expect it to work like other dropdowns, where it stays like I left it if I click somewhere else.

I like that after searching for an overlap and not finding it, I can click "New Overlap" and it auto-populates, but does that need to be a separate text field? The transition feels a little awkward, and it needs to be very smooth to encourage people to create new overlaps.

I'm still playing with it, but I think it's a very neat concept that could get big.

EDIT: Okay, if I "Me Too" and overlap, I get to see who else did too, over on the right, but it's still one more click to open up our overlaps, a scan through the list, some typing, and another click before I can send them a message about how we both like Nutella. What if there were a message button by each person that I could use right after I "Me Too" something to talk to them about it?

Sorry if this is disorganized and long, I'm just adding as I go through the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, solo founder here :).

Good points re: settings UI. Will fix shortly.

Hmm will think about the New Overlap flow. I wanted there to be more space than the search field allows, and also to make sure people review the options available.

Originally I had a single text box that would automatically find/create an overlap for whatever you typed in... but I want people to review existing overlaps first. If a similar overlap is already popular it would make sense to join that one.

<comment><USER9> What if, for a search with no good results, it spat down the extra "new overlap" UI with the search text already filled in?

EDIT: Or keep it the way it is, just with the same field for search and the new overlap, but with the other stuff being visible on the button click.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm now that makes a lot of sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am currently living in Seoul for short term and we are always talking about how this social segment is really missing outside of specific online community meetups.

Overall, I think this is really cool concept and on the right track. Currently, I would like to drill down first by Location/Region followed by interests and then have you show me who fits those two criteria. If there are too many matches I would refine/add more and if too few pull back on my interest selections.

Good luck on the project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great ideas... these features were added a couple days after launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Suggestion (for the future): use the Last.fm API to, if the user is interested, link his/her profile to overlap.me. Then you can use his/her top artists, albums or tracks to provide suggestions for overlaps.

EDIT: A faster suggestion: please make the overlap "suggester" ignore common prefixes such as 'I like', 'I love', 'I am', etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both great suggestions. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting - signed up, created a few overlaps, will see what happens.

Apologies if I'm blind but I couldn't see an easy way to see who matched overlaps? Could be useful to do a list of users according to match rates, or to find those who match a certain profile.

Also, might there be some value to doing _negative_ matches as well as positive?

<comment><AUTHOR> The best way to discover users now is to browse overlaps. Sorting user lists by match rates is temporarily disabled until I ensure the back-end is ready to handle the load (this is the first major public posting of the site).

Filtering, by both match rates and location, will obviously be a high priority as the # of users increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you worried at all that people will add things that they aren't interested in - just to see if others are? Curious what you've thought about that, and how you plan to mediate it. Definitely good ways to do so. BEST OF LUCK! Identity is a majorly messed up space, and this is a much better direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why I liken overlaps more to 'tact' than 'privacy'... because you can't prevent people from lying/misrepresenting themselves, nor can you prevent people from changing honestly wanting to change their overlaps over time (you might be Christian today, but atheist tomorrow...).

One possible solution is to only let you leave an overlap a week after you've joined. But then you have an incentive to create a fake account, and you can't use it for short term overlaps (like joining "I feel like shit" for four hours).

<comment><USER13> Gotcha - makes sense. Could be fun to go into anonymous mode, or something of the sort. If you want to drive true identities just make each overlap a public declaration (you have to tweet to add) or something like that. Always tricky where to place your barrier to participation ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty sweet! I like the idea a lot... Just out of curiosity, did you develop this yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, in Ruby/Rails 3.1 & CoffeeScript/Backbone.js.

It's actually my first web app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have to admit that my first thought was, "Yawn, yet another social something-something," but then I read the blog post and was pleasantly surprised. I might just sign up.

Btw., the design could use some tweaking. It looks a little like a Microsoft FrontPage template.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just signed up. Looks like an interesting concept. Just a thought, but why not hide the overlaps I've already added? Or as an option. Would definitely help out; less scrolling down the better. Also, newly added overlaps with a "new" icon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm an option to hide does make sense. Still need to have an easy way to navigate to your overlaps (there's a "My Overlaps" link, but it's not very prominent).

With more data it'll be also be possible to suggest overlaps to you based on what you've already joined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really nice take on the issue of not forcing users to create a "one-size-fits- all" online persona (which currently is such a limitation of most social & dating sites). Obviously, you've got issues of how to reach a wide enough audience to get it off the ground if you are flying solo, but some of the dating sites are fairly acquisition-oriented (e.g. Cupid plc over here in the UK) and so attracting their attention might be the way to go (if you haven't already raised some external funding by the time I've posted this comment...)

</comment><comment><USER18> When I set my location to "New York City, NY, USA" I think that should auto- trigger overlaps like

      - I live in New York City
      - I live in New York State
      - I live in the United States

</comment><comment><USER19> This is actually pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER20> Like the concept and if you work on the feedback, then you are onto something and I think your competition ATM is Google+(haven't used G+ yet). Get a co- founder and a strategy. Your "Add tag" should read "Press Tab to add tag" or similar. I should be able to comment with my OL(yeah, Overlap) acc since i have one. Nice design, but needs more work(you have set a high par,run with it). Breath deep and give us something great.Good Luck

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to use this for finding co-founders or team building, so some form of grouping feature would be helpful to organize certain overlaps together. After signing up and adding a number of overlaps I immediately thought that this is how Hunch, Quora, and/or LinkedIn should feel in terms of experience. So far I really like this. Looking forward to seeing it grow.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a great idea and I've experimented with UI's for grouping in the past (grouping/lists were a victim of the simplify-before-launch phase).

All tweets, blog posts, postcards, phone calls to friends, shouts from rooftops etc. would be greatly appreciated in helping Overlap grow ;-). My marketing budget is less than what I spend on coffee, and I'm currently in Colombia.

<comment><USER21> Yes, a good call in this case, and a rallying tweet has just been sent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I decided to check it out and take a look around and I'm already running into my first issue! It won't let me update my location at all.

Running Chrome 12.0.742.100 on Maverick.

