skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...and I discover this just as I was about to launch my new startup: fivehundredthousandgiraffes.com

Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Are you a domain maniac?
Domain names is, what i like to say, real estate of web. It’s the land where you will built your “empire”. Since the beginning of the internet people are trying to buy and own as many domain names as they afford. They try to find smart word combinations, catchy words or think the next big “word” thing which will be valuable in the near future.
Neither can the serial killer.
Why does everyone worry about fonts so much? You can download a copyrighted image just as easily, and you can copy paste the copyrighted text too. So what's the big deal that you can copy the font?

And the most ridiculous thing is that fonts aren't even copyrightable. (You can copyright the actual file with the fonts, but not the shape of them.)
I don't get it. It's a shift of technology from one platform to the next. Content, such as ads, is going to be the same. So one gee-whiz thing to the next is just going to result in the next generation gee-whiz ad-blocker.
Certainly not, sure not all layouts can easily scale, but I think Google could afford to maintain a few different widths.

I realise from my own web design and development experience that this is easier said than done but on their scale and the problems that they deal with I don't think it's to unreasonable.
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Why are you calling it a money laundering operation? Are they not legit or are you just being casual?
JavaScript Tips
Even if things don't pan out as Stanley Williams says, there will be enough innovation atop the technology to make many things a reality.

I have known about the memristor from the beginning--before all the "hype"--as I've interned at HP Labs and I drool at the thought of their vision for intelligent systems with in-memory processing. I mentioned this in another post, but I predict the memristors will make computer vision possible. This means autonomous vehicles, better airport security, etc. Similarly, anything involving sensors and machine learning, will lead to unimaginable progress.

Nanotech is real folks. The question isn't "if?", it's "when?" It will go through many iterations, but it's now real.
Scale-Free Thinking
"By the way, religious and political views do not only express themselves in the fields you mention. What disrespectful soul there decided to take my "Favorite Quotes", with access previously restricted to "Only Friends", and plaster them -- without so much as a warning -- all over my public profile?"

This.
There is this one submitter of Giraffes[1], responsible for two percent of all German giraffes, or this one[2], responsible for nearly five percent. I didn’t even have to look all that hard to find them.

[1] http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/search?name=Sanne

[2] http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/search?name=Ediktonia
I had to dig a little to find a screenshot: see http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/the-facebook-ad-backlash-be... . The first thumbnail at the bottom of that post already shows a Fans box on the Blockbuster Page.
I'm reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army

"My friend, Zhang, doesn't believe I can collect one million soldiers by 209 BC. I'm gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. (Or you'll be beheaded.) Thanks, Qin."

Our time is gentler -- the Age of the Giraffes.
> I think the idea that humans are getting smarter and nobler is hogwash.

No, there is quite some evidence behind that idea[1].

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
Google Chrome Speed Tests
Why they are so shy? We all know that it was Microsoft who was invented the Internet, created HTML, Javascript and their browser is the most secure, fast and reliable one.
While I don't work at Google, I have dozens of Googler friends and none have ever mentioned this.

I spoke to a couple today, in addition to asking my wife. All said they'd never heard of it.
In the past it has been a path to real success, and consumers ended up paying more because of it.

One example would be the Japanese electronics industry in the 60s-70s, which was subsidized until it broke the back of US competition. It then reaped a good profit for a long time before other countries caught up.

(I doubt that GM could do this, at least not without a lot more money. But examples of "successful" subsidization programs to strategically promote industry do exist.)
I have attempted to run a .NET platform product, Keepass, on OS X via Mono and it crashes almost without provocation.
I remember sending a giraffe a long time ago, I had forgotten about it :)
Since Windows Mobile 7 isn't out yet, I'd like to note that the current version of Windows Mobile's IE is a hybrid of IE6's rendering engine with IE7's JavaScript engine, a Franken-browser no one is ever truly going to support.
Single page (with ads):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r...
Loved it :) It's like Harry Potter in real live!
It was a recurring theme. He dipped his hand into molten lead three times, getting burnt on the third time. He walked on coals five times, getting burnt on the fifth. He put liquid nitrogen in is mouth twelve times, seriously damaging is mouth on the twelveth time.

I guess he's an inductive reasoner, not a deductive one.
I'm just a software engineer. I'm sorry you think that I'm doing a poor job of defending Facebook, because I think in that a lot of the criticisms are inaccurate and come from a poor understanding of the privacy policies, the motivations and implications. Admittedly, this is mostly because they are insanely complicated, and we need to do a much better job educating people. We (where that includes me and all the people I know at Facebook) care very much about doing the right thing for users while still innovating and giving users the most utility we can. I know it's easier to just think of us as an evil corporation out to suck your private secrets and sell them to the slimiest buyer around, but that just isn't true.

