Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they are stored (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> > Along with the standard data, the original transaction also contains the > message: 'The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for > banks'[3]. Presumably this is a political commentary on Bitcoin compared to > the insolvency of "real" banks.

While it may be political commentary, including a headline from a widely known newspaper also proves that the block was created sometime after that date.

<comment><USER3> Yes, afaik this was the purpose... to prove the creator had not pre-mined a bunch of coins and was then going to cash then in later.

Which is incredible foresight, because that's what ended up happening with some altcoins.

<comment><USER4> There wasn't any competition to mine it for a long time, so post-mining would have been just as effective as pre-mining. We know that Satoshi ended up mining a lot of Bitcoin. Of course, all well deserved. Further reading on this topic: [http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2014/08/167-satoshis- hashra...](http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2014/08/167-satoshis- hashrate.html?m=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't that mean that a whole blockchain could possibly be deemed illegal in some country due to copyright infringement or other liability of publications laws?

I mean if you can't erase the data and keep publishing it, some would say you are liable.

I see that as a particularly twisted legal argument, but couldn't some country use that against blockchain infrastructure if they feel like it?

<comment><USER6> Interesting twist if bitcoin blockchain would be found to distribute illegal porn or private/secret/classified data(it already stores some wikileaks content). # How does government stop/censor a global p2p network? I guess they would put pressure on developers and bitcoin foundation to remove the offending data and update the (official) software to block/reject/deny any upload of it. I assume it would have to employ heavy filtering to prevent rogue actors from spamming illegal content and some functionality to revoke bad blocks(will probably require major changes in ledger code). If there is no change in client software it becomes exponentially harder to censor the data if not impossible: at some point this could be used as legal reason vs anyone hosting the full blockchain. The blockchain would have to be hard-forked to point to the censored version. (I have no idea how this suppose to work since each block depends on previous one: any incident will require to create a new blockchain fork from the start of offending block and this probably won't scale to dedicated attackers inserting illegal content into every block).

<comment><USER7> That's the beauty of a blockchain (and the rules that dictate how it is written) - one does not simply "remove the offending data".

There are enough different parties involved that acquiring consensus to make historical changes is practically impossible. The data that is there, at least several blocks prior to the current block, is permanent.

An attempt to do this would scare the market, affecting the value of bitcoin. The miners don't want that, so they will act in their greedy self-interest - which means they won't attempt to do such a thing.

<comment><USER5> Sorry if I'm naive but another thing I've always wondered about that is the exponential size of the blockchain.

I mean if Bitcoin ever gain real traction isn't it pretty inefficient to store all the data and replicate it around? Storage now seem infinite but practicality it is not, won't current blockchain be saturated to the point of uselessness when/if it reach usage level of an actual banking network?

"Let think about scaling later" is maybe not a good idea for a currency implementation...

<comment><USER8> There's a new block every X minutes. Where's the exponential growth?

<comment><USER5> Well as far as I know X already tend to grow since Bitcoin introduction and it's a big point of discord between developers ("should we increase block size" argument as far as I know).

Now to be more accurate it might rather be a growth according to a logistic curve. Right now Bitcoin is used only by early adopters, but should Bitcoin usage diffuse among general customers it will growth quasi exponentially before plateauing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I once used the OP_RETURN to do the nerd equivalent of carving a heart in a tree.

Tx `26c5ca404cc37abf77fc722a11f56b34a481f7879b1c11fe68fcdcdf2a15626f`[1] it contains the following hex data in the OP_RETURN:

      40616d696e67696c616e69203c332040697a7a617368616869642023536179497457697468426974636f696e2023466c6f6f64546865426c6f636b636861696e

Which when converted to a string says:

 _@amingilani <3 @izzashahid #SayItWithBitcoin #FloodTheBlockchain_

</comment><comment><USER10> These days getting a 4kb image into the blockchain would cost you around 44 USD.

i.e. 4096 x 200 satoshi fee = 819200 satoshis about .00819200 BTC.

Add approximately a 50% overhead in the way you would need to store that image and you're looking at about .016 BTC.

<comment><USER11> transactions have been going through for a several weeks with 1-20 satoshi per byte. Unless you're in a hurry to get that image in a block, you can do it for 10 to 200 times cheaper than quoted price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A map to find treasure or secret passwords or the end of the world plans...Just imagine what could end up in the blockchain. Part time capsule part safe part invisible ink part James bond part infinity. Just think of all the craziness..I need to put something in the blockchain. But what...

<comment><USER13> [https://proofofexistence.com/](https://proofofexistence.com/)

<comment><USER9> Or my favorite: stamp.io

If you have an Estonian ID, Stamp.io lets you sign it too!

Full disclosure: I know the Stamp.io team, and they're awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> BTW, please don't use this address-spamming technique! You can simply put data after an OP_RETURN, which, while permanently encoding it in the blockchain, ensures that nodes know it can't be spent.

<comment><USER10> That's fixed to 80bytes, perhaps space for a few smileys.

<comment><USER14> But the encode-in-address method is limited to 20 bytes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> (2014). Wonder how much other stuff has been added since then.

<comment><USER9> Well, if you check out tx `26c5ca404cc37abf77fc722a11f56b34a481f7879b1c11fe68fcdcdf2a15626f`[1] it contains the following hex data in the OP_RETURN:

      40616d696e67696c616e69203c332040697a7a617368616869642023536179497457697468426974636f696e2023466c6f6f64546865426c6f636b636861696e

Which when converted to a string says:

 _@amingilani <3 @izzashahid #SayItWithBitcoin #FloodTheBlockchain_

Clearly I love my wife (fiance actually but give it few months)

[1]: [https://blockchain.info/tx/26c5ca404cc37abf77fc722a11f56b34a...](https://blockchain.info/tx/26c5ca404cc37abf77fc722a11f56b34a481f7879b1c11fe68fcdcdf2a15626f?show_adv=true)</comment></comment>


How Instagram's Mike Krieger Took Its Engineering Org from 0 to 300 People - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/how-instagram-co-founder-mike-krieger-took-its-engineering-org-from-0-to-300-people/ <comment><USER2> tldr - with lot of cash.</comment>


What Twitter Can Be - <AUTHOR> http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ <comment><USER2> For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app, ...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their developer program:

No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, ....

I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large part of the Internet (even more than today).

<comment><USER3> But how exactly do they make money on developers using their API?

<comment><USER4> The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use Slack because companies host their support on it.

By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps. There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming API.

<comment><USER5> Brings value is not the same as brings money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to be on twitter. Left because nobody talks with you, just at you. And when you do actually get a conversation going, it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations. The hashtag doesn't do much to foster conversation either. Merely a way to label slogans. This dichotomy between being a public feed but also being a place for conversations is at the core of why twitter sucks.

<comment><USER7> _it 's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations_

That, at least, shouldn't be the case. Your conversations live in the Notifications tab.

<comment><USER8> Twitter's conversation handling has improved a lot lately.

<comment><USER9> Can you give an example?

<comment><USER8> These lines for conversations are new. If you follow the original poster and one of the people replying, it will pull out their responses and put them right in the timeline with a blue line. It sorts in your timeline according to the latest reply from someone you follow. Below that, you can see someone replying to themselves in a longer series of tweets, and Twitter folds them up so they don't clutter your timeline too bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing about Twitter is that it should have been TV vs trying to be channels. I don't know why they were never comfortable enough in their skin to let third parties extend the living heck out of their platform. Using Twitter and getting a Gen 1.0 iPhone were very similar experiences. Pretty much wow and thinking the sky was the limit (vs what they actually were initially). Apple harnessed an app developer community and made their product 10x more valuable. Twitter locked everyone out. I always thought the Twitter competitor launched by Dalton (App.net) totally missed the boat. We didn't need a paid service to save us from ads we needed an open free platform that drew in millions and millions of users to draw in app developers etc. That would have crushed Twitter.

<comment><USER11> Except that TVs are commodities compared to channels. They didn't want to commoditise their own business.

<comment><USER10> hah well all analogies break down if you peck at them long enough. Twitter should have enabled developers to create great things on their medium vs trying to be both the platform and the app creator.

<comment><USER12> But the analogy doesn't break down. The value is in owning the medium. This is exactly why entities like comcast don't want to become dumb pipes. yes it is better for everyone if they do, but in their shorter term interest, it's much better to own the high value stuff.

