skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but the point of being closed was the privacy. I have always believed that the secret to Facebook's success was the privacy. You were among your friends. Yeah, it wasn't private in the secure sense -- it wasn't secure enough to stop a determined stalker, let alone the FBI -- but it provided a social space that was different from just spewing stuff all over the open web.

Now that they appear to have given up that angle and replaced it with an unpredictable tangle of spurious logic that, yes, spews stuff haphazardly all over the open web, why not just publish your updates in the open?

What needs to happen now is that someone needs to go into Facebook's old business, the one they have apparently abandoned. Where is the closed service that makes a best-effort attempt to provide an invite-only social space for myself and my friends?
He's referring to the classic problem in a startup of distinguishing between things users want (vitamins) and those they really want (painkillers). It's critical to concentrate on the latter because you have so little margin for error.
I could have sworn that it was posted in a wrong thread, but your explanation makes me doubt.
Would be nice to merge them. Or even leave a comment in the other thread to come over and post here.
ain't that the truth. As one who found a long lost brother, on google no less, I have to agree
http://www.upl8.tv/

circa 2008.
Come on now...you can't throw that out and not tell us the whole story :)
"Leaks IP address" as a dramatic headline is an indicator that the poster is not-so savvy about networks and security. Seriously, this is the level of knowledge I observed in the typical high school student 3 years ago or so.
Yea let's get an open alternative, a few years of coding, a few years of Facebook screwing up, a massive hatefest, and it will have 30% penetration in 2018. By then there will be new technologies that will make the issue irrelevant.

Same as Linux and Firefox. By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete. Google's Chrome OS throws much of linux away. NativeClient sandboxing turns browsers and plugins into frameworks of choice, like jQuery.

There has to be a more efficient way.
I've been thinking about doing some kind of distributed/open social network thing what with all the Facebook scandals cropping up, but it's pretty hard to do.

The fact is for something like Facebook to function smoothly, it has to be centralized. There has to be a server somewhere out there that can be queried reliably for this data and that's the bottom line, even if you have something API-based like OpenSocial. It's just a matter of who you're going to trust with that data -- and as we see over and over again, money and power clouds judgment; a good candidate to control this network when it's starting out may not hold up so well under the barrages of billions in revenue and investors down the neck.

The only way for users to have real control over their data is to build some P2P/self-hosting architecture, and for reasons all HN readers understand, this would be a huge, huge mess.
metalike!
The contact importer works both ways; so if A has emailed B, and A imports his contacts, A might get recommended to B as a friend. This is the usual explanation for mystery PYMK suggestions.

That said, the algorithm for finding candidate pairs uses a lot of features, including past employers, schools in common, graph features other than just distance, etc. Occasionally it has a surprising success like this.
Good content is exactly why hacker news needs search. There is a ton of info that would be useful to people after one day. Which is about as long as it stays on the homepage. If content is your number one priority giving people a search box would create more good content.
"I've seen FOAF profiles, but I've never seen a FOAF network."

Yeah, because no one is going to give 700 million dollars to a bunch of hippies to make some internet commune.
My take: ignore the hype, watch people freak out and run around, and if it turns out it is a truly bad apple, pull out when I know for sure.

Not because I have a vested interest in them, but I don't have any info I need to keep private (I make sure of this) and I am not one to buy into hype and running around with your hands in the air.

Go ahead, downvote me for not being a Facebook alarmist. I do apologize though if I put it too curtly.
For convenience, maybe that link should be
http://www.google.com/search?&domains=news.ycombinator.c...
It's possible to extract the address ranges, street names, city, and state using the TIGER/Line dataset. It won't give precise addresses (for example, if the range is 200-300 and address 250 doesn't exist, it won't say that). It also isn't that easy to deal with.

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/
Only in the small! Comfort yourself with the great narrative arc of humanity.
I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature.

Because attention is a finite resource. I can only spend attention on minor problems by taking it away from major ones.

For example, right now, instead of wasting my time replying to this comment, I should be working on a new project we're launching soon. And I think I will, so forgive me if I drop out of this thread.
Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy.

Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content.

You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.
I would like to see more information before reaching a conclusion.

Does using a GPU really help as much as chmike suggests?

