skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FaceBook's network effects are nowhere near as big as EBay's.

When I first started making friends online, we all got DeadJournals. It was free, it didn't have invite codes like LiveJournal, it wasn't "too young" like Xanga, and it wasn't "too old" like Blogger (I was a freshman in college at the time, and most of my friends were high schoolers).

Then one person in my group of friends got a LiveJournal, and with it, an invite code. LiveJournal was seen as higher-status, and so over the next 5-6 weeks, we all migrated over. Every week (that's how long you had to wait to get an invite code), the person who just got their LJ code would announce "I've got a code. First person to shout gets it" in an AIM chatroom, and one more person would move over, until we were all on LiveJournal.

Then, when my friends graduated high school, there was a big split between those who went to college and those who didn't. