demachina

Twitter can be fine, it can be priceless. The problem with Twitter:

Their client is bad and they mostly killed off good third party clients. I build my own client to solve this, most people can't or wont.

I want a client that prioritizes the things I follow and read the most (i.e. everyday), @newsyc50 or @newycombinator, @zerohedge, @arstechnica, @techmeme, @pkedrosky. @kdnuggets, @reuters, @variety, @politico. @zerohedge is the controversial one of the bunch. My client shows counters on unread messages for each so I know when new tweets are available and they are one click away.

Next I surface trends from the larger body of follows I'm interested in but don't have time to read. I process everything through spaCy and use its increasingly very good entity recognition to find the trending topics in my feed, much better than Twitter's BS trending. When something is tweeted from 5 or 6 places its a trend I may be interested in. I can adjust this threshold up and down.

I lookup each entity in a local Wikipedia database so if its someone or something famous its one click to read about them in depth. If there is no match its probably someone or something new to the Internet which is also interesting to know.

You need a critical mass of follows for this to work, like several thousand. It is a chore to find several thousand interesting people and organizations to follow. Most people aren't going to do this work which is why most people hate Twitter. Following that many is also noisy so you need a client that prioritizes for signal.

Don't read replies to a tweet unless its really interesting, there are a few interesting replies but they are usually pointless, noisy and/or toxic.

Filter out replies by people you follow most of the time. Most of the time. though not always, these replies are noisy and uninteresting.

I have a smooth scrolling feed I just look at to see what everyone is talking about. It was a bit of of a pain to implement when they killed off the stream API, though I replaced it by polling the feed just below rate limit.

I poll everyone I follow if the client has been off for a while to fill the holes in my timeline.

There's Mastodon, but last time I was there it was only really big with a slightly creepy Japanese anime crowd. There just wasn't that much interesting English content to read.

Mastodon's API's are mostly open source standards which means they tend to be messy and inconsistent.

As far as user monetization the main strategy was predictable pleas for Patreon donations and some people constantly begging for money with a new crisis/excuse each day or various forms of victim hood.

I still like Twitter because it has high signal to noise ratio news feeds and power users, once you find them. Not sure how usable its going to be once they gut their Stream API in a month though.

To be honest, all social networks look like they are in various stages of epic FAIL and the perennial search for the new one that is going make it all better is probably in vain.

There are a slew of inherent structural problems in social networks many of which arise out of the fact that crowds, tribes, herds tend to bring out and amplify the worst in human nature. Its recommended you read up on mimetic theory before you play:

https://www.ravenfoundation.org/faqs/#dialog

There is also a fundamental, difficult to resolve, conflict between the two forms of free speech identified in Ancient Greece, isegoria and parrhesia.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/two-con...

Either you allow largely unconstrained free speech and your network turns in to an abusive cess pool, or you constantly police and suppress it and it turns in to China. There isn't really an easily identified middle road.

No... large numbers of people committed fraud. Countrywide, and one of its execs, were convicted of fraud in one of the egregious examples of "the hustle". The problem was an appeals court overturned the conviction in an inexplicable decision:

https://www.propublica.org/article/us-attorney-asks-court-to...

It was also about mortgage fraud ... bond rating fraud ... multinational banks selling fraudulent mortgage backed securities based on the previous two frauds. Almost no one went to jail for any of it, the few who did were little fish. The SEC, Fed, Treasury and DOJ were asleep at the wheel before and during the crash and did almost nothing after other than reward the perpetrators: A. threw $700 billion in tax payer funds at them B. forced mergers that made some of them even bigger C. the Fed printed $4 trillion dollars and handed it to them to plow in to the stock market and juiced an 8 year bull market which enriched all of them.

Cryptocurrencies certainly have their problems but the last 10 years have been a case study in how horrible fiat currencies and the current global financial system really is. Japan's central bank has printed so much money they own something like 65% of all the ETF's on the Nikkei.

China, EU, U.S. and Japan have printed something like $16 trillion dollars since the crash. If banks leverage that at a conservative 12X that's $192 trillion. The world is awash in fantasy money.

So true. There is certainly skill involved, one of them is almost certainly the ability and willingness to exploit your fellow human beings. I'm completely lacking in that skill so, woe is me, I will never make a billion.

It seems I will have to settle for doing the things I love, enjoying life, as I strive to avoid screwing people.

You do seem to be the sensei of trolldom and to have found your one true skill.

I don’t, especially when you experience the things you will have to do to get it and keep it.

You might want to read some thoughts from a guy named Siddhartha. Craving a billion dollars is just going to make you miserable until you get it, and then when you have it you will crave another billion or something equally toxic to your well being.