What do the encoder's authors have to say?
Seekh Kabab Recipe
For convenience it should be a box with a button posting to searchyc.com, it's much better at searching HN than google. But something is better than nothing.
A few years back there were articles that you could travel back in time, but only to the point when the time travel machine was invented. Now you can't travel back at all.
Are you solving a problem that people have and are willing to pay to get solved? I think that is one of the core insights from Lean Startups. Having a MVP done in a day is nice, but it will probably end up being tossed a week from now, and then you only have another week of runway.

I wish you the best, but would not advise your course of action to anyone. It is ridiculously dangerous and strictly inferior to either freelancing&startup or dayjob&startup at the stage you're currently in. (Since you can be doing anything during a "wait and see" stage, you might as well be getting paid.)
My guess is that it is simply regression to the mean. There are more Windows contributors than Linux contributors, so their average contribution is likely to be smaller.
Finally realizing and accepting how crazy people (including ourselves!) are, and the world is, is the main lesson of your 20s. There comes a subtle but powerful increase in fearlessness and self-acceptance when you realize that any screw-up, offense, or drama you could cause pales in comparison to that being dealt with by everyone else on a regular basis :-)

In most people, there seems to be a subtle increase in fearlessness after this realization.
Thanks for all the hard work mhartl!
Amazing Loader animation in CSS3(no images).
I think there might be more to it than that, even. A lot of people won't admit it, but there are definitely cheap ego boosts to be had from watching people you perceive to be idiots firing emotional shrapnel at each other.
Facebook has had stream search for public status messages since July of 2009. Stream search is privacy-neutral; it only lets you see posts you were already allowed to see.

If you don't want your status messages to be visible to everyone, set your privacy settings accordingly. Account -> Privacy Settings -> Personal Information and Posts and adjust the "Posts by Me" setting to whatever you like.
Arenas back home after serving time at halfway house
Virtualization is the Future
Yes! That was the one.

We now need a word for this technique where you use irony to mock someone. ;)
Good QM joke...
I think this decision is more bad than good. It sets a bad precedent that with enough lobbying content providers can get crippleware protections that were previous banned by FCC ruling. Who owns my hardware, me who paid for it, or the company that sold it to me. This whole license instead of purchase culture needs to be examined.
Leaked to Flickr, not to a Flickr user, unless I am missing something.
> Same as Linux ... By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete

Care to explain, how all the effort in Linux was obsolute ? (And i am on Ubuntu Linux typing this reply)
> ...for example, a method that involved electron quantum holography was able to store 35 bits per electron...

Um, given that this stuff is being stored roughly at room temperature, that's impossible (or misstated).
The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time.

The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully concentrate on making HN, the best site of its kind right now even better.

I personally find it very hard to believe that the trade-off is as stark as is portrayed here, working on a site like this is not in 'absolutes' like that, you simply do stuff because it has to be done. If a YC funded start-up would display that attitude to their users they wouldn't stand much a chance, in fact it is exactly opposite to what Paul says in other places to how one should deal with users.

It seems more like a stubborn 'I'll do this my way' kind of thing, Paul has kept the door solidly locked to others contributing to HN, but then goes and makes a big case about how he has only so much time to spend. It's hard to be arguing both of those at the same time.

Anecdotally, I've used search 100's of times to find a comment or an article that I'm pretty sure I read on HN but at the time didn't have an application for so I didn't bookmark it. This happens all too often in the tech sector, after all you can't know in advance which technology will land on your plate 3 months from now.
I think he meant "most of the effort that went into a good userland GUI experience, from FreeDesktop et al" is wasted when your display is 100% filled by an HTML frame, ala ChromeOS. The Linux kernel is certainly not a waste.
This is the craigslist logic. Sticky sites can convince themselves they can do no wrong because really they can't. Users would need a really strong reason to leave in droves (friendster). Even spam comments would not lose users quickly unless they were overwhelming because hacker news has a critical mass of people who would have an impossible time moving en masse.

Just because people still use craigslist doesn't mean they are doing it right. A decent mapping ui and post reply management would make the site so much better, users happy, and destroy the competition. Instead Craig says basically what you say here. It's the complacent mediocrity of monopoly.

No offense. I don't even care about search. But I disagree that you shouldn't add features unless the lack of the feature would lose users. You should add features that make users happy.
FWIW, I have written a facebook clone in Common Lisp and took me 2 months. It has profile pages, a platform for 3rd party apps, elaborate RBAC-based security, and a rudimentary service API.

If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come aboard.
Since you are cutting down, could I get that extra screen real estate?