<comment><USER10> It does breakdown. Twitter done right is a marketplace with network effects. ISP is an easily replaceable service. If I'm CNN I can't just pick up and leave Twitter for another Twitter at a lower cost. Same thing all the way down to a tech company with 10 people who use it to communicate outrages. People are already there. They expect you to be there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This might sound very weird in this day and age, but in my professional life (web developer), Twitter and G+ compete content-wise. And G+ wins easily.

Disclaimer: I'm a very light Twitter user. I'm almost surely missing out on features I never bothered to discover.

The main advantage G+ has in my eyes is its signal to noise ratio. It seems far better than Twitter's. Again, specifically in my professional world, quite a lot of relevant people post on G+. I guess they either don't post personal stuff or efficiently use Circles. Many, but definitely not all, are of course close to Google.

Some other advantages for me: the fact that you can read the whole story (not just sentence-per-sentence) and the -theoretical- ability to drag in non- professional relationships (yes, I like Circles).

I realize no one takes G+ serious anymore and that it's a graveyard for most. But it seems to work well for some (professionally). In a way it can make Twitter lose (one of) its edge(s): follow tech-people.

This isn't meant as a G+ promotion. I just wanted to make clear why Twitter might not be a good fit for some.

<comment><USER14> There's a single thing G+ can offer that Twitter doesn't: Long posts.

The rest? Bullshit. G+ is a closed and broken platform, built by an advertisement company. It made lots of questionable decisions in the past (this very same person has a blocked G+ account - for real name policy violations - that, combined with the amazing Google customer support means that I will never ever be able to rate an app for my Android phone). There is _nothing_ good about G+.

Twitter sucks in various ways. But G+ is not better. Not at all. Unless we're really just talking 'character counts'. In all other ways? Worse, so. much. worse.

<comment><USER15> > G+ is a closed and broken platform, built by an advertisement company.

So just like Twitter then?

<comment><USER14> That's a good point. I admit defeat.

The single retort I can come up with is that I'd still prefer to feed anything _but_ Google with data, but really.. You're right. No difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Twitter's biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value along with user's willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that.

So Twitter tries to do the work for you, but guessing exactly who/what you'd be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible.

The closest they can get is the current logged-out homepage: "Here are a bunch of random categories. You like the NBA? Maybe celebrity chefs? Cute animals? Country artists?" (Those are literal examples.) Total shot in the dark.

<comment><USER17> I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also.

Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years curating my feed.

There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is why so many people don't stick around.

The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people to follow based on those interests.

However, they often recommend celebrities and 'popular' accounts.

These people are often terrible at Twitter, so new users see a bunch of boring, self-promotional content in their feed and don't come back.

<comment><USER18> How did you go about curating your feed?

I tried to get into Twitter for a while and ultimately stopped using it.

Part of the problem I think is I have kind of a wide range of interests -- sports, software, entrepreneurship, etc. So Twitter probably can't gauge my interests very well. I ended up with a lot of those self-promotion feeds and ESPN writers, but nothing ultimately with substance (except for certain people that I found via other sources -- like if I follow their blog, I'd follow their Twitter too).

It'd be better if it was easier to categorize the feeds I'm following and view by category depending on what I feel like at the moment. I know they have lists, but I only just found that a little bit ago -- and it's so hidden that I actually have to _type the URL into my address bar_ because I can't get there from a link on the homepage. Viewing by category should be, if not the default, then one big link away from the initial page.

<comment><USER19> Lists are the way to go.

Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. I had several abortive attempts at Twitter before I 'got it'. You have to build up your feed slowly and organically. Start by making the effort to follow a few, very high-quality accounts based on your interests, then use these accounts to find others, and so on (unfollowing as necessary to keep the signal/noise ratio as high as possible). This requires substantial effort on the user's part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At first Twitter was awesome because of their API but then that closed off so now I have to use their stuff only I feel as if they haven't done anything in the past few years but scale.

I've tried being a user for years but they really need a better way to manage and view lists. The frequency of celebrity tweets vs. friend tweets vs. company tweets is all different. How I ingest that content is differs depending on my mood or what I want. Thus far, there's no easy way to sort through the content to quickly find what I'm looking for or interested in. It all requires endless scrolling and weeding out the noise.

<comment><USER22> What is it about Twitter's list manager that doesn't address this issue for you?

<comment><USER19> It does not exist on mobile?

<comment><USER23> Personal Profile > Settings Cog > Lists

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Not present on my iOS app version, but perhaps it was added in the last few months. I've delayed app updates because of the risk of auto-playing video ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The scariest statistic in that article is that one billion users tried twitter, then walked away. I'm sure some of those are novelty accounts that just never took off, not truly unique users, but that is still a ton of people who already wrote twitter off as irrelevant to their life.

That is a large hurdle to overcome. Where are you going to grow your userbase if that many people already made their decision against you? I can assure you, that is not a tech question, it is a marketing issue.

</comment><comment><USER25> I got frustrated trying to follow various conversations on Twitter, so I wrote a tool to do this:

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloonOnTheMoon.png)

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainingFirstElement.png)

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20150325.png)

<comment><USER9> Have you created a web service or app around it? Or is it on Github? A visual conversion graph would indeed help, the Twitter UX isn't really useable to follow up any longer conversation. I assume the Twitter UX has been even slightly degraded a bit over time for A) scalability reasons B) so that users stay longer on Twitter (good for advertisement statistics)

<comment><USER25> Currently it's a complete dog's breakfast of scripts and hacks. People seem to like it, so I might look to package it properly, unless someone else wants to do it.

<comment><USER26> What are you using to draw the hierarchy?

<comment><USER25> dot/GraphViz

I curl the tweet, look for references to other tweets, curl them, lather/rinse/repeat until there are no more. Then I build a dot file and call GraphViz on it.

Trivial stuff - people seem to like it, and I've found it very useful. I should learn how to use GitHub and throw it up on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One of the best use cases of twitter for me is customer service, a few complaints about @comcast is way more effective than calling and waiting on the phone for 20 minutes and fighting with the customer service agent... I was able to resolve my issue with a few back and forth DMs with @comcastcares ... I don't think many people have enjoyed this experience, it's like night and day.

<comment><USER28> Customer service via twitter just feels wrong to me. I'm a low-frequency twitter user so maybe I don't "get it", but it feels very much like shouting into the void. There's no feedback saying "yeah, we heard you".

Whereas with a phone call you're actively navigating their support structure, or with a contact form, where you have a tracking id in your email box.

<comment><USER29> Does it feel right to a part of the consensus customers should have regarding large companies? It does for me.

The Comcast site has a form you can fill out to remove you from their snail mail list. As someone has been a customer for 4 years, getting advertisements in my mailbox made me irrationally angry. I filled out the form but saw no drop in volume. Taking my silly issue public via Twitter helped get the problem resolved.

I had a sense of pride knowing I publicly shamed Comcast enough that they did something about their poor mailing practices. And it only took a few days and maybe 500 total characters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _" Shortcomings in the direct response advertising category have resulted in the company coming in below the financial community's quarterly estimates."_

Well, yes. The problem with all social networks is that ads interfere with the "social". Ads are a big annoying guy getting in your face when you're trying to talk to someone. Or worse, they're your (soon to be former) "friends" who've been tricked into "sharing" (i.e. spamming) ads.

Remember, Twitter's big period of growth was before they had ads. They only put in ads when they had users hooked.

The first one is always free.

<comment><USER31> The direct effect of Twitter ads isn't that bad; by the standards of web advertising it's hardly intrusive. It's the probable side effects of optimising for that revenue stream that are the trouble. One of Twitter's virtues from an advertiser's perspective is that most recent Tweets are often barely more compelling than than whatever message or link they're trying to promote. Streams which efficiently filter out irrelevance mitigate against that[1]. Reverse chronological order with ads interspersed is probably a local optimum for ad discoverability, and I bet the marketing guys test that....

Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads" is going to be a much-requested feature.

Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just _too restrictive_ for the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS, but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be 250-400 characters.

[1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era. But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content, some of it promoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Twitter lists (especially in combination with Flipboard) are useful for filtering/curation, but have seen few improvements and remain unavailable in the mobile app.

Lists could exhibit business value comparable to Pinterest curation, if Twitter paid any attention to the feature. They are micro-social networks that amplify the value of Twitter's main accomplishment: a directory of pseudonymns for writers, marketers, subject-matter experts and other publishers of time- sensitive content.

