twitter is inherently a spammer's heaven. It's really easy to make 140 characters seem legitimate. An hour of writing spun content and a really easy to build signup bot and you can have full conversations, retweets, everything.
There's a reason twitter gets spammed so much, and it's because most of the time, normal people's 140 character messages look just as spammy as the actual spam.
Why does loading TechCrunch take me 9 seconds? What exactly are they doing to cause such a slow load? Why does a page load for them require 330 requests?
I'm going to say without looking that's it's for ads. Oh and I'm sure that blocky logo isn't compressed at all, (same effect could have been done with the logo at 50x50 scaled up ;p)
I'm a coder, entrepreneur, and huge philosophy fan. I think many people similar to me (IE people here) also love philosophy as well all enjoy thinking, logic, and problem solving, the epitome of philosophy.
There're quite a few of us. One of my coworkers was a philosophy major in college, I flirted with doing a philosophy major but couldn't quite make the course schedule work out, and I think PG was a philosophy major.
Can't you do it every time someone votes? The scores aren't dependent on any other items other than their own votes, so each time it gets a new vote, you rescore it and it will drop or go up on the front page accordingly.
Sure, but with a system that is active (like HN), there would be enough votes coming in frequently enough to handle the ranking updates and account for time increases without needing to hit the system every 5 minutes.
Also, if only updated periodically, the front page would "skip" so to speak every X minutes (exaggerated changes in rank), whereas re-scoring on each vote would allow smoother changes in rank.
Regardless of whether or not credential requirements are founded, those are some pretty dickhead email responses. Why cuss at someone asking a genuine question?
This is sad. I like Charles' writing (esp. Accelerando). But I think his curt, snarky replies were rather rude -- and spouting expletives to a highschool student is just over the top. I lost a little respect for him today. I will not be emailing him (ever). Hopefully I can overlook this offense enough to still read Rule34.
EDIT: The student was also in the wrong; he was being presumptuous. The best way to deal with these people is just move on.
To be honest the emails he got could have easily annoyed him and seem to have come from someone who believes he is not interrupting into someones time (especially after the first response which is reasonable for someone without "citable" credentials).
I'd like to think he gets a large amount of emails a day and the fact that this person wanted credentials but decided to email rather than research further could have hit a nerve.
Just look so far as the final response shown:
> I think that you shouldn't write articles under the mindset that you know what you're talking about...
sure, I admit the emailer went on to judge, but his initial email was:
> Hello, I'm citing your work for a debate article I'm using
> about space colonization and how it is improbable. I do
> need credentials however, and I've yet to find them online.
> If you could reply with your credentials that'd be great.
No harm in that email, very simple.
But then the blogger went on to whip out his e-peen and tell the kid to go to his wikipedia rather than just write "I'm a self taught novelist who thoroughly researches his topics he writes about but doesn't have credentials in the traditional sense".
EDIT: I apparently have no idea how to do quotes on HN despite my valiant attempt to do so. I apologize.
Because life is to short to waste on being artificially nice to dumbasses you'll never know. Sometimes it's just far more enjoyable to tell the truth and speak your mind. We should celebrate such occasions.
Furthermore, perhaps this is culturally dependent, but nothing about those questions strikes me as genuine.
There's a difference between being honest and being a self-absorbed jackass though. The original email sent by the student was harmless and sincere and the response from the blogger was pretentious and whiney.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't have posted this email exchange on my own blog if it was me because I feel it would portray me in a negative light. To each his own I suppose.
Companies rarely buy other companies for their profits. Most of the time it's a strategic move e.g. Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck to protect itself from aggressive moves by UberMedia
It baffles me how, with the number of investors involved and the huge amount of money on the line, Twitter is making any strategic move other than "how do we get profitable"
