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.

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.

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.