When I am programming I have one terminal window open for subversion, the IDE I am programming in, and the web browser for documentation.

When all three are on different screens life is awesome, if I have to move my mouse to switch between windows it becomes a burden and annoying. Having even one extra screen is an absolute must as a programmer. I don't think I could live with just a single screen.

Now on a day to day browsing machine, sure, one screen, like the iPad is perfect. Hell, I tend to sit on the couch with my iPhone browsing the web while watching TV.
PG: How about creating a competition for making the best search for news.ycombinator.com?

Potential way it could be arranged:
E.g. require that participants have their yc name as part of the user agent string while crawling and that they are allowed to maximum crawl 1000-10000 threads(with all comments) and create search for that. Or perhaps create a recent dataset with stories/threads so all participants have the same data.

Potential price for the winner:
Serve search on news.ycombinator.com for one year?
Interesting that you claim the efforts that have gone into developing Linux are now obsolete yet Chrome OS (which your offer will transcend "obsolete" Linux development) still depends on Linux as does a huge portion of the web.

Human progress is largely evolutionary and incremental. We stand on all that came before us. Facebook brought a new concept of interaction that has a downside many people are against. They address this by creating an alternative, and so goes history.

Progress is a dialog.
Interesting to note that since posting donation averages on the front page, each average has increased by 10 to 20 cents. There's probably a dozen psychological studies on this sort of thing.
We are working on better ways to present it, we would definitely welcome some suggestions on how to make it clearer, support@embed.ly.

re: problem 2, some sites that use us do a mix of calling the source and embed.ly, we generally are faster on subsequent calls to the same url and also we support sites that don't roll their own.
Dr. Drew and Adam Corolla had (have?) a call-in radio show on late at night (99.5 Washington D.C) and they had a segment of weird stories named "Germany or Florida". It's always something weird/stupid and always happens either in Germany or Florida.
So, I guess I am the only jerk who, after losing all hope to get the fair price, would just order the special, then pick out the meaty parts in front of them and politely ask for the garbage bin?
"lambda the ultimate kitchen utensil"
FOAF is not a fair comparison. It meets only the "open and distributed" criterion. A Facebook replacement would, like the Wave protocol, allow users to chose a service as their delegate, and would not just be a way for nerds to mark up their meatspace and online-only friends.
Yeah, very possible that culture is a big part of it. I would attribute a lot of it to that, along with the homogeneity of the population, which probably reduces the race-related tension which is so prevalent in the US.

I was mainly saying that your argument that the great-grandparent of this was using noone incorrectly was wrong. 53 in a country that large is a rounding error, as is the rise from 53 to 66 which you just stated. Statistical noise.

You can't really compare it with prohibition or the ban on Marijuana, either. Culturally, that seems like a much more ridiculous law than gun bans do - drugs and alcohol affect ones self, and people generally feel that they have a right to choose what they do to themselves. Bans on things that are addictive? Of course those will be broken. It's not a very good comparison.
I know some people who started smoking because of that. They only smoke at work. I contemplated starting too, but I know I won't do it because I really hate that smell.
When the server first comes over we usually politely let them know that we'll be needing our check split. Sometimes it's easier for them to know this ahead of time, especially if they have older POS terminals.

I've also found that individually we tend to tip 20-30% but when there's a large check that has to be paid on one card (with cash and IOU's going to the card holder) the tip tends to be <20%.
You can use the embedly api right now, the only thing we ask is if you call us server side to provide a valid user agent. Heres the docs, http://api.embed.ly/documentation and if you want to promote your site we'll put it up on our developers page.
New Proxy Sites | Free Proxy List | Web-Proxies.org
"could be replaced with a cross-browser plug-in that exposes a unified API for accessing resources outside the browser (i.e. webcams, microphones, whatever Air does, etc.)"

...aka Flash?
No kidding. GitHub absolutely exploded the number of contributors to Rails (at least, judging by this visualization).
> I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

> I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

> I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

Great examples of what Facebook cannot do, and what the Facebook replacement must do.
I don't know who is downvoting you, but I wasn't intending to be condescending.
I was a work only smoker for a year when my boss smoked and no one else in the dept did. It helped a lot. It was never a kiss-ass thing and there wasn't any direct benefit, no raises over non-smokers or anything.