Money and spending it is just another kind of drug. Once you have it and all the stuff you can buy with it you will become an addict. You will then crave a new and bigger high trying to acquire or spend even more of it. You know what kind of stuff junkies do to get a fix, billionaires are pretty similar, hence this topic we are discussing here today.

Its way better to stay grounded, do the things you love, and enjoy life. If you can make a billion doing that then you probably should take it, but it shouldn’t be your goal in life unless you want to turn in to a complete ass.

There are new Reddit threads from veteran Amazon employees about what a horrible place Amazon is for their developers, and its gotten much worse in recent years. You can find them from here:

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/old-man-at-amazon-gives-advice-...

They appear to be using stack ranking and performance improvement plans to massively churn their work force so a significant percentage of employees doing good work are disposed of by their two year anniversary just because their system is designed that way. They seem to be making their “teams" in to brutal exercises in survival of the fittest or more accurately survival of those most able to play the stack ranking game. Stacking ranking nearly destroyed Microsoft so you assume it is or will do the same to Amazon.

I feel for young programmers starting out, because the work environment seems to be bad and getting worse in a lot of places.

The SpaceX design should be dramatically suprior to the aging Atlas and Delta designs because they are designed to be cheaper to build in the first place and they will be game changing if they manage to land the first stage and immediately turn it around for multiple launches.

Atlas and Delta are certainly good platforms for high reliability but they are expensive and they aren't making much effort to bring the costs down. Bringing the costs down would require design revisions that might undo that 50 years of design stability.

If SpaceX or someone else comes up with a reliable design at a dramatically lower price point ULA wont be able to sell their launchers unless its to a money is no object customer like the U.S. military.

Recovery and rapid turnaround of the first stage could make space access cheap enough many things would become possible and affordable that are not currently, due to high launch costs, like expeditions to Mars or large space structures.

On the other hand Apple, Google, Faceobook, Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn are increasingly sucking all of the oxygen out of the rest of the software ecosytem. Software developers are increasingly being painted in to a corner where all the users are sitting on those platforms all the time and unless you are there too its really hard to get eyeballs to look at your software.

Developing for the open web and trying to get people to websites in the current mobile/social era is increasingly brutal unless you are willing to be completely dependent on a handful of big companies.

No he did not mean just don’t depend on LinkedIn. He meant don’t place the fate of your software and company in the hands of any third party. The list of companies who have burned developers includes Twitter, Apple and Google just to name the three spectactular examples. Facebook has been somewhat better to their developers though there have been a few instances there too.

Unless you have an ironclad contract with whomever you are partnering with(whose API you are using) and know exactly what you get from them and they get from you and for how long, you should not be depending on them.

If you want to spend a few weekends writing to some API and don’t care if the rug gets pulled out from under it, and all your users then fine. If you want to support an API in a product that will survive without that integration that is also fine. Just don’t gamble your entire product and your future user base on API's that can disappear overnight when some dickhead MBA decides he isn’t making his numbers and the free loader third parties aren’t worth it any more.

Yea but Twitter's clients also suck and their management and engineering team seem completely incapable of developing interesting, innovative or easy to use clients. Their one size fits all clients also don’t accomodate power users, many of whom are the people who generate a lot of the interesting streams that draw users.

This should be a golden age of software but its increasingly resembling a wasteland. Most software is being herded in to app stores which Apple and Google completely control and dominate, and which has reached a saturation level of app developers.

Interesting companies keep putting out awesome API’s, lure in suckers . . er . . developers, only to crush them after the developer has sunk a bunch of time and and money developing for them and about the time the company has developed enough momementum that they don’t need third party developers unless they are fully monetized partners.

And then of course there are the patent trolls.

Mobile devices will presumably jack in to large monitors or head mounted displays of some kind, plus a good keyboard of some kind, and pointing device(track pad). Thanks to Moores law you should be able to have the equivalent of a desktop experience driven by a mobile device soon.

The one problem is being slave to Apple and Google having absolute control of the OS, software and apps you can run. The only plus is their hegemony does help with security but neither one of them is even remotely trustable with the keys to every personal computer on the planet. There is irony that the creator of the big brother commercial in 1984 is increasingly, you know, big brother.

P.S.

Not sure how Daves self promotion blogging rose so far on hacker news. It actually has almost nothing to do with Doug Engelbart. He was just name dropping, something he often does, before doing what he usually does, self promotion. Yes there is that age discrimination angle which plays well with some old programmers, but not me.

People who spend their time complaining about discrimination should spend more time doing something that people will value regardless of your age, sex or gender. At that point your age, sex and gender become irrelevent especially on the Internet which tends to be blind to these things until you wear them on your sleeve. Dave likes to use his age to promote a martyr complex angle.

Ive looked at most of Daves recent projects and none of them are particularly interesting.