<comment><USER32> How do you combine twitter list with flipboard?

<comment><USER19> Username (top left corner) -> Following -> Accounts -> Twitter -> Your Lists -> Follow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Twitter died to me when they closed down their API's.

<comment><USER34> I remember hearing presentations from their devs about twitter annotations, metadata etc. Such enthusiasm at those times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe its just me, im too old and not famous enough...but Twitter just seems to me to be a celebrity (that includes fame of any kind) circle jerk...and if you're not famous, you dont exist. Its weird. I hated fb towards the end of my usage of it...but at least like the old sitcom 'Cheers', at least sometimes you could go 'where everybody knows your name...'

</comment><comment><USER36> Honest question: I've tried Twitter a bunch of times, tried to engage with it for a couple weeks, then given up when I felt that either the tweets were not curated enough for me or that nobody was listening to me. Is there some guide for technically literate people to start using Twitter effectively? Right now I use Feedly and blogs to serve this purpose, but the appeal of real time news a la Twitter seems quite sweet, if only I could tap into it.

<comment><USER37> Yes, please! From other peoples' descriptions, I can rationally understand what benefit Twitter brings them, but I have never been able to replicate that for myself.

I have always walked away, convinced that it's a real-time medium that requires constant attention, because I find it to be nigh impossible to read up on any discussion ex post facto.

That is especially true for any discussion with more than two participants — those are tree-ish in nature to me, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how anybody makes sense of them in Twitters one-dimensional chronological organisation.

Help please?

<comment><USER38> To steal someone else's metaphor, try thinking of Twitter as a river. If you try to bottle it up or consume it all you'll drown. If, on the other hand, you dip in for a swim as you please, you might find it all bit more manageable. As the rush of tweets flows by you, just check out some, then turn your phone off and carry on. When you load it again, don't feel you have to go back and "catch up" or give it the constant attention you mentioned.

YMMV, but I also think the emphasis on "conversations" is a bit misleading. Lots of people do have conversations on there, but I personally love it for breaking news, link-sharing, jokes, and photos. If your frame of reference is a forum with posts, or an article's comments, or a real-life conversation... you're going to have a bad time.

<comment><USER39> I've heard this too; it drives the completionist in me nuts. After reading a Twitter stream for 5 minutes, I look up and wish I had caught up on the news, or read a short article from Instapaper / Pocket.

I have no doubt this says more about me than about Twitter, but I never could never see a way around it. Similar experience with Reddit, comparing the default front page to one tailored to the subreddits I enjoy the most. Of course I gave up on Reddit too after a while...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the stained toilet bowl of human interaction. Twitter would instantly better if it forced real names and banned people for abusive comments outright. Until then, Twitter is unusable.

<comment><USER41> The idea of an everyone-can-talk-to-everyone social network is initially appealing. You can write (and there were) thousands of articles about twitter extolling the virtues of the "internet community" or "the conversation" and "personal brands." It was all very 1995 internet enthusiasm with a new coat of paint. Then everyone tried it, and it turns out nobody wants to hear from everybody.

Trolls/abuse/whatever aren't the problem. They're the most extreme manifestation of the real problem: everyone wants to broadcast themselves to as many people as possible but nobody actually wants to listen to anyone but a subset of the people they've already decided to hear from.

But twitter can't restructure as an RSS reader for worthless thoughts (and links to worthwhile thoughts) for those with short attention spans. Maybe they can clamp down on abuse, it might give the flash in the pan a few more years of life.

<comment><USER40> So lets see. in about 30 minutes I can deck into the Twitter API and create about 100 accounts and cron job your Twitter account for a post and then inundate you with thousands of crazy insults from random accounts. I can do all of this because you said you didn't like blue cheese and I for one sir think you are an IDIOT and should be taught a severe lesson for not liking blue cheese. ~Twitter Reality.

<comment><USER41> I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand what your post is trying to say.

I just see a non sequitur about twitter abuse. Did you interpret when I said abuse is not _THE_ problem with twitter, that I meant I don't find abuse on twitter to be _A_ problem?

That wasn't what I was trying to say, but otherwise I'm confused as to how your post is a reply to mine.

<comment><USER40> Just in case you don't get it. This is the typical train of thinking on Twitter. You say something intelligent looking for conversation, and eventually you are going to run into the crazies on the platform just looking to broadcast thoughts that have nothing to do with the original point and then quickly turns into negative, abusive slop. (the blue cheese remark should have clued you in.) I understand fully what you are saying, but respectfully disagree. Clearly tales of abuse and outright ugly human behaviour turn millions upon millions of core users off the platform. This has been said a dozen times by Dick Costello himself. That being said, I can see your point, and will pontificate on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Though you wouldn't know it by looking at the stock price or by reading the headlines, Twitter is owed recognition for ramping up their product development"

Sacca is incorrect when it comes to Twitter's stock price. They're being given an epic benefit of the doubt on their valuation. Few companies get that sort of charity; ask Groupon, Angie's List, Etsy, etc. about that.

They're substantially overvalued by any normal market standards. A $24b market cap for a company that has never - in nearly a decade of existence - earned a profit; worse, they've bled a billion in red ink over that time. It's also trading at a rich sales multiple of about 16.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think of.

<comment><USER16> I _think_ what you're imagining is pretty much what we've been building for a year or so, but I could be wrong.

It seems obvious - a lot of "news reports" nowadays are pretty much a couple lines of text with a bunch of tweets dropped down beneath them. But making that scalable is actually pretty difficult.

The first difficulty (and we've confirmed this and talked about the problem multiple times with directors of product at Twitter) is finding what the "best" stuff is.

We tried some time ago doing that for news - can we just algorithmically find the best tweets with regard to topic x? Even given full API access, the answer is either "not really" or "yes, but austenallred and his team aren't good enough programmers to figure it out."

There simply aren't enough inputs - it's the same reason Google has always struggled at real-time news. There are favorites and retweets, but those are largely a function of how big someone's following is. Some guy walking on the street taking amazing photos will never have as many retweets as CNN, even if you try to control for the number of followers, or measure retweets as a function of the number of followers somehow.

Then even if you could get that, the tweets aren't always analyzed in the right context. Run that type of analysis and the top tweet is likely to be a joke tweet or something like "OMG I'm praying for Boston."

The best solution that we can come up with is crowdsourcing the finding and curation of tweets. It's working OK, but there's a long way to go. Basically we let everyone find and submit tweets, tag them with specific topics, and then upvote/downvote and fact-check for accuracy. (for details on how it works, see [https://grasswire.com/about](https://grasswire.com/about))

Once you add a couple lines of text, you can turn the raw firehose of Twitter into something that can be consumed by somebody like my mom. That, I think, it a really big deal. It's working fairly well for news right now, and as more people join and submit it gets better. Our hopes are that we can expand into different verticals, and create daily digests of the best stuff with regard to topic x that you can consume in 30 seconds.

<comment><USER44> Where can I find what you're building?

<comment><USER16> [https://grasswire.com](https://grasswire.com)

We basically see this as the back-end that could power some really cool stuff (apps, partnerships with publishers)

<comment><USER45> I'm nitpicking but the lack of a scrollbar makes me feel strangely out of control. Any specific reason for the removal ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This article at one point proposes splitting content into separate apps. I'm unsure of the end goal of this; I guess that it's trying to provide a clearer divide for users, allowing them to filter content in a sense. It seems like this would be better solved by filtering better within the app, separating apps is just going to lead to more confusion, imo.

</comment><comment><USER47> Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything?

[http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z](http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z)

I value the service, and am wondering what other people value it at.

I will post the results here after set number of people vote.

 __ _UPDATE_ __Initially I was going to wait a little longer, but after looking at the results from this sample, the trend is pretty be predictable.

RESULTS LINK: (VIEW AFTER VOTING PLEASE) [http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNc...](http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNcxY0oMnk)

I think the results deserve a discussion on their own...

<comment><USER48> I used Twitter quite a bit for work purposes (before I left CNET/CBS last year to found a recommendation startup) and might have paid for it then.

But the value for me was in interacting with a large number of people, and I suspect even charging a few dollars a year would lead to the vast majority of accounts disappearing, reducing the remaining users' incentive to pay, leading to more accounts disappearing, etc.

<comment><USER47> Lets say one had to pay 1 cent to tweet, don't you think that the quality of data would be much better? A lot of spam bots would be out of business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is a great essay (and shows that even if it's predictable, it's always good to balance criticism with praise, support, and a sense of a positive path forward.)

As for Sacca's suggestions, I have mixed feelings on the specific features he suggests for encouraging people to Tweet more ("Tweeting Shouldn't Be So Scary") and increasing engagement ("Using Twitter Doesn't Need To Feel As Lonely") but I like his suggestions about improving the timeline:

"Live Is The Biggest Opportunity Yet."

This is the section he describes most lucidly and is the simplest to implement on top of the existing product. It's currently done in a ham-fisted way—where I am in India it prods me with modal dialogs about cricket matches!—but there will need to be less prodding if it's built as a standard set of pages where you can follow the best tweets for a sporting event, TV show or news topic while the situation is ongoing even if you're logged out. It's a bit like following a hashtag, with some curation and highlighting of popular tweets on the topic thrown in.

"Channels Will Make Twitter Easy, Easy, Easy."

I sort of lost the thread in the middle of reading this in terms of figuring out exactly how this is different from Live or other category based curated tweets but I kinda get it. These are his examples: "Want to know what are the most popular articles linked to on Twitter? That should be a channel. What are the most popular sites linked among the people we follow or people that our friends follow? Great channel. Which books are people Tweeting about? Channel. Which videos are garnering the most attention? Channel. Any particular .gifs blowing up? Channel."

"Twitter's Save Button Would Let You Keep All The Good Stuff."

This is a relatively complex concept and would be difficult to implement in a clear way but I like the idea. "We could keep every product we saw mentioned, every book that looked interesting, every destination we wanted to visit someday, every concert we wanted to go see, and every ad that piqued our curiosity. All of this could be saved to a Vault within Twitter with just one button in line with the RT and Fav buttons in each Tweet."

</comment><comment><USER50> The author of the article is Chris Sacca.

<comment><USER51> Chris has said he's going to be more vocal and clarified his stake in Twitter[1].

[1] [http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed- aqua/](http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-aqua/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > For most people, Twitter is too hard to use.

I don't know how to use twitter and I don't care. Why? Cognitive overhead. I use facebook messenger, whatsapp, HN, stackoverflow, github, Linkedin.

</comment><comment><USER53> Interestingly, Tumblr already implemented some of these suggestions. With such features like "explore" or new search, The discovery of content is unmatched by other social networks. It is also way easier to get likes and reblogs than on Twitter (if you're a regular person, not a celebrity). Having your post go viral (into 1000s of notes) is quite satisfying and would never happen on Twitter if you're not already popular.

</comment><comment><USER54> "Tweet nearby" & "Encrypted tweet nearby" & "P2P Tweet": These three functions would blow the lid off active user growth. Across the globe Twitter remains a key means for promoting events, demonstrations and encouraging political action. Give users the means to reach by locale (Concert), and securely by locale (Flash mob), and P2P (Iran, Syria, China) -- and sit back and watch the audience skyrocket.

<comment> aaron-lebo Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point on Iran, Syria, China, but you are talking about subverting authoritarian governments, right?

Why wouldn't those same governments require Twitter to cut those off? I don't see how a centralized service like Twitter can ever provide that.

<comment><USER55> You are right to point this out. The United States has tried many times to use social media platforms to cause uprising in other nations. These very same nations (including the ones enumerated above) _do_ cut off the services. Take the US installation of ZunZuneo in Cuba and the governments crackdown on personal phones in response - China's ban of Google for US influence and foreign surveillance - Russia's machinations against Facebook for influencing its audience - Kiev's ban of CSOs as Western organization through UNITER was revealed - North Korea's hacking of SONY in response to its partnership with the US State Department and CIA on The Interview - Israel's hatred over Jeremy Bird's participation in "OneVoice" political campaigning over Twitter - etc, etc.

Continuing to use US private companies as soft weapons will increasingly harm the reputations and global standing of these corporations. The military- industrial complex gig is up. Other nations know what's happening. It's merely a matter of denying the company access to a population while making it look not so bad from the PR side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.

<comment><USER57> We tried that. It didn't stick.

You have to remember that in the early days Twitter and a log of competition. Jaiku, Pownce, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, etc.. Then you had the open source versions: Laconi.ca, Status.net, Friendi.ca, GNU Social, Twister, etc..

Say what you will about Twitter, but it's the only thing that ever got traction or had any sticking power.

<comment><USER58> How did Twitter get traction and sticking power where the others failed? What was it doing differently?

<comment><USER59> I think it's because they iterated really fast on new features, and presumably stayed with what was popular. Original Twitter isn't even all that close to what Twitter is today. gnusocial is playing catchup featurewise, moves much slower, and frankly the default theme is really ugly.

<comment><USER58> How did they know what was popular? Which features did they iterate on?

<comment><USER59> I assume they can see what uptake there is for features using analytics, but what comes to mind are native retweets and subtweets. Those are relatively new. They have also changed how blocking works multiple times based on feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Perhaps he should have included this, "we stopped talking about arab spring once we realized how it was a bad job that pushed people into depeer shit, perhaps now is the time to lift the carpet again and start talking about how we can build better tools that are powerful enough to put these fucked up countries back together"

</comment><comment><USER61> I think their time has passed. Social media is not like tv. With t.v., People want good new shows, they don't care if they're from nbc or hbo or someone new. With social media people actually want a new medium every few years. I don't think there is any feature Twitter could add that will overcome this fact.

</comment><comment><USER62> If I were still at Twitter I'd do anything to get Chris on the team.

</comment><comment><USER63> Don't pump. You might consider $WB stock which is way undervalued comparing to $TWTR.

</comment><comment><USER64> Exactly why everyone moved over to App.net, right? Right, guys??</comment>


Polyfills as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://polyfills.io/ <comment><USER2> HTTPS is not working correctly. This site seems to be hosted on Github Pages. So use the HTTP URL: [http://polyfills.io/](http://polyfills.io/).</comment>


Ask HN: How to raise a hacker? - <AUTHOR> I have a 6yo son, who's really interested in engineering (details see below). I'd like to help him develop his interests and skills. Which resources - toys, projects, activities, websites, books etc. would you recommend?
His favorite toy is a German construction set "Fischertechnik" which he play's like a pro, inventing own designs and models. He's very good at handicraft. Is interested in computers (but we almost don't let him play computer games). Likes 3dprinting very much (I've built a Mendel Max a while ago). I can go on, but from all what I see, he's really technically interested.
"How to raise a hacker" is probably a bit too provocative. I have no intention to raise a technologcal wunderkind or force my kid into something he does not want. I'd just really love to help my son develop in the areas he's already interested in - or maybe open a few of the branches he might also find potentially interesting. For instance, programming or electronics. And that we have fun together doing that (you can call me "technically interested" too).
But I have a feeling I'm just not aware of the good options. How would I teach him coding? Introduce to electronics? Robotics?
What I'm looking is basically some general advice. I believe there are a lot of parents here who share their passion for technology with their kids. What would you recommend? What was inspiring for your kids? What was your "best toy ever"? Please share, I'd be very grateful for that.
In case it's relevant, we live in Frankfurt, Germany. Me and my wife, we both work in IT (I'm a dev/architect, she's a test manager). <comment><USER2> The single greatest gift you can bestow upon your children is _reasoned curiosity_. And by reasoned I mean allowing all questions to surface, and to reason about how to understand or answer the question in a practical way.

But as Mz says you must let them do things. We did set a rule that our girls could not own a pocket knife until they were at least 10 years of age and had developed the fine motor skills needed to keep it under control. Once they owned a knife of their own we talked about the "blood ball" which was their name for the concept of not whittling or cutting where someone was within reach of your outstretched arm. That would keep you from stabbing somone next to you if your blade slipped. And we talked about direction (never cut toward your body) Since we camped a lot there were plenty of opportunities to whittle sticks into funny shapes, and knives are generally useful in a camp site.

We also had a tradition of always eating together (which can be hard in a startup where you have to explain that you're leaving at 5PM so that you can have dinner with your family and that you'll be online later) The dinner table rules were any question was allowed, we owned a used set of the World Book Encyclopedia to answer questions.