Unrelated feedback wrt the dating settings: restricting the gender identifications to male/female and most definitely restricting the "looking for" to male XOR female leaves a nontrivial number of people in a bit of a bind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pushing a fix for the location bug right now.

Dating settings will be updated... I removed extra options yesterday to simplify the user queries, but they will be put back in.

<comment><USER23> That UI is also has several UX problems:

1) Poor defaults - better to pick "Choose One" / NULL instead of misclassifying gender, etc

2) Small widgets, hard to click/read

3) Confusing "OK" button and saving behavior

4) Hard to even find in the first place!

<comment><AUTHOR> The placement is deliberate -- dating won't be a viable use case for the site until user count has increased substantially. Right now it's mostly there to make people feel comfortable that if they leave dating off, they shouldn't be bothered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very nice!

It'd be cool if you could select a bunch of "Me too" options when you first sign up without it reloading the right sidebar. On Chrome at least, it slows down, gets choppy, and makes it hard to click on other options & scroll until its fully loaded.

Once you've made some initial overlaps, you should be fine. Starting off it just is a bit tricky.

Besides this, it's a cool idea. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know, I'll think about how to handle this. (The problem of not testing on other people's machines!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an interesting concept.

You could definitely release interesting stats on what people like, particularly on how certain subjects correlate with each other.

</comment><comment><USER26> So, after only 3 answers it went from girls to hardcore geek; damn.

</comment><comment><USER27> Put a flattr up buddy! I want you to succeed, this shizz is awesome.</comment>


IPad Air bursts into flames in Australia store - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/2061976/ipad-air-bursts-into-flames-in-australia-store.html

<comment><USER2> To those left wondering what the heck an "iPad Air" is:

• iPad, 2010

• iPad 2, 2011

• iPad marketed as "The New iPad" (a.k.a. iPad 3), March 2012

• iPad marketed as "iPad with Retina display" even though the previous model already had that (a.k.a. iPad 4), November 2012

• iPad Air (a.k.a. iPad 5), 2013</comment>


Azul Means (Big) Blue: There's a new kind of mainframe coming and it isn't from IBM - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080229_004404.html

<comment><USER2> I'm amazed that IBM isn't in trouble - their services and products seem so expensive that I wonder how anyone could ever buy them. I just came home from a dinner with somebody working for IBM, and she told me that getting a new customer into their CRM costs around $5000 and takes a week!

A month back a story ran in Denmark where IBM had bid to install an Oracle database, and wanted $30.000 for doing so. A small company made fools out of them by having an engineer do the same thing in less than half an hour. In a straitjacket, only using his nose. Video here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHzV4LZnvHc>

</comment><comment><USER3> Some thoughts on Azul:

The comparison of Azul to a mainframe is apt, since there is no low-end Azul box. If you don't have $50K to spend, go home. Startups can stop reading now.

The network-attached coprocessor idea doesn't give me a good feeling; it sounds like yet another point of failure.

Because Azul uses hundreds of cores, most apps won't scale out of the box; Azul-specific tuning like lock splitting is needed.

I want to like Azul but in the end it looks like a niche box.

<comment><USER4> There's more to Azul than just the fact they have a zillion cores in a box.

They've also done some awesome work on optimistic thread concurrency and concurrent garbage collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 768 custom processors with hardware garbage collection in a 14U case is quite impressive. I'd given up all hope of seeing a Java mainframe like this 10 years ago.

Regardless, I'd like to see this benchmarked against a PlayStation3 cluster ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125829> ). If you can cope with the 512MB memory then I suspect that the PS3 offers better value for money.

<comment><USER3> Why benchmark apples against oranges? Any app that will run well on a PS3 will suck on Azul and vice versa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about native OS SMP support? Does this architecture easily map and scale linux or freebsd? Seems like the dedicated engines for java should be replaced with TCP offload engines and let the server developers code in whatever language they choose. I don't like it, too tied to a language choice.

<comment><USER3> I can understand that viewpoint, but porting the whole Linux universe to a new architecture is a much larger job than porting a Java VM.</comment></comment>


Wi-Fi SSID Sniffer in 10 Lines of Python - <AUTHOR> http://hackoftheday.securitytube.net/2013/03/wi-fi-sniffer-in-10-lines-of-python.html

<comment><USER2> He's using the incorrect datatype for ap_list. This is apprently the collection of AP's already seen, and used with this pattern:

      ap_list = []
      if AP not in ap_list:
          ap_list.append(AP)
          print AP

It works, but does a linear scan every time. It's better to use a set() in such a case:

      ap_seen = set()
      if AP not in ap_seen:
          ap_seen.add(AP)
          print AP

For looking up things, a set (essentially a dict without values) is much quicker than a list. Is this premature optimisation? Perhaps, but using a list for this purpose is also a code smell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice catch! This may be required as we are comparing against every beacon frame and one could have a large number of them over the air at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Should be WiFi SSID Sniffer in 10 lines of Scapy.

Let's give Philippe (Scapy's author) the credit he deserves.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there a problem/drawback with "iw phy phy0 interface add mon0 type monitor" besides using the airmon tool to create a monitor interface? It works nicely with the iw command.

</comment><comment><USER5> > A 10 Line Wi-Fi SSID Sniffer

> from scapy.all import *

Yeah.

<comment><USER6>
      > A 10 Line Wi-Fi SSID Sniffer
      > #!/usr/bin/env python

Yeah.

I bet it's even being run on an OS that they didn't write themselves.

<comment><USER7> I kind of agree with @adlpz on this. It's like saying, "Serve a website with 1 line of code!" and then running `sudo service apache start`.

Technically correct, but highly misleading. Either way, I hope you realize I'm not being snarky here - just wanted to share my point of view on this. OP's article was great, that's a ridiculously powerful library.

<comment><USER8> Meh. Strictly speaking you are correct, but deconstructing it, it means that we can never say anything is easy (N lines of codes for small N's being synonymous with 'easy'). Yes, it's actually bloody easy to serve a website, and that's a good thing, and if someone didn't know it was possible, it's been helpful to write that 'tutorial'.