I suspect he was referring to the FriendFeed founders giving their user community the middle finger by cashing out to Zuck. People are going to do what is in their own self interest so you can’t exactly blame the founders for that.

As I recall FriedFeed’s growth had plateaued so they probably figured it wasn’t going to compete with FB and Twitter. Mobile and apps were also starting to take the world then too.

I have no interest in taking sides in #gamergate but it should be pointed out that someone trying to make #gamergate look bad could have posted the threats on twitter.

As heated and complex as this dustup has become you really can't take anything at face value any more. Its become a pretty intense propaganda war by both sides, or maybe all sides, so unless you have posts from a verified account or video of someone saying something you should take just about everything else with a grain of salt.

Its pretty naive to think anyone knows the true motives of someone posting with a probably throw away twitter account.

The Quantum Thief is a really interesting book. I really enjoyed it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quantum-Thief-Jean-Flambeur-ebook/...

I cringed most of the way through Atlas Shrugged when I first read it. Having encountered more than my share of bureaucrats , inept big corporations and NGO's since, I can say she did have some valid points. The world is full of people who survive by sucking the blood out of the doers.

It is nuts putting it on a sci-fi list, its more a political screed.

Anathem was really good, probably the last good book Stephenson's written. Reamde was awful.

Daniel Suarez is top of my list to replace Stephenson. His books aren't great literature, and not as great as Stephenson when he was at his best but they are good page turners for near future tech.

Daemon, Freedom, Kill Decision, Influx.

http://www.amazon.com/Influx-Daniel-Suarez-ebook/dp/B00DMCPO...

They are leaking potentially confidential information to a third party company running the service, in this case Slack. For all you know they could be doing stock trades based on all the insider info they can glean from their chat traffic as their business model.

If the communication includes material insider information, like companies/products they are considering buying, and they are flinging it all over the internet so third parties can read and act on it the SEC can charge them.

If you use cloud services for company communication then you at least need to have provably secure encryption so only the people you want to see the conversation can.

Of course this criticism applies to all the suckers who use Google and Microsoft cloud services for their business.

Anyone who places any confidence in references from former employers is kidding themselves in the first place. Most employers wont give a negative reference on any employee, the liability risks are simply too high in our litigous age.

Not sure why Reddit's CEO thought it was cool to put one on the Internet for the entire planet to see.

You seem to have a natural tendency to side with the authority figure which is just as bad if not worse :)

How did you jump to the conclusion the CEO's version "was just the facts"? You seem to be saying because he is the boss that he is being factual and the employee inherently was not.

The CEO's spin might be the facts but it would be impossible for anyone who wasn't there to know. That's why an employer wouldn't normally air stuff like this in public, its one person's word against another, and the liability risks are steep.

I'm not basing my comments on which one of the two parties was being truthful, they might both think they are. You would have to do an indepth analysis of the employees performance, and the circumstances of his termination to know for sure.

I'm saying it was really poor judgement for a powerful employer to unload on a relateively powerless former employee, and air what should have been confidential HR information in public like that. If I were applying for a job with the guy I would think twice about working for someone willing to savage an employee in public like that. If I was on his board I'd sure think twice about whether he is the right person for a CEO job.

If nothing else the Streisand effect insures Reddit is going to get about a million times more bad exposure, now that its going viral, than they would have when it was just a thread from a disgruntled ex employee.

People were starting to question whether Reddit had a good CEO and corprate culture already, now its certain to gain momentum.

Might have been a better choice to make your point about headlines to not use an example that is flame bait and slamming a significant percentage of HN's readership, pg included. Blaming boomers for everything wrong with this planet is a little over the top. They are one generation among many.

Earth's likely demise will be the massive increases in fossil fuel use in places like India and China, and the failure to control population growth in places like India.

The EPA was created in the 1970's. Its mostly managed to push all the pollution intensive industries off shore to China and elsewhere.

It was also a serious mistake to carry the Western lifestyle to places with billions of people largely unmodified.

Any environmental choices made by boomers in the developed world will trail to insignificance in the face of China and India's choices. India in particular is the one currently obstructing the Kyoto follow on talks in Warsaw.

Really, really good speech

First you kill off all Twitter replies, those are where the most noise is on a lot of entities you follow. Then you prioritize entities who consistently post interesting stuff, and you quickly filter out people who use Twitter as a chat tool or Facebook.

Twitter at its best is short succinct one liners that quickly summarize the content you want the world to see with links that take you to the long form, and you only go there when the tweet conveys its something that will probably interest you.

The second you start writing stuff longer than 140 chars it gets too long to quickly scan a stream and find the stuff you are really interested in to spend your time on. People who want more than 140 charts on Twitter are NUTS. It would destroy the whole point and the beauty of the thing, they totally don't get the concept.