When driving on the road we encouraged questions about "What do you think that is?" and ways we might be able to guess the purpose of what ever it was we were looking at. Ways to validate our understanding or test our hypothesis.

It means answering "Why?" questions all the way down, without angst and frustration but with discovery and learning.

We took apart things, we fixed things, we built things, and we imagined things. It gives you the freedom to ask a question like "what if we pitched a baseball at the speed of light?" If you think that is a silly question for your kid to ask, then you don't have the right attitude about fostering curiosity.

<comment><USER3> Good answer! When I was 4 or 5, I used to ask so many questions my grandparents often wondered how my parents survived ;-) For me it was great, it fostered just that sense of curiosity that I have never lost since. It also taught me pretty soon that my parents do not know everything, which meant that I had to learn how to find things out for myself (especially in books).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I 'd just really love to help my son develop in the areas he's already interested in_

Grant him genuine agency and let him take the lead.

When my oldest was about 16 months old, he decided to put his own dishes away, just like mom. He was too short to reach the sink and began chunking his dishes into the sink like a basketball player, because that was his relationship to the sink, height wise. A lot of parents would have told him to stop and tried to then teach him to pick up after himself later. I felt that was the wrong approach. Instead, I locked up all glassware and all members of the house ate off plastic bowls and plates and drank from plastic cups until he was tall enough to put his dishes in the sink without chunking them.

I told this story once online to someone hoping to foster independence in their child. They thought it was a great idea and announced that they would start _making their child put their dishes away_ post haste. Uh, no. You have completely missed my entire point.

Support his interests as best you can while helping him not hurt himself. It will go stressful but good places and you will have a really neat person on your hands every step of the way.

I do have a private parenting blog that is currently on hiatus. You could send me a gmail address with the subject line "Memoirs of a Mom" and I could add you, if you care to see what is there already.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Grant him genuine agency and let him take the lead.

I don't want to lead him in a sense "do what I say and that'll be good for you", but I'd like to help him open new horizons. And I really feel that he need external input here. We're living in a small village (but close to a big city), we don't have a TV, there's not too much happening around here. Without external inspirations, I'm afraid, we'd land with a local football club and Angry Birds on the iPad.

Nice story about plastic cups. :)

<comment><USER4> _And I really feel that he need external input here._

Yes, he does need external input. Just make sure it does not cancel out his own inputs.

He is the center of his life. He has knowledge he cannot convey to you. That knowledge influences his decisions. Just because he cannot articulate it does not mean it is unimportant.

So, let's take a simple example: He dislikes a particular shirt. Perhaps it is his only wool shirt and perhaps he has a mild, unrecognized wool allergy. He can tell you he doesn't like the shirt and doesn't want to wear it. He cannot tell you why in a way that is defensible if you require him to justify his choice.

Expose him to good things and lots of options. But try to let him pick and choose. Try to resist the temptation to decide what he should or should not like.

I used to think video games were drivel, brain rot, no good would come of it. My mother kept sending them, my sons kept playing them. My sons now want to make video games and I have been won over. That occurred because I left some space for them to make decisions about their own lives and some room for the possibility that I did not know everything and was not always right.

The innate intelligence of small children gets overlooked, ignored and dismissed simply because they aren't as educated and articulate as the adults, so they cannot defend their preferences. Assume his preferences exist for a reason. Don't automatically dismiss them just because you are better than he is at articulating why you think something is or is not a good choice.

I hope that makes more sense. Happy parenting and best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You simply help him widen his horizons in areas that interest him, engineering in this particular case. Provide him with support and logistics.

Get him smart toys as he's growing, like the thing you mentioned, like Lego, like Makeblock ([http://www.makeblock.cc/](http://www.makeblock.cc/)), toys that encourage creativity.

I'm sure you can find great resources for kids to learn how to code, that's where you come in. He expresses the wish to learn how to code, you find out what's best out there to do it in his age.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

My problem is that I don't know a lot of "smart" things. A normal offline toy shop does not have much to offer. And you have to know what to look for online.

Makeblock looks interesting.

<comment><USER6> When I was a kid I had a number of Lego Technic sets - they are great! Might not be proper "engineering" but still allows you to touch and build a simplified version of many real-world things, for example a car's drive shaft.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search- alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=technics+lego)

If he's already pretty skilled, he'll definitely be able to handle even the sets that are marked 10 years old +. I recall I had one of these when I was 6, it was a slight challenge but that was the fun part : ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, he handles 9+ pretty well. He's now playing a lot with Fischertechnik ([http://www.fischertechnik.de/home/produkte.aspx](http://www.fischertechnik.de/home/produkte.aspx)), it's a German analog of Lego Technic (or vice versa, whatever), but as far as I can tell it's somewhat closer to reality. I'll take a closer look at Lego Technic though, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What would you recommend? Without hesitation, two things i believe are crucial:

1) Let them find a introductionary reader (the most basic of study books) or kids-encyclopedia on the subjects they find interesting.

2) At first, limit access to resources, but not knowledge. Spoiled equals no curiosity and creativity. Time to experiment.

My experience as a kid;

Best toy ever: LEGO Technic.

How would I teach him coding? First i realized computers just do what humans tell them to. Then i did "Echo Hello World", and promptly found a introduction reader about QuickBasic on MSDOS with my mothers name on it. I absorbed it entirely and backwards, picked up on Visual Basic, and thanks to dialup internet soon PHP.

Introduce to electronics? I started disassembling electronics shortly after i got my hands on a "How Stuff Works" CD-ROM.

Robotics? For me it was LEGO Technic and hacking, but nowadays i'd just give them a LEGO NXT kit. (See the LEGO FIRST events, they're awesome even for the youngest of kids)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good, thank you. Why limit access to resources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My father gave me a hammer and a stump with nails started in it at 2. I would play outside and investigate the world as I grew up. I had a chemistry set, the radio shack electronics starter books, and a workshop where I could assemble model rockets. While my father only had a high school degree, he was very mechanically inclined. His parents had a garage growing up, and he was changing oil in cars at age 9. When ever we did projects around the house, he had me involved helping. I guess being involved and getting a chance to explore the world helped me the most.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's more or less what we do. :) Ok, that was not hammer and nails but an electric drill/scredriver and screws but you got the point. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think other commenters emphasizing _agency_ are spot-on. A kid needs to have enough leeway to get interested in whatever random things they feel like getting interested in. With computers around, he'll probably random-walk his way into engineering anyway.

I think it's good _not_ to obsess about limits around computing time, _even if_ the kid just plays games. As you most definitely know from your own experience, programming and electronics - or any other creative disciplines - are not things you do 3 times a week for 1 hour after you've done your homework. They require long and uninterrupted blocks of time. Setting a hard and short time limit for computer use pretty much ensures a kid will _only_ play games, chat and browse cat pictures, because those are only fun things you can fit in tight schedule.

Games ain't bad - there are fun ones, there are ones with stories comparable to the most important works of literature and cinema, and if the kid starts to think about making his own (as I did when I was around 9) or (more popular today) making mods to the ones he like, it can lead straight to amateur gamedev and getting really good at programming very quickly.

Also, if he likes space, show him Kerbal Space Program at some point. It has an uncanny ability of getting people into aerospace and making 12yo better at physics than high school teachers.

You live in Germany, there's a strong hacker culture there. When he's little older, take him to a local hackerspace! People there are usually very friendly and can show some pretty cool DIY tech that could spark kid's interest in electronics and programming.

<comment><USER3> > I think it's good not to obsess about limits around computing time, even if > the kid just plays games. As you most definitely know from your own > experience, programming and electronics - or any other creative disciplines > - are not things you do 3 times a week for 1 hour after you've done your > homework.

True, but consider the kid is only 6. At that age there is still a strong health/developmental reason not to allow a lot of screen time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Show practical thing people can do themselves. Changing a tire, fixing a bicycle, etc. This (together with watching Macgyver :-)). Sure it's easy and sometimes cheap to let someone else do it. But I think teaching kids how regular tools work, is an important first step. (My down owned a saxophone shop and used to let my brother dismantle and re-assemble old saxophones, that was a great engineering lesson for him).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think your son does not need your help with developing his technical skills, he will do that by himself. What you should be careful is to make sure that he does not neglect other aspects of growing up, like not picking up social skills, not doing enough physical activities.

So, this might seem weird, but I think you better not encourage him too much about the things he already like, and should encourage him to do stuff he might be neglecting..