All members of the "Do X in N lines or M minutes" meme are examples of stringing together one or more powerful libraries.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lets get rid of tracking on the UK's NHS - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/uk-parliament-nhs-should-respect-privacy-online <comment><USER2> Wow thats bad, on just so many levels. Why is a publicly funded service selling tracking data, let alone one that handles, as it's primary function, confidential and privileged information about your medical history?

The author is right, heads should roll for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure they sell it. If I'm reading their dialogue correctly, they appear to just give it away which is either a lie or even more worrying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Agreed, this is wrong. Confidentiality when it comes to health matters needs to apply on the web, too. There's far too much scope for information gained using marketing tools on NHS websites for abuse.</comment>


Ask HN: "Fair Use" of Magazine Logos? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Our organization makes free software, and recently "Product X" was reviewed and given the "Editor's Choice" award by PC Magazine.
Seeing this, I placed their magazine logo linking back to the review on our download page, alongside the badges of other download awards we've been given in the past.
I was contacted barely 24 hours later by Ziff Davis Media legal, and told that my use of the logo was not Fair Use and I had to license their editor's choice award logo for $1250 per year.
I'm no lawyer, but I honestly feel that this is fair use? I'm using their logo to link back to their site - does anyone know if this is not allowed?
BTW, the PC Magazine review used our product, screenshots of our product, and more without letting us know they were doing a review let alone asking for our permission. Can someone explain the logic in this to me? And on their site, they have the screenshot of Product X alongside the "PC Magazine Editor's Choice" logo.
I'm sure anyone reading this can figure out "our organization" and "Product X" but whatever. <comment><USER2> Seems like you were doing them a favor in the first place.

I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt first, chalking it up to an overactive legal department, but on further thought it sounds as if what they have going is a roundabout way to sell their endorsement. In which case, their endorsement is meaningless, at least from a philosophical perspective.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with you about the fair use, but I'm not a lawyer either.</comment>


Trailblazing DIY pinball game snags Pioneer Award for Bill Budge - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/trailblazing-diy-pinball-game-snags-pioneer-award-for-bill-budge.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

<comment><USER2> I'm definitely a huge fan of the Bill Budge Pinball Construction Set. It was the way many of us were first introduced to the ideas behind object-oriented programmer (the ball _is_ the message).</comment>


Directed Edge (wheels' startup) launches public beta, finds related articles in Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://blog.directededge.com/2008/08/13/directed-edge-launches-recommender-engine-public-beta/

<comment><USER2> "We've got a super-fast in-house graph storage system that makes it possible to do interesting stuff with graphs quickly, notably figure out which pages are related."

I'm working with large graphs and I find that using a relational database as a backend is horribly slow if you want to run somewhat complex graph algorithms. Looks like everyone who does this ends up developing an in-house system. Anyone know if there's a library out there for doing this sort of thing? The order of magnitude I'm talking about is ~10^8 nodes, ~10^9 edges.

<comment><USER3> I think your best bet is an RDF tool like Jena or Sesame. 10^9 is pushing these engines though. There's an HBase-SPARQL lib, but that's gotta be two years away from stable.

For real world problems, I tend to write custom code that's Java NIO heavy. Try to pack the data as efficiently as possible, and minimize disk seeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> The tools that you mention are honestly not just one, but a couple orders of magnitude too slow to do interesting applications on at this scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Count me as one of those people more interested in cool graph theory stuff than Wikipedia. What else have you got up your sleeves?

Also, while we're talking about Wikipedia-- any plans to play around with "shortest path" algorithms? For example, how few pages to I have to navigate to get from, say, "Turing machines" to "Miles Davis"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wikipedia's just a big data set to practice on. I've been musing on information graphs (and doing talks about such) since 2004 or so.

It also happens that I've done a bit of work in writing fast, embedded databases, so when I realized that none of the off-the-shelf graph databases that I found were fast enough for our needs, and that mapping graphs to an SQL database was abysmally slow, I wrote a small one. Honestly, I was surprised when I discovered some graph databases that _advertise_ being an order of magnitude slower.

I'd love for our product to be a graph database, but I'm convinced that product takes too long to get to the market. I'd need probably a year of just concentrating on that, without, say, also having to do business stuff just to get that ready for general purpose use. It'd also be cooler for geeking out to, but I don't know if people would actually pay for it.

So right now we've got a database that's really fast at: traversing lots of edges and filtering on tags. That's what we need for finding related stuff.

As for shortest path stuff ... well, it's never had much more than novelty value for me. I don't see much of a business case for implementing it, and well, we're a business.

<comment><USER4> I agree about the shortest path stuff being purely novelty stuff-- but I must admit it was the first thing that came to my mind when I tried to connect Wikipedia with graph theory.

Personally, I like playing around with graph theory, but I have yet to come up with a compelling business case-- I wish you luck, and hope you find something cool (and lucrative.) I'd probably be a customer of a fast graph database, but I doubt there are a lot of other graph theory hobbyists out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> PageRank was a graph algorithm that seems to have done pretty well. ;-)

<comment><USER4> Touché.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a nice feature for browsing Wikipedia aimlessly. I'd be more interested in an article about this: "We've got a super-fast in-house graph storage system that makes it possible to do interesting stuff with graphs quickly, notably figure out which pages are related.." Sounds cool, how does it work?

</comment><comment><USER6> You have a hugely improved layout and page design than the original wikipedia, kudos.

And the related links feature makes ad-hoc browsing of wikipedia entries quite useful, again kudos.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hmmm... simple stuff turned up mostly topical, so I tried Pierre Herme, a famous French pastry chef (at least if you follow French pastry). The top result was a stub article for a French immunologist; others include a musician and a TV newscaster.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are almost no links going in or out of his page, and since our algorithm is mostly, as our name implies, graph based that means that there's not much we can do there currently. He's the rare case of a reasonably well written article that doesn't really use Wiki markup. I started to say, "We'll be adding the French Wikipedia soon, it should be better there." But then I saw that the English entry is just a translation of the French one, with the same lack of links.

We'll be adding other techniques to our analysis over time though, this is just our first step...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So... I load up a page, and the benefit is supposed to be that I get 10 of the links from it on the sidebar as "related links".

Why do I care, exactly? What's the value here?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that it's like Amazon recommending books or Last.fm recommending music (though the technique is quite different). In practice, once you're used to using it, it's a really fast way for jumping into a topic since you immediately see clusters around an article -- i.e. if you don't know anything about Literary Theory and want to figure out what the important articles and authors in the area are you can do so quickly. (An example a friend of mine used when looking for books on the topic, successfully, incidentally.)

My question would be, do you not associate what we're doing with recommendations or not see recommendations as valuable?

<comment><USER9> Cool for all the "knowledge management" aficionados, there's a whole industry around that. Also potentially useful for intranets / collaboration systems -- if at some point you can offer your API offline, i.e. as a library callable from code without having to depend on your web service. If I can package up your algorithms with a product I'm deploying, I'll be happy to pay for it (provided that real customer value is being added which for now I'm assuming).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Check out www.wikiwarp.com/go

 _made along with HN user jsomers_</comment>


BBC Freeview HD content management - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/01/freeview_hd_content_management.html

<comment><USER2> "The proposed system is designed to make sure that the vast majority of consumers [...] can watch, record and move Freeview HD programmes between their own devices without ever knowing there is any content management present (like most people don't even know that content on DVDs is encrypted)."

"At the same time, it provides just enough protection to prevent the casual and incremental erosion of the value of HD broadcast content."

Most users are unaware DVDs are encrypted because determined reverse engineers published circumvention tools far and wide. If anything they should be striving for just a little more success than DVD DRM.</comment>


Instruction Synthesis Is Fun and Weird - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1219 <comment><USER2> It's very impressive that the synthesizer came up with that instruction sequence. The technique used is too slow for general compiler optimization (tens of seconds to an hour for short programs) but useful for specialist problems.

This is worth trying on bit-pushing algorithms such as crypto and compression algorithms. Those use so much CPU time that the effort is justified. It might also be useful for generating code that uses MMX/SSE2/3/4 instructions.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Of course, at some level this isn't very different from what compilers have > been doing for ages, if we consider the source language program to be the > specification, but when we're doing synthesis the connotation is that the > specification isn't directly implementable using standard compiler > techniques.

I guess compiling lazy functional languages was synthesis at one point, too, before people really figured out how to do that efficiently via eg the tagless spineless g-machine.

I wonder whether synthesis is like AI: whenever we understand how to do something, like play chess, it's no longer AI.

EDIT: Comments on the site delve into that very topic.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool! And somewhat scary, shifting the work of the human to verify and understand machine-generated code.

Also, obligatory nitpick: the example naive C implementation uses bitwise AND (&) when it means boolean AND (&&), the line that starts:

        return
            (n00 == n01) & (n00 == n02)

This is bad, since bitwise AND in C isn't short-circuiting. It's also bad since it's semantically weird, the things being AND:ed are obviously truth values (the results of lots of == operators), which are not necessarily the same as "raw" bits.

<comment><USER5> In C, == simply produces a numeric value (0 or 1). There's nothing "weird" about the subsequent operation of & on those values.

There's no effects to make short-circuiting a problem, either - on the contrary, it is likely that the programmer had branchless code in mind.

<comment><USER4> _Blush_.

You're right, at least in that == produces 0 or 1. I was sure it had been "ported" to produce _Bool when that was added (which then of course automatically converts to 0 or 1 as needed), but that seems not to be the case.

I still think the ANDs should be boolean (i.e. &&) though, but perhaps your hunch about branchlessness is right.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can I get a less intense summary?

<comment><USER7> "you can make computers do things you have to think about to understand."

<comment><USER8> or maybe even "you can get computers to figure things out, and it's cool when the computer reasons something in a way you hadn't thought of"</comment></comment></comment>


Swift Compilation Time Reporting at Tumblr - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.tumblr.com/post/144151794436/swift-compilation-reporting-at-tumblr <comment><USER2> I've had an implicit mixed type array that turned REPL into an amazing picture show.</comment>


NYPD Officers Can Lie and Brutally Beat People – And Still Keep Their Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/secret-nypd-files-hundreds-of-officers-committed-serious? <comment><USER2> My main complaint about police is that they just aren't subject to the same laws as everyone else. Besides the more attention grabbing abuses one thing that really bothers me is that they can't really even be held accountable for simple things like speeding even when they are off duty. I've never understood the justification that the laws that are important enough to enforce on the general populace aren't important enough to enforce on themselves.

<comment><USER3> I don't think anyone really agrees that it's right, it's just that peers won't enforce the law against each other, especially if nobody above them will. For this reason, there's often a police of the police, such as Internal Affairs in the US, but they're usually interested in larger infractions than speeding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder whether a reason for this is that it would be legally impossible for the city to fire the officers for their actions whilst simultaneously denying wrongdoing in legal battles (to seek a lower settlement).</comment>


Show HN: Churni, Reduce churn with a better cancellation process - <AUTHOR> https://www.churni.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Founder here, I left my full-time job 4 months ago and have been working very hard to build & bootstrap this SaaS project. I was previously working at GitBook (a SaaS documentation plaftorm) as a software engineer and I identified this opportunity when we were trying to reduce our churn.

Churni makes it easy to create a better cancellation process & implement retention strategies such as giving a free month, a discount or scheduling a call to save customers. It also allows you to collect & analyze customer feedback to prevent future churn.

If you want to know more about why I'm building this, my motivations & challenges, I've written an article about it: [https://www.churni.io/blog/introducing- churni/](https://www.churni.io/blog/introducing-churni/)

I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and am happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Awesome responsive design by Stuff and Nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/we_are_the_mods_we_are_the_mods_we_are_we_are_we_are_the_mods <comment><USER2> Somebody help me out, because I don't get it. Is it supposed to be "awesome" at each particular size, by itself, without resizing? Because it looks pretty "normal" at each size. Would it be "awesome" if you didn't use the magic keyword "responsive" which let me know I should start dragging the window resizing handle to make things happen?

Because people don't go around resizing web pages. They open it in one size (namely: as big as possible), and pretty much leave it there. And if they do resize it, it's not to see it change.

I'm not trying to crap all over the design itself. It looks good. I can only assume it addresses their target audience. And I can appreciate the benefits of having a single set of HTML/CSS that scales to all sizes.

<comment><USER3> It definitely addresses their target audience. They're a web design firm that claims it has a reputation for designing "flexible websites that look fabulous on every type of device."

Being a design firm, their use of eye candy works for potential clients who may not be too technical, yet realize there's this need for "making my web look good on my phone and computer" (as one former client once said to me).

And it's pretty nifty eye candy too. It's the first time I've seen someone change an illustration based on a viewport size. Not groundbreaking, but a pretty neat idea.

Oh, and to address your question about who would ever resize their browser to see this - only developers would do that. These could be developers working for their potential clients, which means this eye candy can be a good conversion tool.

End users wouldn't resize browsers like this, of course. An end user would see just one of the illustrations, depending on which device they used. On an iPhone, they get the thinnest illustration. On an iPad and some laptop browser windows, they get the middle illustration. On large screens, they get the largest illustration.

<comment><USER2> So, my point is: is the design "awesome" without resizing the window?

I don't think so (not that the design isn't good). But it's even a little awkward at the smallest size, because you see a transitional animation whenever you load the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is indeed awesome. Tons of fun just dragging the window resize handle around, and watching the presentation update fairly intelligently in real time...!

I wish more sites would at least think a little about this sort of thing. I like to keep my browser in a small window if I can, just to let me use other apps along side it on my desktop machine. Unfortunately all too many sites just look awful unless you give keep the browser window large...</comment>


Some Notes on Orbital Mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1774 <comment><USER3> Tangential to his point, but N-Body simulations like this are almost a perfect fit for GPU computation. The power of modern GPU's is astonishing. It's probable that he could get his "about a day" calculations down to a few minutes, or alternatively, keep the runtime the same and dramatically improve the accuracy or length of simulation.

Here's a couple of recent papers:

Using Graphics Processing Units to solve the classical N-body problem in physics and astrophysics [http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5234](http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5234)

The GENGA Code: Gravitational Encounters in N-body simulations with GPU Acceleration [http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.2324](http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.2324)

<comment><USER4> I don't think that that is a good fit for this case.

Remember - he's using only ~11 bodies. The problem remains mainly sequential for that number of bodies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really good article. I've only had time to skim so far, but it's impressive.

I happen to be a physicist too, and my stance on climate change is identical to yours. I don't think we'll ever have a climate model with detailed predictive ability: the system is too complex and the initial conditions too uncertain. But we really need to stop changing the composition of the atmosphere; mainly, we need to move quickly away from burning coal, for several reasons. I agree that we should do this through incentives and development of alternatives, not through a "revolutionary" approach.

It was refreshing to read something rational about climate. Everything I've seen lately (although this isn't my field) is either "we can't predict climate so we should stop worrying and just keep burning coal" or "it's already too late because the models are true and we have to shut everything down now or we're all going to die."

On your orbital simulations: you seem to be using physical units. Often people avoid some of the very big or small numbers by using, say, the Earth-Sun distance as the unit of length or the Earth mass as the mass unit. Do you just prefer physical units, or are you doing this and I missed it? Either way, very interesting demonstration of the effect of the Moon on the Earth orbit - <USER2> not have guessed this result.

P.S.: Go gnuplot!

</comment><comment><USER6> I certainly agree with the author's conclusions. Frankly, I think the discussion on Anthropogenicity of Global warming is irrelevant.

We are in an era, aptly called the Anthropocene, where Humans, while spreading like cancer, are basically taking crucial breathing space away from our co- habitants.

I wish there were some sort of joint efforts underway to curb populations, in countries like India, and at the same time curb consumption in the Western world.

Sadly, the debates are all extremely partisan, and play by old - petty- rules of geopolitics.

<comment><USER7> So, explain to me who gets to live and who doesn't?

<comment><USER8> It doesn't have to be that way. Simply making it less fashionable to have kids would make a big dent in the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious about his use of Runge-Kutta. IANA numerical methods expert, but it seems like this is exactly what symplectic integrators ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symplectic_integrator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symplectic_integrator)) are for. Looks like he gets very good results, but how trustworthy is Runge- Kutta?

From his perspective, of course, using Runge-Kutta makes perfect sense. This is "Huh: I have this tool, and applying it to this problem wouldn't be too hard; would the tool work?", not "I should create a new tool."

ETA: couple of forgotten words.

<comment><USER10> I agree in general, and it would have been nice to see some plots of some of quantities that should be conserved, e.g. how well does his simulation preserve the initial energy and angular momentum?

Having said that, it is an adaptive RK scheme, and it seems to work pretty well, the article shows that the results match some reference data quite well, and it even captures some quite subtle effects, most notably the influence of the moon.

<comment><USER11> He mentions a 10% error in energy conservation, so not too great.

Probably he should have done research before he started, he would have found one of the several lecture notes that tell you how to integrate orbits. They tell you that symplectic methods are great for time reversible problems.

Or he would have found one of the public codes for integrating the solar system very far into the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> RK4 is not a good choice for periodic systems.

It may be better to use a symplectic integrator.

<comment><USER12> A number of people have suggested this and I've now looked into the question a bit.

Curiously, the comparisons I've seen between RK4 and symplectic integrators all use fixed step sizes. I used RK4 with adaptive step size because I had the code around, having written it for a different project about ten years ago that involved mostly smooth motion with a few tight turns that required a very small time step. By making the step size adaptive I could get decent run-time performance while retaining good accuracy.

I'm tempted now to write a symplectic integrator and see how it performs against adaptive RK4.

<comment><USER4> Use an adaptive symplectic integrator and get the best of both worlds.

Also, I wouldn't call 10% error in an invariant "good accuracy".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The following paper is a better read than OP's, and it also shows some academic refinements in the main number used here. This article is (obviously) referenced, as science should be, and makes clear that these points are clearly not ignored by models or unknown in the field.

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010GL045777/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010GL045777/full)

<comment><USER12> Thanks. I've added a link to this. I should hope it's a better read: it reports on more than a week's part-time work written up in a couple of days for a blog post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article, inappropriate title. If you want to discuss the physics of climate models, don't bury the real title in an attempt to appear objective. It will have the opposite effect.