[Where there are valid criticisms, you can be sure we're taking them very seriously.]
In Bulgaria, and in other countries on the Balkans, there is an old tradition of walking on fire. It's called Nestinarstvo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastenaria
I love it!

And I love the guessing game with the age of the submitter, I only wish the server wasn't getting slammed 'cause it takes too long to get the response.

So far I'm 6 votes in with 3.7 years avg difference so far, it's a pretty great idea, though I wonder if it selects based on users so you don't get shown consecutive (or even in the vicinity in the case of the mass posters another comment mentioned) giraffes from the same artist.
Good insider perspective on the process - for better or for worse. I'm sure we'll get used to the new layout, I can already see how his will save me from moving my mouse around too much.

Now only if we could get IMDb.com redesigned!
Q: How is a female stronger than male?

A: Fe = Iron

Female = Iron male
Longest recorded sniper hit record
Rocking and Rolling Rounded Menu with jQuery
- This is the settings page I'm referring to: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=pr...

If you're interested in seeing if your settings are working, you can try the "Preview my profile" button on that page.

Btw, I found that page under top right Account->Privacy.

- I wasn't involved enough with the Instant Personalization product to be comment on it competently.

- As for criticism, you can be sure we're watching very closely. IMO, much of it is because people don't really understand the changes or what is affected (as you point out, this stuff is insanely complicated, and we need to do a lot better at explaining and clarifying it to people).

- You can absolutely have free form text. The "Bio" field on your profile is free form.

Why can't you have it in the "Favorite blah" boxes?

(a) Users simply used Pages to do this a lot more than they used the free form text. That stuff was edited once, and it wasn't convenient to maintain as your likes and dislikes changed.

(b) We think there is significant utility that we can provide to the user from having this information in a structured format. Instant personalization aside, going to Pandora and hearing your favorite music play is pretty cool. We think we can do a lot more here.

Religion is already not in this set -- it was not included in the Connections change recently.
Someday, someone will be killed by a crazy person who takes advantage of an online service's lax privacy controls. That will prompt legal changes like those that followed the 1989 death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer at the hands of a stalker. He used California DMV records to find her home address:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Schaeffer
Maybe, someday they will shift this banning system from an automated one to a moderated one. Till then, do not make too many enemies. After all, the majority always wins. :)

http://apartments-bol-croatia.com
Decentralized = much harder to police by governments, authorities, big corps. This can unlock radically new usages.

For instance, in a fully decentralized system, you can get rid of storage limitations by storing stuff on your computer (or on the cloud in a private form). So you can share not only pics of your pets, but also your music and movies collection.

If this results in something as easy to use as Facebook, but uncontrollable and perfectly able to host and protect media piracy / political dissidence / etc., we get darknets for dummies. This project or a variant thereof, if successful, could deeply change Internet by taking all power out of authorities and into people's hand. Whether it's a good or a bad thing is debatable, but it certainly is interesting.
"You can still control the visibility of these links on your profile."

Is the following definition of "visibility" accurate in your context?

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/handy-facebook-english-...

"As Facebook explains, "Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you're connected to." Likewise, "While you do have the option to hide your Friend List from being visible on your profile, it will be available to applications you use and websites you connect with using Facebook." Because Facebook deems this information "public," it reserves the right to share that information with its business partners and third party websites, regardless of your visibility settings. "

"regardless of your visibility settings."

So, we can "hides these links on your profile" from our friends, but we can't hide them from Facebook's "business partners and third party websites, regardless of your visibility settings?"

Isn't that completely backwards from what people would want from a social site? If my understanding of this issue is correct (and I confess, I haven't been able to hold FB's privacy policy and settings regime in my head for some time), then this would be like hiding my street address from my friends but broadcasting my address to junk mail companies with a hearty "Catalogs? Send 'em here!"
Yep, I call bullshit too. I've had my browser crash dozens of times on my Nexus without a single message. Just poof, back to the homescreen. Relaunching the browser will show the homepage and no other windows open.
156

http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com
html >> images
While the motivations of the creators of the privacy policies and options might be pure, the fact that the settings are confusing enough that people are exposing information that they want to keep private is pretty damnable.

If Facebook cares about protecting the data of their users, making the privacy settings more intuitive would be more productive than worrying about needing to "educate" users. This includes having default options that hide data instead of making it public.
Because lines which allow for more than, say, one hundred characters are a bad idea?