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your point, but wouldn't worry much about it. He's actually very well balanced, has a very good overall development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think at 6 you needn't/shouldn't go that specific yet. If he shows interest in IT/technology, great! Help him along if he needs help, introduce him to something new once in a while, but don't focus only on that one area.

My advice would be to encourage his reading (if he has already learnt that). Reading is one of the best ways to expand your horizon and learn new things - much better IMO than games or toys (though they of course have their place too). I'm guessing you have a public library nearby, or his school will definitely have one. Go there with him, buy him books for Christmas; in short, introduce him to the world of the written word. And then: let him explore!

</comment><comment><USER12> Hopefully you might be able to find local resources similar to Leonardo's Basement

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leomoves/help-more- kids...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leomoves/help-more-kids-fail-at- leonardos-basement)

the Bakken Museum

[http://www.thebakken.org/youth-programs](http://www.thebakken.org/youth- programs)

or the Works Museum

[http://www.theworks.org](http://www.theworks.org)

Or if there aren't such available in Frankfurt, get some other parents together and start something!

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't have children yet, but if I do, I plan on asking them "how do you think that works" often to get their curiosity gears turning. Do any parents have experience with this approach?

<comment><AUTHOR> A good question to ask, sure. :) My problem is that I have only a very basic idea about how most things which surround us work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have you watched Mr Robot? This is what happens what you raise hackers. As someone mentioned in the comments, as a Human - albeit a curious human, not a hacker.

</comment><comment><USER15> Raise a human, not a hacker.

<comment><AUTHOR> You either completely missed or completely ignored my point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Minecraft.

<comment><USER17> This is alright, but honestly it needs to be catered. Just giving them vanilla Minecraft would work for a start, but moving into the world of modifications would be something the parent should cater to the child. There are a lot of amazing mods, that would help them learn all about the world. There are also a lot of ... I won't say useless.. But more "for fun", such as gun mods and others related..

Overall, Minecraft would also let you play with them, and create a nice family environment. :)

<comment><USER9> I don't think one should obsess too much over the "pure fun" ones. Growing up is just like basic research - you have to let yourself waste time on random stuff with no apparent practical use.</comment></comment></comment>


Clarence Thomas's Radical Vision of Race - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-radical-vision-of-race <comment><USER2> This was an illuminating analysis of someone I found mysterious.

There's quite a bit of truth to his position: What I think he wants to build up is a black elite that is on equal footing, and many of the liberal policies sabotage that.

But there is a bootstrap required, as the US robbed and pillaged much of the black culture (and still do, to this day!).</comment>


Who is going to Startup School? Have you heard back yet? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Announcement: Responses delayed for one day. We ended up getting a huge number of applications (1181 for 650 places), and it's taking us longer than we anticipated to read them all. So we're not going to be able to reply to everyone March 7, as we initially promised, but we will try to do it by the end of March 8.

</comment><comment><USER2> It seems that the acceptance e-mails will go out all at once, after everyone has been accepted or rejected.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nor have I, which is one of the reasons I started this topic.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am also waiting for the response.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have not yet received word.

</comment><comment><USER5> same here.</comment>


Version Numbers Don't Matter (to users) - <AUTHOR> http://bvckup.tumblr.com/post/10218389389/version-numbers-dont-matter

<comment><USER2> Asking the user if they want to upgrade only makes sense if it can potentially mess something up, like dropping support for something or changing file formats, or take long enough to interrupt their train of thought, like old Firefox updates.

Otherwise, asking the user is unnecessary and gets in the way. In browsers, for example, any changes to the rendering engine will have to be backwards compatible and any changes to the interface will be minimal as there's not that much _too_ change. Chrome's model does really well here.

The version number itself can be anything you want, as long as it's relatively simple- it's really only necessary when the user is troubleshooting, so it just needs to be easy to say over the phone or compare to something on the web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps I am an odd one out, but as a user I _really_ do not like software that updates itself, leave alone silently like Chrome does. As a developer - sure, I would love for everyone to be on automatic updates, but looking at stats it appears to be not the case.

I have an app out that checks for updates and prompts the user if there's a new one. That's the default setting and it can be changed to disable all checks or switch to an automatic updates. Looking at the server logs I can tell that users do disable the update checks after the first notification, a lot of them do, like close to 25-30%. And virtually no-one switches to the automatic updates. YMMV obviously by an app and the OS, but it's still a data point to consider.

<comment><USER3> Your users don't want to be bothered by notifications. Automatic updates sound scary; they don't trust that your changes will always benefit them. It's easier to just turn the notifications off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So what do you guys think?

I am really curious to try just the date as a version number, but it seems just too alien and unconventional. The only real-life example I am aware of is Kuznetsov's _iproute2_ tool for Linux (or just _ip_ ). It uses the DDMMYYYY format and that's not much of an improvement over regular versions in my opinion.

Can anyone think of any other notable examples of unconventional versioning? It'd be nice to have a list for a reference.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2>

<comment><USER4> Try Semantic Versioning [1]. It gives you a sane, well-defined way to version projects and makes the version numbers useful and meaningful. It makes it easy for technical users and developers to get a feel for what has changed since the last time they updated.

You don't have to _display_ version numbers to non-technical users. The update summary in this post looks fantastic for showing what changes have been made to end users.

[1]: <http://semver.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> SemVer appears to be a formalization of a common versioning scheme as applied to APIs. And it inherits some of its problems. For example,

> _A bug fix is defined as an internal change that fixes incorrect behavior._

One man's incorrect behavior is another man's proper working order. Excluding crashes, missing data and other obvious bloopers, the "bug fix" needs to be defined way more formally than this. That would lead to more strict documentation requirements, which is a major bore and inconvenience to any self-respecting developer, which in turn will lead to lapses in SemVer compliance and then back to the starting point :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want my users to update unless they want a new feature from my software. The deal is, if they're not experiencing any issues, don't have any new needs, they might as well not change what isn't broken. I realize updates without any automated notification, the user has to seek out a new update.

That said, I am distributing business-oriented software, that is often "mission critical", or at least directly tied to the profit stream.

</comment><comment><USER6> To mention the obvious, this won't work in all circumstances. For some technologies, you will want to branch and release (e.g.) new features in the 2.0 branch, and bugfixes in the 2.6 branch. If I'm on 2.6, I can plan to permanently stay up to date with the most recent 2.6.x release, without worrying about new features messing me up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, sure thing. This is more in a context of end-user products that tends to have linear release stream and shorter release cycles.

<comment><USER7> But even if you have a linear release stream, you've probably got branching going on internally once your product gets to have a significant installed base (i.e. you fork a release branch to let your main-line development continue while you polish the release up before shipping it). At this point, you have builds going on in two branches, and thus tracking the version numbers when you get issues reported becomes critical ("are you using release 37 installed 2 days ago or today?").

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the point being is that users shouldn't really be exposed to the details of internal branching. It is perfectly fine to use hierarchical versions internally, but they should be mapped to something simpler for the public releases. A one-to-one mapping, there should be no such thing as two different #37 releases.

<comment><USER7> Ah, I guess you then run into some blurring when you get to external beta testers and partners, or if you're developing an open-source product. But if you've got a closed-source product that you can manage the external releases to a single stream, then yeah, you can go with simpler public revision numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Versioning software and displaying "what's changed" to end users are completely orthogonal. By all means, provide this simple summary when you pop up an update window. Also provide sane, informative version numbers for developers, especially if your software can interact with other software.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _informative version numbers_

That's the thing. It is really hard to make a string of dotted numbers _informative_. They can obviously be used to express hierarchy of the versions, and that's useful in development context, but I would strongly argue against trying to pack any additional sense into them.

<comment><USER4> <http://semver.org/> provides a very useful scheme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me appreciate the fact that I work exclusively on webapps, where this pain doesn't exist.

<comment><USER8> I would agree that the pain of displaying a version number to the user doesn't _necessarily_ exist. Though, it is a good practice to have releases for your webapps, even if you have multiple releases per day. In this instance a revision number would accurately describe the "version".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Users do care about major version numbers, provided that the next version is substantially better or different. Take video games, for instance. We normally call them "sequels" but it is really just a significantly enhanced version of a previous product.