<comment><USER12> I've changed the title to "Some Notes on Orbital Mechanics and Climate Change". My actual motive for the original title was that I thought putting both in was clumsy and ugly, and felt that "Some Notes on Climate Change" would be misleading, as the bulk of the content is about orbital mechanics even though the motivation is related to climate change (which is spelled out clearly in the first sentence.)

I forgot, as I often do, how common the fundamental attribution error is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)</comment></comment>


Is there any tool to see all HN discussions for given URL? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) seems to do it...just search for the URL

</comment><comment><USER3> To my knowledge, not the full URL just the host, but something is something.</comment>


New Feature: Delay - <AUTHOR> There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people.  I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed.  Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.<p>Delay is initially 0.  The maximum effective value is 10. It only applies to comments. <comment><USER2> As someone who often posts comments and then edits or deletes them after a minute or two, I like this feature. For some reason it's always easier to figure out if your sense of humor isn't actually funny or if you're being an asshole after you hit the submit button.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you make the "delay" title in the settings link to this page, and noprocrast link to the page where you first described it?

This would probably help an extremely large number of people who will find an unexplained "delay" field confusing.

It's a good feature. I wish Twitter would implement something similar. I always find myself deleting tweets that I posted as a kneejerk reaction.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat, although ideally it would only delay the RSS feed comment, not the one visible on the web page, so as to keep things moving along quickly.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Many users edit comments after posting them_

Can we have an optional preview page before comments get posted instead? It would be useful for fixing typesetting and other errors before it's actually posted. I fear that having a delay of 10 minutes will drastically increase the number of redundant comments.

<comment><USER6> I just set my delay to 1 minute. That should be more than enough to proofread and check typesetting of average length comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could we have a definition of what this does on the profile page? (Along with the other fields.)

</comment><comment><USER8> PG: Did anyone specifically request this feature or did you work through a bunch of log data and noticed this behavior?

<comment><USER9> I'd guess that he does the post/edit thing too, and is solving his own problem.

I do this with both comments and blog entries. Not sure why, but it's easier to assess what I say when I see it in final form.

<comment><USER8> I do it that way as well for posts + comments, I am guessing, like you, so does PG.

Still is that the only reason or was there a feature request by someone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about making the main rss feed auto-discoverable?

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice! What else is in the works? :)

</comment><comment><USER12> _"... I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments ..."_

Nice my own personal garbage rss feed.

\- does the rss option kick in for all users or karma > n?

\- any idea of how many entries? (20?)

\- will personal rss result in an extra hit on the servers?

</comment><comment><USER13> Simple, useful, congrats.</comment>


Port Canaveral proposes a $500 per ton warfage fee on SpaceX [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.portcanaveral.com/PortCanaveral/media/Commission-Meetings/2016/06-June/E-2-c-7-Consent-Agenda.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> SpaceX spokesman John Taylor: "Currently, the highest anyone pays for incoming cargo is $35.30 per ton"

-[http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/21/11988328/spacex-falcon-9-r...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/21/11988328/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-port-canaveral-florida-tariff-fees)

</comment><comment><USER2> How is aerospace tonnage any different than other tonnage?</comment>


Twitter Valued at $10 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/02/10/twitter-at-10-billion-insanity/

<comment><USER2> 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.

<comment><USER3> Well, the attitudes you cite aren't really in conflict; there's no contradiction in finding the service to be useful, and still having doubts about the valuation of the company.

That said, if you view twitter as an advertising medium, then read-mostly users who tweet rarely (or never) could still be a revenue source, so long as they're reading ads along with everything else. A teenage kid who checks for tweets from Justin Bieber five times a day is a pretty valuable ad target (for some ads), but it might be hard to find a trace of them in the data feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We all already know that this is absolutely insane.

That's $100 Million a year for the next _hundred years_.

<comment><USER5> What makes you think Twitter will:

a) peak at around 200M users b) only manage to monetize $0.50 per user annually?

FB makes $4 per user. You think Twitter won't be able to manage atleast $2? They've barely capitalized on the analytics they perform thus far.

<comment><USER4> In my opinion, twitter vs facebook isn't a fair comparison at all.

Facebook is games, and photos, and chat, and events, and groups, and coca cola's official page. There are a lot of reasons to visit facebook.

Twitter is short status messages. Basically twitter is about half of what facebook was 5 years ago.

I think the 200 Million number is dishonest. I'm a twitter user, and have been for at least a couple of years...but I think I log into the site and look at it about once a week (here is my twitter: <http://twitter.com/blhack>). Most of those logins happen over my phone, meaning I don't see the "trending" ads...or any ads at all.

I said that I don't really use twitter. This wasn't always the case. I used to check it probably 10 times a day...but then a new service came along and replaced it for me. It does a better job at status updates...so I switched (and so did most of my friends). This is also a huge problem for twitter. What is twitter giving me that I can't get elsewhere (in my opinion: nothing...doubly so because the new layout is so hideous)

<comment><USER6> _...but then a new service came along and replaced it for me_

What's the new service?

<comment><USER4> Thingist (<http://thingist.com>), which is one of my side projects.

/ _Warning: Rant_ /

Status updates as they exist right now freaking _suck_. There's not any context, no way to organize them. They're disorganized. I used to always post songs that I liked to my facebook or twitter feed so that I could share them with my friends (as well as find them later). A problem was that I had to search through 5 years worth of statuses to find the songs.

On thingist, it's just a list: <http://thingist.com/t/list/38/>

I used to do the same thing with quotes. If I found a quote I liked, I would usually share it on facebook or twitter. Same problem as with the songs...and now I have a list for it: <http://thingist.com/t/list/51/>

Or bars I like: <http://thingist.com/t/list/65/>

Or things that blow my mind: <http://thingist.com/t/list/134/>

etc. etc.

<comment><USER7> Most users don't want to add context or have to organise stuff. I signed up for your service, added something I like, but having to fill out a form after? Ugh, I am lazy.

The reason why Twitter is successful is that its so simple, there are millions of use cases.