My client puts the people I am following in a bar on the left prioritized by the ones I like and read the most. @newsyc50 and @newsycombinator are at the top, along with @slashdot. I alwsys tap them first thing every day and I get EXACTLY what Malda was asking for, the top posts on Hacker News recently with no noise. @newsyc50 has links to the Hacker News comments and I go to them on topics that really interest me.

I scroll down my avatar bar and look at other people I follow that aren't as consistently interesting when time permits.

Twitter, if you get a good client, and spend time finding and following the right things, gets you all the news and info you could want, and you only get noise if you want it. I look at my whole stream to get a pulse of what's happening, or for the occasional serendipity, otherwise I just look at the streams of the things I am consistently interested in.

Twitter is a beautiful thing, Dorsey deserves a billion for it. Unfortunately the current Twitter and its executive team have been pretty ghastly for a while, but that's usually what happens when a company heads to IPO.

Pretty flawed writing on Dave Winer's, like this part right here:

"Ayn Rand's philosophy might have worked in an agrarian society when people lived far apart, and couldn't pool their resources."

Agricultural coops were some of the earliest, most intense and long lived Socialism in the U.S. in fact some of them are still going. Building grain elevators, pooling expensive machinery, getting fertilizer and seed in bulk and at a reasonable price, shipping crops to market and trying to avoid getting screwed by middlemen, are things were Socialism had its place.

Atlas Shugged was written for and about railroad barons, industrialist and to a lesser extent Wall Streeters.

Classic Dave, say something that has no basis in fact, and hope no one calls him on the B.S. because he's Dave Winer.

You can be fairly confident there some startups out there founding by 20 somethings, populated by 20 somethings, who think having someone over 30, or certainly over 40, on their team or even in their office would be akin to the plague. They would probably place them in the same camp as their parents.

I totally understand why coders like Agile, hey I like it because hacking code is the fun part :) Its also kind of a good fit for the app store era, where you throw something out there and see if its sticks before you actually develop most of it. Not entirely sure its actually a good way to develop nontrivial software.

Not sure I'm seeing the hypocrisy there, please expand.

I am mostly just getting tired of YOU trolling Hacker News, That is one hypocrisy I'm seeing, you complaining about trolls when you are the one doing it.

This thread just isn't productive or interesting any more. It seems to be mostly designed to get attention. Based on the posts of others you seem to have been trolling here for a while.

The other hypocrisy I'm seeing is you exploit Hacker News when it benefits you (i.e. to plug your product) and trash it when it doesn't gush praise of you, but that is normal for you.

Telling you my real identity would be silly since you are, most of the time, not a nice person to anyone who criticizes you.

Dude… you get "personal" all the time. It takes a pretty serious double standard to be so sensitive about it when its aimed at you, versus when you are dishing it out being fine with it.

Not sure I've actually seen much aimed at you on here that is "personal". Its mostly a lot of people frustrated with you for being the actual troll while accusing everyone else of being trolls.

As for people using aliases, I think you should have actually learned the value of them considering how much time you spend on the internet trolling. Its a really, really bad idea to troll under your real identity. Its why so many people are permanently irritated with you.

At this point I think I will stop trying to offer constructive criticism. Its becoming really obvious you are a pretty classic troll, and quite good at it too. You are mostly wasting everyone's time as only a good troll can.

Yet when there was a thread on here about your product, Fargo, last week you seemed to be quite fond of Hacker News, asking people on your blog to vote it up so you could get more publicity.

If you don't like Hacker News why don't you stop reading it, posting to it and pointing to it in your blog multiple times a week, glowingly when its in your favor and harshly when its not.

You seem to being continuing your long running tendency to eviscerate anyone or anything which criticizes you and make out like its "their" fault and not yours.

You are also reinforcing the perception among many that you want attention, even when it entails hacking people off to get it, like you are doing here.

Please expand.

I quite carefully read your comment about anonymity and truth, which suddenly morphed in to anonymity and cowardice when I called you on it.

I appreciate maybe I bent your meaning a little when you said you are nice to people except when they say "personal and negative" things about you. I bent it partially based on reading your Twitter feed and blog for years and seeing how you actually deal with people there.

Quick question, do you think the stuff you said about Marissa Mayer might be considered "personal and negative" by some people? If so why is it OK for you to say personal and negative things about other people, but not vice versa.

I should apologize for generalizing. I am sure you are nice to a lot of people. A lot of people seem to have a very high regard for you. You may be very nice in real life, I have no way to gauge that.

The issue at hand here is are you nice, or at least civil, to people if they disagree with you, especially online? Judging by comments on HN, you seem to have really viscerally angered a lot of people over the years. Why do you think that is?