<comment><USER8> I would also say major version numbers are an important means for additional revenue through upgrade fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tell that to Minecraft fans.</comment>


The Nastiness Problem in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/123611-the-nastiness-problem-in-computer-science/fulltext

<comment><USER2> I can tell you physics is worse.

At one major CS department, I'd say the department colloquium is a waste of time about 50% of the time. The one person who would hold these people to account was a particularly nasty physicist who'd sit in the front row. Sometimes he and I, also a physicist by training, would proceed to disassemble the lecturer the same way a pair of crabs will disassemble a starfish.

Then some nasty stuff went down and that nasty physicist and I haven't talked in years... That's the way it goes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just get tired of people's laziness and lack of attention to detail. Not because I'm a perfectionist, because it causes problems. It often falls to me to figure out how exactly someone else fucked up. It gets _old_.</comment>


Stemmy – The Stemming Algorithms Tester. Porter, Porter2, Paice-Husk and Lovins - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/moliveraf/stemmy

<comment><AUTHOR> The stemming algorithms tester. Featuring Porter2, Porter, Paice-Husk and Lovins stemming algorithms, it allows you to change among them easily and see the outcome in the blink of an eye.

Don't believe the hype! Check it out for yourself!

[http://www.stemmy.ninja](http://www.stemmy.ninja)</comment>


"Inventors of the digital world" are french - <AUTHOR> http://www.inria.fr/ <comment><USER2> English site for the less linguistically talented: [http://www.inria.fr/en/](http://www.inria.fr/en/)</comment>


Julia on Google TPU: Shakespeare RNN - <AUTHOR> https://colab.research.google.com/github/JuliaTPU/XLA.jl/blob/master/examples/3_LSTM_DistributedTraining.ipynb <comment><USER2> I've been using Julia for a project at work and it's been a pretty fantastic experience.

I've only being doing some analysis stuff at the moment, but I've got a few machine learning/NLP projects coming up that I'm super excited to use Julia and Flux for!

<comment><USER3> How did u find the compilation process

<comment><USER2> Package compilation or code compilation?

Package compilation was painless, code compilation isn't really noticeable once it starts running and the benefits you get from native speed are evident. I recently learnt that the IO functions are async as well (powered by libUV!) and the parallelism is easily an order of magnitude nicer to work with than Python's (and it's only going to get better).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I should have mentioned somewhere. Credit for putting the notebook together goes to Elliot Saba ([https://github.com/staticfloat](https://github.com/staticfloat)) :).

<comment><USER4> This is brilliant work. I'm not strong in NNs yet, but I am strong in prerequisites/blockers. This demos:

* Working in a rapid application development (RAD) fashion by operating on vectors using a language like Julia/MATLAB/Octave/Scilab which allows focusing on abstractions instead of implementation details and other distractions.

* Running code optimized automagically on GPU/TPU/etc.

* Sharing work over the web in a standard fashion (Jupyter Notebook on colab.research.google.com)

It's not clear to me where in this process the code is actually run on TPU (maybe someone has a tutorial?) but that doesn't really matter. The specific machine learning algorithm used is also not really that important.

The important part is that this enables amateurs to tinker with machine learning, see results quickly and share their work. Which means that now we'll finally see the accelerated evolution of machine learning.

Any of these blockers alone hindered the evolution of AI for decades, but seeing all three knocked down in one fell swoop is pretty astonishing, at least for me. I favorited it as a watershed moment in the history of AI! Congrats to him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Error Could not access the resources needed to display output. This is probably because third-party cookies are not allowed by your browser. SecurityError: The operation is insecure."

You know what doesn't throw errors whenever I just try to look at it? Products like Jupyter notebooks - stuff not made by google. I believe Colab is a using dark patterns to discourage blocking 3rd party cookies by subtly breaking what should render as a simple non interactive webpage to passive viewers.

To me, at least, Google and their dark patterns are considered harmful.

<comment><USER6> Here's what I white-listed on uMatrix:

* raw.githubusercontent.com — it's loading the notebook directly from GitHub, so yeah, this one is fairly essential. Just need one XHR here.

* googleusercontent.com — no cookies, but it does load scripts, css, a frame and an XHR here.

That's it. There are some other domains it hits (like fonts.google.com and gstatic.com), but they're not needed to view the file.

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues/17#issuecom...](https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues/17#issuecomment-459030596)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a whole lot of work for a result that's indistinguishable from a Markov chain generator..

<comment><USER9> _> indistinguishable from a Markov chain generator_

A Markov chain generator wouldn't:

* Capitalize the first word of each line

* Make lines of approximately the right length

* Mark text with who is to speak it

While this is just a toy example, it's powerful enough to start showing the ways RNNs can produce text that looks superficially correct.

(Generating Shakespeare is actually one of the examples given in the classic [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/))

<comment><USER10> You're mistaking a Markov chain toy with an actual Markov chain generator.

1\. Yes it would. It would see capitalized words as high probability for first word on a line or after a point.

2\. Obviously it could, depending on stop condition. Especially if you include line length.

3\. If trained on corpus of plays, for sure it would.

The strength on the RNN is supposed to be in context and memory... Perhaps handling of grammar.

There are advanced hierarchical grammars that are related to Markov random field models that are about on par with RNN based on many text and music analysis loads. (In fact probabilistic math is often used to describe results and workings of a deep NN anyway.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How large is the project? I'd like to clone it to my drive account, but not if the data sets are too huge.

<comment><AUTHOR> The notebook is about 400kB. It also downloads a 4MB dataset and julia, tensorflow and dependencies need about 400MB, but that gets stored in the ephemeral Colab VM, not on drive if you copy it there.</comment></comment>


The Creativity Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

<comment><USER2> This part of the article jumped out at me:

"When UGA's Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state's capital - why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of."

This seems like a great way to teach children to be creative, and just generally intelligent.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a tactic that goes back as far as Socrates at least ("Socratic dialogue"), and it's very effective. Unfortunately it also requires a great depth of knowledge and patience on the part of the teacher, so it would be hard to get this to take off in U.S. schools at the moment.

<comment><USER3> So I went to a high school which claimed to practice the "Socratic Method." Now I'm not saying it can't be used correctly, but in 90% of the cases it was used it was sticking us in a lab, showing us an experiment and asking us what happened, THEN having us do the reading. It makes NO sense and was a HUGE waste of time.

As a tool in your arsenal it's great, as the cornerpiece of your education system it's really not. People need to be shown what to do ultimately.

Finally, America is becoming "less creative" based purely on the judgment of two scientists (literally they look at the drawings and say "I give this one a 15/18"). Seems a little melodramatic/farfetched. I'd be the first to believe the hypothesis but what a stupid experiment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Socratic dialogue is completely different from the Socratic method (which I hadn't heard of before). Socratic dialogue is a way of getting a student to consider and answer their own questions during a conversation, where the teacher responds to the student by asking leading questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You want to teach children to be creative, you teach them to _be the active builders of their own intellectual structure_ to quote Piagat and Seymoure Papert.

Papert is the inventor of Logo and his book _Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas_ inspired the name of Lego Mindstorms.

That book shows how education should be taught.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation" ...

I wouldn't be too worried about this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Worth the read. I usually (wrongly) associate creativity with the arts, but this article frames it as a crucial skill for effective problem solving. Is there a more fulfilling way to learn a subject than solving a real world problem that requires you to understand it?

It was especially encouraging to hear how schools can fulfill the standardized curriculum requirements without turning the kids into zombies:

 _[...] they'd unwittingly mastered Ohio's required fifth-grade curriculum "from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. "You never see our kids saying, 'I'll never use this so I don't need to learn it,'" says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. "Instead, kids ask, 'Do we have to leave school now?'"_

<comment><USER7> This is kind of like how Mr. Miyagi teaches Karate. They didn't even realize they were mastering the standardized curriculum, until they had already done it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why Feynmann disliked the social sciences, seriously, the Torrance tests is a perfect application of all of the problems with highly interpretative "tests".

<comment><USER9> Can you give us a detailed explanation of why Torrance tests are problematic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey look everyone! A new educational crisis! Quick, get the money canon.

</comment><comment><USER11> Again the reason why creativity goes down - nowhere to apply it. There is no industry left in USA - the only way you can apply your creativity is by creating something, but your creations are not going to be competitive - chinese workforce cheaper, small shops you can sell through your staff all gone and replaced by targets/best buys/evilmarts and so on. Only things that are produced in USA is food and lo-tech wooden/metalwork.