<comment><USER8> I definitely do the "want to share but also 'bookmark'" thing with my Twitter updates. And, yes, hashtags somewhat solve this, but not really - at least not for me. I like the idea of lists on Thingist, but I don't want to have to categorize all my tweets.

If Thingist could automatically categorize my updates, but have a way for me to re-organize them, that'd be ideal. Seems like a decent amount of people fall into your same use case, where they tweet quotes, songs, videos, etc. Some of these would be easier to detect than others, but it's somewhat doable.

This seems some like weird cross section between Twitter, Tumblr, and delicious to me.

<comment><USER4> This is something that I've been trying to figure out for a while now...

Categorizing them is really, really hard to do. Look at the ways that this user uses the site: <http://thingist.com/t/item/3051/>

"Things that make me feel better when I'm sad" would be impossible to detect programatically.

"Show me all of the links to youtube or soundcloud I have posted" is totally doable, and is something that will probably happen within the next couple of days.

<comment><USER8> Touche. I'm thinking way too much like a programmer. Thanks for posting that link, it's a good reminder of how different people are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At this point I'm not sure any of these investors are valuing twitter as a company based on revenues, this is just strategic or "greater fool theory" investing. These companies just think they will be able to sell these shares at a higher price then they bought them to some greater fool later on.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not defending the valuations of Twitter and Facebook (since I think they're too high), but I don't think it's useful to just look at their revenues for the previous year and extrapolate a multiple and call it ridiculous.

Both of those companies haven't had to focus on revenues. Their strategies were to get users first and then worry about money. To me the real test will be what is Facebook's revenue the first year they go public. If they haven't shown any significant growth, then I'd be worried.

<comment><USER11> Did you know that MySpace, on a per user basis, is twice as profitable as Facebook?

One of the problems these companies will face, having coasted on not focusing on revenue for so long, is how to find ways to generate revenue without alienating your user base.

It's a very tricky question, and done wrong, can do some serious damage to your site (I'm looking at you, Digg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> * Unlike Facebook, twitter provides me a real value.

* They not even started yet serious monetization efforts.

* $10B or not is just a function of how devalued USD currency is and at which stage of the bubble we are ($50B for Facebook, $6B for Groupon).

<comment><USER13> I think it's the orders of magnitude out bit that people object to.

Twitter is obviously fun and useful for some, eg journalists who want to pad their celeb gossip news story out with "X tweeted Y", etc

But is it really worth $10bn to humanity? Nope.

Is it really ever going to be worth anything close to that based on revenue? Again, nope.

<comment><USER7> I think you're dreaming. :D

Is Twitter worth $10bn today? Probably not. Could it be? Easily. Hell, I'd invest assuming the CEO was good.

Twitter gets so much attention from its users each day. It has replaced email for social things. I have made _so_ many friends and connections on Twitter it's almost ridiculous.

It's where people go to converse, to ask questions, to find out what is happening in the world. It's why Al Jazeera paid for sponsored search terms during Egypt.

Twitter is giving a voice to people that are previously unheard, and in the future, this will be _huuuuuge_ in 3rd world countries - remember that Twitter can work entirely via SMS. We have no idea what is happening in most parts of the world, but with Twitter, we can listen and learn.

I genuinely think Twitter is one of the most revolutionary products on the internet since email, it has the potential to be _significantly_ more impactful than Facebook, Microsoft or even Google can dream of.

The only thing holding Twitter back is people like you who look at Twitter and don't get it, it is so simple people cannot see why its valuable. :)

 _You_ can follow me on Twitter here: @plc

<comment><USER13> You're high.

> "It has replaced email for social things"

WTF? Maybe for you, if you say so, but people still get several orders of magnitude more social email each day that twitter messages have ever been sent.

> It's where people go to converse, to ask questions, to find out what is > happening in the world. It's why Al Jazeera paid for sponsored search terms > during Egypt.

> Twitter is giving a voice to people that are previously unheard, and in the > future, this will be huuuuuge in 3rd world countries - remember that Twitter > can work entirely via SMS. We have no idea what is happening in most parts > of the world, but with Twitter, we can listen and learn.

That's utter BS. Egyptians on the ground, rioting, don't think "Oooh! I must tweet about this".

I'll give twitter 5 years before it's irrelevant. Maybe 2 years if AOL buys it.

<comment><USER7> > I'll give twitter 5 years before it's irrelevant. Maybe 2 years if AOL buys > it.

I'll take that bet thank you very much. :)

How about: if Twitter hasn't IPO'd / been acquired for greater than $10Bn in 5 years, you owe me dinner. (we live close to each other remember)

<comment><USER13> Deal, although I'm not sure that's a good criteria.

Obviously Twitter is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If AOL had 100Bn in the bank, maybe they'd buy twitter for 10Bn.

But to me, that wouldn't prove Twitter is worth 10bn on an open market, it just validates that AOL is absolutely batshit crazy and likes losing money.

Maybe it's just me... Everyone in my extended family uses email regularly. Most use facebook weekly or daily. Twitter rarely comes up at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So nobody is going to say anything about this :Twitter may be valued as high as $10 billion, based on the microblogging service's recent low level sale discussions with both Facebook and Google executives.

Maybe I missed it but I had no idea Facebook or Google was interested in acquiring Twitter. Google, I expected, Facebook is a bit shocking...What would they do with it? Shut it down? FB needs to be careful--they're already seen as big brother to many.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm reading "Seeking Wisdom", which outlines Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger's investing philosophies. Two things stand out -

1\. They almost never invest in high technology.

2\. They talk about how an unsexy business that produces value for its shareholders is just as good as a sexy one. Money has no memory - money you made from dividends or equity increases in a company that sells bricks is just as good as from a company that sells something more exciting.

Thus, I wonder if a lot of high tech companies are like airlines - people own them because they're sexy, whereas totally decent boring unsexy companies are much lower valued.

That doesn't get into whether Twitter will justify the $10B valuation or not, but interesting to think about - saying Buffet and Munger have done pretty well would be quite the understatement.

<comment><USER16> While I've never read that book, the one bit of Buffett advice that always stuck with me was, "Invest in what you know."

And I definitely know that Twitter ain't worth 10 billion dollars.