If you try different display options you will see that the width of the pages is designed around such a line length limit. They don’t shy away from going wider when they don’t show text (try Images) or from using a additional column (try Updates). This suggests to me that they know of the space they have, they just don’t want to fill it by mindlessly lengthening lines.
Saree Blouse Patterns and Designs 2010
The most interesting thing about a sari is that of the saree blouse or choli. There are different types of saree blouse designs.
How I Was Born 300 Years Ahead of My Time
http://xkcd.com/242/

(as I read it he was doing demonstrations - knowing the risks - and when it went wrong the first time, stopped)
They use capacitive touch screens (so you would need a special stylus) and there is in emphasis on multi-touch which is awkward to do with a stylus.
I wouldn't call it prejudice as much as observation. The stats and financial mathematics people did go on to earn the big money, and those courses where, on the whole, filled with people (like me) who couldn't cut it in the harder PhD level pure math courses. That is simply how it was.

I never argued that private initiatives didn't fund a lot of (or even most) cutting edge research.
Another view of game piracy
Reminds me of a line from King of the Hill, when Minh Souphanousinphone is a bit too blunt with Peggy Hill, Minh apologizes by saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, I said something out loud that I should have only thought."

There's a lot more "out loud" when the cost is so low. I half hope it leads to people becoming more critical about who they let get under their skin, and more critical in what they believe from random sources, but I'm not optimistic.
Nice. Thank you, it's about time.
Well, two of many reasons are adobe is run by morons incapable of making a secure or performant product. Unless you missed the wave of acrobat exploits? 'Cause my gf's laptop sure didn't :(

Removing yet another plugin from your browser shrinks the attack surface, and as a side benefit, reduces use of one of the worst IMO bits of web tech.
I personally use HeyWatch, for less volume the price is way cheaper. It's 0.05e/video, you double the price if you need HD.
I could see the dropbox reciprocity tactic working here. The recommender may get a cut of revenue, but the recommended could be given a discount as well. This could turn companies off from the CPC model though.
The search options (or, as of yesterday, “tools”) have become tremendously helpful, making them more visible seems like a obvious step to take. Might be annoying for people like you and me who always knew how to access and use them but I think we are in the minority.

(All else is mostly cosmetic and very much a question of taste. I see signs of clear progress with a aesthetic that, while being distinctively Google, manages to convey to me for the first time that they care about details.)
If by generally regarded, you mean literally blows chunks... ffs, VLC is open source and it performs better on my macbook pro. Adobe is too incompetent even to copy freely available code.
Thank you in turn for your response and consideration.

Separately, I'll mention the following just in case it is of any interest or use.

Last night shortly before 11 pm Pacific time, I "fell" into what appeared to be the public view for a profile named "Everyone". My memory's hazy, but I believe this happened as the page flow returned to me when I was backing out of the privacy feature/page that allows one to view one's profile as it appears publicly. I backed out by clicking the button "Return..." dedicated to that purpose on that page.

I'm not certain this is how the flow occurred, but it seems to be what I remember. If it's not the precise flow, it happened somewhere in the flow I used to view my publicly visible profile.

If this is a concern, I can provide you a bit more in the way of details, out-of-band. (I doubt it would be the case, but in case this exposed some test or "magic" ID (the ID does look unusually long).) I just browser back buttoned to a former page and clicked "Home" or whatever to resume what I was doing.
I'm a philo nut. I've read Hume's Treatise, as it of course is well documented in Kant's into to Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant started his whole journey into creating his system of Transcendental Philosophy because of Hume's deep questioning of the reality of causality.

Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion, but it was only a century after Kant's era that the holy texts of those religions were translated for Europeans. Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to have read the Upanishads and other Eastern religious texts, and then to also work Eastern ideas into the historical backdrop of Western philosophy.
Most pirates say they'd pay for legal downloads
Hmmm.... ok, that makes sense. Thanks!
You don't say how much skill and experience you brought to the job. You need to weigh up what you brought to the table and what they gave you.

The other big question to ask, if your current company hit a tough patch (not an unlikely scenario in this climate) how would they treat you? Would you be first or the last to be pink slipped? Are you sure. For example, It's more than likely there are managers and founders who will save their skins before giving a rat's arse about yours.
Seriously? You're whining about the CTO calling investing 6 months of three quarters of their dev team into a risky project betting the company? While it isn't literally a 100 percent make-or-break project, Scribd does have competitors who haven't been kind enough to sit on ass for 6 months. They need to have something with some business benefit to show for that 6 months or it's going to be extraordinarily painful.
I appreciate his, and other FB employees, attempt and presence. It has to be a huge challenge to explain how this works and why.
Are you joking ??? For what reason(s) would anyone leave Google to work for Facebook?
So is zencoder _only_ for h264 encoding? Site didn't make the output formats very clear.
You're seriously so pissy about scribd that you're currently objecting to their using standard html instead of images? Get a life.
What option did you end up taking then? Any way you can go through the process?
Seems like the real value is derived from the incentives system. I don't think I've ever used those common 'email a friend' links. There's two potential reasons for this:

1) I don't get any results. Not even confirmation if the person took me up on my recommendation.
2) I go to ecommerce sites to research and buy things for myself--for some reason I just don't think of others during this process.