But when we were working long hours and she went for a smoke I went with her and we shot the shit. It just made us closer and it was more fun to work together overall. (I had quit a pack a day habit years before and when I left that job I stopped the work smoking.)
Getting my Dissertation Approved was a Difficult Task, but I did it
I read through the website which was on the top of search engine results and decided to get help from them.I asked for the help from the guys, and they promised to help me with my dissertation. With the assistance of these guys, I submitted my dissertation proposal to the supervisor, which he instantly approved.
Thanks, Ryan.

My mom had to give up a baby for adoption in England in 1954. The rest of us found out about him in 1978. No one knew what happened to him.

One day in June 2005, I was using google to see what my family in Ireland is up to. I'm naturally nosy that way. Quite by accident, I came across someone who was trying to locate my mother. I established contact with them and found that it was my older brother!

We soon spoke to him and he and his wife visited our mom in New York. It was an amazing experience. He has two sons and one of them has the same name as me. My mom, now in a nursing home, was elated.

Mark is a geek too! He invented this SCSI, fiber optic thingy and built a company on it in the UK. We really hit it off and we chatted quite a bit on the web. He's incredibly funny.

To me, this is the most amazing consequence of the Internet. I can't tell you the number of connections I've been able to establish, maintain and recover by email and google. Mark was certainly the most significant.

Sadly, Mark passed away at the end of January. He only made it across the pond the one time, but the connection will stick with us forever.
The fact is for something like Facebook to function smoothly, it has to be centralized.

I hate to do this to you, but [citation needed].

for reasons all HN readers understand, [P2P] would be a huge, huge mess.

Count me as one HN reader who does not understand that. (But then, it's hard to get someone to understand something if his ideology depends on not understanding it...)
facebook is now opt-out whereas it used to be opt-in. give me something like that with early 2006 facebook simplicity and id try it. ironically, ive always wanted a higher res community for the people here on HN. this might be the perfect seeding grounds for something to happen (early adopter, good sense of community, far reach,etc.)
"Paul has kept the door solidly locked to others contributing to HN"

Does he? If you send a bug fix or feature patch to the HN arc codebase, he tosses it without looking at it? Or does he look at it and then take a decision whether to include it or not? I would imagine the latter (please correct me if I am wrong).

That he refuses to consider some suggestions, no matter how much sense it may make to the person making the suggestion (or even bystanders) is the exact same behaviour that every open source project's BDFL exhibits. I think you exaggerate with the "door solidly locked to other s contributing". If you send in a bug fix patch for example, I am sure he'd incorporate it asap.

Now the complaint reduces to "but PG refused to consider this feature though I (and many others) think it is a must have"

The traditional answer to "but the BDFL refuses to incorporate my suggestions which were liked by all the users I spoke to" is "then fork the code, and/or build something better".

My view, fwiw, is that we (users of HN) have the right to request features and present a logical case and PG (as the chief programmer/owner/BDFL etc of HN) can accept or refuse those requests for any reason whatsoever. If he explains the rationale that is a bonus, but he doesn't really need to. It is his project.

If he refuses to incorporate our fixes/suggestions, we (the hacker users of HN) can either go along with his decision xor fork the codebase (or start a new project from scratch using our preferred tools) and build something better (and I know a couple of HNers who are trying exactly that).
Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.

This absolutely squares with my experience. I wouldn't want to lose visibility into my own comment scores, but I could do without seeing everyone else's.
"Interesting sidenote: Ashton Kutcher is actually directly responsible for this site existing; the Nowmov guys were considering working on another idea until Kutcher told Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston that he wanted something like this. Kutcher decided to invest in and advise the startup, and Nowmov became a reality."

It's the kiss of death.
No way. You cannot attract so many people worldwide when the trend is already mature. The same with other mass hysterias like WoW, now the iPad, etc.

The Tipping Point is a good book to learn why not. In-browser social networks is a not a cool thing anymore. It is just some feature of the net.

What is really interesting - is an emerging market of the Android-powered devices. The hardware is powerful and cheap enough, and the platform is open and simple (unlike the Nokia's crap).

The next generation of the social communications should be something like "texting 2.0" - texting with easy integration of a rich content from phone's camera on the fly. Just because teens loves texting, taking photos and their mobile phones.
What would be a mess about it? Couldn't we be clever enough to figure out how to do this with what we have?
How long will it be before they are pushing for the same restrictions on sports programs and cable tv shows?

I think the FCC specifically said that they won't allow this.