<comment><USER17> _And I definitely know that Twitter ain't worth 10 billion dollars._

That's a lot like saying "I know x startup will fail." You are probably right considering vast majority of startups shooting for the stars fail. But you also don't get very many points for predicting what's gonna fail. And so it is better to invest in 30 companies where 29 turn out to be absolute crap and one turns out to be Google versus investing in 30 average companies that have average returns or NOT investing in any company at all.

Of course you can invest in one solid company and have that be google. But I don't know very many people that have done that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Twitter has about 200M users, of which about 20-30M are actually active.

That's $50 per user. Or around $400 per active user.

Nuts.</comment>


Ask and you shall receive: Filepicker.io now supports IE, Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://filepicker.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Just shipped it. I've been trying to reach out to people who said they wanted it, but not everyone has emails.

Enjoy!</comment>


Android users will surpass iPhone users by end of 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/12/mobilebeat-android-users-will-surpass-iphone-users-by-end-of-2010/ <comment><USER2> What I'd want to know is what percentage of users faced with a choice of iPhone and Android (on the same carrier) would pick one or the other. As it is right now a lot of people are buying Android phones because the iPhone is not available to them without switching carriers. If that exclusivity expires it could plausibly adjust the trajectories of each of these platforms.

<comment><USER3> I imagine this could be seen by looking at adoption rates in other countries where there isn't exclusivity.

Another data point is how many people are held back by carrier quality. AT&T should be great quality wise for at least 80% of America - so if someone really wanted an iPhone, I feel that most would have switched already.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to see data supporting that 80%. We had AT&T phones through work at my last job, and we'd use our personal Verizon phones because of poor signal quality and dropped calls during service calls.

<comment><USER5> If you believe the rumors, Verizon will be selling the iPhone in January 2011.

<comment><USER6> Most people stopped believing the rumors after around the 5th time they were wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They are basing their guess on stats from AdMob. Everyone, say it with me: Ad traffic does not equal web traffic. Web traffic does not equal market share. Market share does not equal revenue.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you but let's face it, the number of Android devices being sold is increasing each month at a huge rate. Just like Windows outsold Mac, the same will happen with Android. That doesn't mean iPhone will go away though.

<comment><USER9> There's no doubt android will be everywhere eventually -- in a laundry machine, toaster, microwave, etc. However, whether android becomes an actual competitor to iOS is still undecided. App developers on the iOS platform still make around 40x more than android, so companies jumping on that platform right now will most certainly lose money initially.

A few friends of mine run their own ISV producing around 5-10 apps for the iPhone a year and are able to make a decent living (around 100-200k a year). If they focused on android, they'd only be making around 3-5k a year, definitely not enough to be independent!

I think it's too easy to pirate and return apps on android, plus the App market not quite as globally available as iOS. Users on android are too accustomed to downloading free apps -- if it's not free, users don't download it. There are too many steps involved in buying an app, there needs to be far less steps involved so it can be an impulse buy. One also can't do fancier sales models like in-app purchases that the iOS is capable of doing.

I really wish well for android, but I feel like Google just doesn't know marketing & sales like Apple does.

<comment><USER10> _I think it's too easy to pirate and return apps on android_

Around 5% of my app's purchases are returned. Even if every one of those is a pirate, that's not too bad. Agreed with the rest of your points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do people insist on writing like this? The first sentence is the only piece of information in this article. The rest is filler, mindless regurgitation for people who just woke up from a 30-year coma combined with random predictions based on nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the writers at these blogs are expected to produce tons and tons of content per day, and thoughtful, insightful content is not something that can be produced in 15 slapdash minutes.

<comment><USER11> I guess you're right. If you're writing about a topic that your audience is also well-informed about, odds are that you're wasting their time regurgitating such factoids as "iPhone only comes in one form factor" and "there are 50 different Android phones". I'm guessing anyone reading VentureBeat knows that, it's not exactly USA Today's audience. It's a plague on the internet, not just with paid bloggers but even people who are writing for their own sites who feel the need to tell you things you already know for paragraphs on end before getting to the point.

In fact, if your headline had included the phrase "AdMob chief says", _all_ the information in the article would be contained in your headline.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope I'm wrong. Because the alternative suggests that our tech media is, by and large, as useless or even more useless than our traditional media (our, meaning the United States'. Apologies to the other 6.5BB people worldwide).

The people who are seen as the true 'luminaries' of tech journalism are simply the ones who've been able to make the most noise:

Steve Gillmor writes the most incoherent essays I've ever read.

Robert Scoble is simply excited about _everything_ (but occasionally takes time to call me an idiot when I criticize his photography).

John Dvorak has admitted to and seems proud of being a professional troll.

MG Siegler...I don't even know where to start with him. Frankly, I would probably believe he was a cunning piece of software had I not met him at WWDC 2009.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a much needed additional data set:

"The average Android user is spending just . . . $0.50 among all applications."

"iPhone users are spending an estimated . . . $5.00 among all applications."

Those data sets are measured monthly - <http://fadellc.com/press_1.html>

So does this mean that Android needs 10x traction to create the same opportunity for your general app maker?

<comment><USER13> IMHO, one of the big things the Android Market is missing is Gift Cards. Gift Cards make it easy to spend money (after all, once you've received the card, what else can you with it?). They also make it much easier for teenagers to buy apps, a demographic who likes to spend money, but seldom has ready ability to charge to credit cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They seem to be tying innovation and market share which makes no sense to me.

Further, the number of Windows users is significantly higher than Linux or Mac users, yet I'm still going to stick with Linux and the Mac regardless. As long as there are enough users to keep a platform viable and profitable for the vendors, I doubt users care about the percentages.

</comment><comment><USER15> This seems fairly reasonable of a prediction. What I wanna know is when there will be more Android developers than iPhone developers?

<comment><USER16> That seems to already have happened.

[http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/07/mobile-developer- ec...](http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/07/mobile-developer- economics-2010-the-migration-of-developer-mindshare/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if the rapid fragmentation of the Android OS might degrade the Android experience and its public perception. If so I suspect that Android might become commiditized and therefore vulnerable in a way that Apple's experience is not.</comment>