That being said, I do believe you're on to something here. Distribute this among the long-tail of ecommerce stores and you have a high potential market on your hands.
You could argue that the author is a knowledge worker as well. He
talks about how his job requires him to know and learn about a huge
number of things, then he applies that knowledge to solve a problem.
Yes, his job is miles away from writing position papers for a think
tank or falsely summarizing complicated research in a company, but it
is pretty far away from laying brick or hauling gravel as well.

In the end, I think we agree. Shitty jobs where you are not
accomplishing Good Things suck and should be avoided. You can find
rewarding jobs in lots of places, not just the ones our culture
usually promotes. People should consider some kind of trade more
seriously. I don't think he is trying to claim that manual labor is
sweepingly special and more rewarding than other professions, and I
think he is right not to do so. Writing code is undeniably knowledge
work and I know that I derive great satisfaction from being able to
hit the right combination of keys to make what I imagine appear on the
screen. Many people I know are knowledge workers in some way and they
have found real fulfillment in those professions. Research,
Psychiatry, Writing, etc.

It is very fulfilling to make things with your hands because the results of your effort are so recognizable and tangible, but I think that many have found equal satisfaction in other fields.

To each his own.
A lot depends on iAds.

That could be a game changer, though I don't see the profit from iAds matching that of mac/iPhone/iPad/app sales.

Ugh, are we going to see iAds in addition to Google ads while browsing the web?
Correction: "Maya plumbing, first pressurized water feature found in NEW WORLD" - the Egyptians had it long before.
Terrorism is a tool of government to implement police state:

10 steps necessary for a Fascistic group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state and subvert the social/political liberty previously exercised by its citizens:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.

2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.

3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not
answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.

5. Harass citizens' groups.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.

7. Target key individuals.

8. Control the press.

9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.

10. Suspend the rule of law.

This pattern was implemented in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and any country on the road to totalitarianism.

Btw. For military industrial complex who gain from this 40% of US budget this never ending war with ghost enemies. These people are living by killing humans. For them there is no problem to stage such events. 1,3 million Iraqis dead based on total lie about WMD.

Of course if you say that Putin could use this type of methods during Moscow terrorist attack everyone would consider that this is totally possible but in USA such things could never happen. Yeaaah right! You are on the path to POLICE STATE and you afraid to face the truth.
It's truly a sad day for philosophy when an old man who has lived an extraordinary life is rejected outright by the crowd who won't even bother to examine his words because the form of "truth" they can recognize must resemble a fantasy narrative they learned to believe in through 17 years of the modern classroom education format.

Just because a thing cannot be expressed succinctly as a tautological formula(F=ma, etc) on a chalk board does not mean it's bunk, non-science and therefore worth completely ignoring.

The guy was a friggin astronaut and is a professor of physics! How many people have been to space? Do you think you'll ever go to space in your life? Probably not.

It's wise to listen up when one of just a few hundred human beings who have been to space says "hey, I've spent my life thinking about this based on my direct experience of having gone into space, and I want to share it with you because maybe you'll find it useful, and it might not even be perfectly true."
like the 7 minute abs got usurped by the 6 minute abs?
"the fact that the settings are confusing enough that people are exposing information that they want to keep private is pretty damnable."

The information is being exposed, not because of confusion, but because Facebook wants the information exposed (to business partners and affiliates). The confusion leads to surprise, not exposure.

"making the privacy settings more intuitive would be more productive than worrying about needing to "educate" users."

This was exactly my thought earlier in the thread. If it's this hard to understand and explain, there's some simplification yet to be done.
To add one more, I saw a big feature article in freaking Consumer Reports this month about Facebook privacy issues, and them sharing more than you think. It seems to be hitting the mainstream in a big way.
Sbrows , the funny way to search the internet
sbroWs provide a useful and funny way to search the internet showing the real content of resulting websites.
You brought up an interesting point.

come from a poor understanding of the privacy policies, the motivations and the implications

What are the motivations? The key, primary, and focal motivations behind all of these changes?