<comment><USER12> I have two responses to this.

First of all, it is getting absurdly easy to find useful feedback. For every topic you might discuss, for every skill you might learn, there's at least one discussion forum, and in each of those forums there are intense, even competitive practitioners of the involved art who will tear you apart if you aren't working up to standard. Sometimes this is done in bad faith, but on the whole, that part of the "creative loop" is the best it's ever been. The main factor that holds people back from any creative endeavor is motivation. When hanging out with friends the motivation problem becomes a major factor; our likelihood of engagement and satisfaction is a lot higher when we get together to _create_ rather than to _consume_. But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

My second point is that by losing the work environments in the "heavy" industries, the USA will be deprived of creatives in those fields - but that doesn't necessarily mean we lose out on creatives. Look at Richard Florida's books on the "Creative Class" - one of the points he argues is that our major cities are getting increasingly "peaky" as the creative people in each industry pool together more and more closely. We already have some creative powerhouses(NY, LA, SV to name a few), and there is no reason for them to decline anytime soon. Where we still have industries involving physical goods and high capital requirements, intense pressure exists to take a high-tech approach and automate everything rather than battle to get cheap labor. For example, think of what Amazon is doing with shipping. That stuff requires a lot of creative know-how, and in the coming years we're probably going to see similar approaches taken in a lot of industries that are traditionally "people services."

<comment><AUTHOR> > _But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and > engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the > BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or > "way over my head."_

...and plain ol' laziness. I wrestle with this _all the time_ \-- it's quite hard to force myself to work on a project, or read a book, or pick up a pencil and try drawing again for the first time in decades, when I can instead pick up my laptop and browse HN for a while.

This problem is compounded by living vicariously: I can read about other people being creative, and that's fun.

Eventually I get to a point -- usually at the end of the day -- where I feel compelled to make, fix, or build something, but I should have been doing that all day anyway (and waiting until the end of the day is not optimal).

I've not yet figured out how to fix this.

<comment><USER13> Actually it's tied to the crisis at NASA, and to a larger extent the country. I don't know why people are afraid of confronting an issue like this. It's as if by ignoring it and saying our institutions are ok, things will work themselves out on their own. No.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely agree. Excessive patriotism and pride is not serving the country.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Belgian court: IRS allowed to copy your data - <AUTHOR> https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.knack.be/nieuws/belgie/fiscus-mag-uw-data-kopieren-zonder-uw-toestemming/article-news-1534227.html <comment><AUTHOR> Original article in Dutch: [https://www.knack.be/nieuws/belgie/fiscus-mag-uw- data-kopier...](https://www.knack.be/nieuws/belgie/fiscus-mag-uw-data- kopieren-zonder-uw-toestemming/article-news-1534227.html)

The gist of it: Belgian court of appeals rules that tax inspectors are allowed to copy any and all of your data without your consent or court order.</comment>


First Round Capital launches Entrepreneur Exchange Fund - <AUTHOR> http://redeye.firstround.com/2010/01/sharing-and-exchanging.html <comment><USER2> I'm happy to see this happening. I pitched this same idea to a few friends last year and have wondered for a while why entrepreneurs don't commonly exchange equity simply to reduce the risk of entrepreneurship, and why there aren't funds like this.

What would be a good way to catalyze more of this type of activity? Does anyone have insight into the legal requirements of trading equity for equity?

If entrepreneur equity exchanges became common, I believe it would have hugely positive impact on entrepreneurs and might even end up offering a better way to finance ventures.

Let's say you had a ton of autonomous entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur equity exchange funds (or a market, who knows). Basically, funds where entrepreneurs recruit other entrepreneurs to participate in trading equity. Probably some would develop reputations as being where all the best entrepreneurs go and they'd become exclusive, like the best VCs currently, and those would be hard to get into. But there'd be no real limit on how many companies could join even the best, only how many promising ventures there are. (At least that's my guess, because there probably wouldn't be the same kind of overhead for accepting a new member as VCs face when making a new investment).

Once you have a group of quality entrepeneurs who each own a bit of the pooled equity, individual entrepreneurs could simply sell some of their shares in the fund to raise money for their own ventures. Rather than selling shares in my company, I'd be selling shares in a bunch of companies just like my company. An entrepreneur could probably find a much better deal (just like VCs currently do) because the risk would be so much lower. The fund could also sell shares directly to investors and disburse it to members, but that might get a bit tricky.

It seems to me like the best kind of organization to run this kind of fund would be a non-profit trade organization or some such. Or it could even just be a co-op where all the entrepreneurs are members.

Obviously these funds would be cheaper for LPs to invest in than going through VCs, and entrepreneurs would get better terms if they were able to access a new class of investor.

It also seems like a good idea for VCs and angels to set these up, though, because it aligns the interests of the participating entrepreneurs with that of the VC. As a VC, I want you to go for the big wins. As a member of the pool, I want everyone else to go for the big win, and by reducing my risk, it makes me more comfortable going big.

I kind of thought this was just another of my somewhat ridiculous ideas until seeing this article. I'm happy to see it validated, at least in some small way.

<comment><USER3> I think the challenge might be in setting the valuation of these funds. With so many startup's, there is bound to be information asymetry. I wouldn't really wAnt to trade my equity based on a 'feel' or PR of the member startups. But I agrees with your general thesis- it's a great idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a neat idea. Your expected value of your project is probably the same either way, but it changes the distribution such that you are more likely to get something (but with a slightly smaller "big payout").

It certainly makes gives First Round a leg up on the other VCs. Kudos to them for doing this.

</comment><comment><USER5> I always thought you'd be crazy to not pick First Round over any other VC fund, but this actually seals it economically (if you believe there's value in the FRC's portfolio).

Those guys are just so damn smart.

</comment><comment><USER6> Y combinator should offer a similar option.

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't artists often do things like this?</comment>


Open source at companies get newly published repositories by companies every day - <AUTHOR> https://www.goopensource.dev/#/ALL <comment><AUTHOR> Alpha version 0.2

Are you actively looking for an awesome opensource project which is maintained by a company like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and co and is at the beginning of an engineering phase or just looking for newly published open- source projects by companies to keep up to date with new frameworks, tools, etc?

Any feedback is welcome!</comment>


The case for teaching everyone programming. - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.fortnow.com/2008/12/teach-everyone-programming-guest-post.html

<comment><USER2> If anything, programming helps us think abstractly -- definitely a good exercise for the the human brain.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think the Passenger drones have a very serious design flaw? - <AUTHOR> All the new passenger drones that are coming out have the propellers sticking out, which clearly is a design flaw, and have a serious safety hazard issues around people. Why don't they consider a passenger drone with the design similar like the Hover Camera Passport?<p>• Workhorse SureFly • Ehang 184 • Kittyhawk Flyer / Cora • Uber Elevate (CES Air Taxi) • Drone Hoverbikes <comment><USER2> I find the Ehang particularly egregious, yes - it seems designed to chop people's kneecaps and/or behead them.

The Volocopter, however, has the rotors above the vehicle, like a helicopter, and I don't see how that is any more problematic than a helicopter.

Having ducted rotors might be another solution (should give higher efficiency, too, particularly when combined with counter rotating props).</comment>


The History of Libraries Through the Ages - <AUTHOR> http://www.zencollegelife.com/the-history-of-libraries-through-the-ages/

<comment><USER2> If you are interested in the history of libraries, I strongly recommend Henry Petroski's "The Book on the Bookshelf" [http://www.amazon.com/Book-Bookshelf- Henry-Petroski/dp/03757...](http://www.amazon.com/Book-Bookshelf-Henry- Petroski/dp/0375706399/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272392497&sr=8-1) . It's both full of information and an entertaining read.</comment>


5 Cool Innovations Already Happening in Spatial OS - <AUTHOR> https://spatialos.improbable.io/community/cool-innovations-that-are-already-happening-in-spatialos <comment><USER2> Do you have any more information about how you solved the distributed physics problem: "Distributed physics is an extremely hard problem for games to solve. SpatialOS makes this much easier by automatically managing the interactions between many different types of game engine or microservice, such as physics engines."

<comment><USER3> That's part of our "secret sauce", but you can read more about the topic here: improbable.io/2016/01/27/distributed-physics-without-server-boundaries

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can swarm workers be programmed to control vast flocks on Lambda?</comment>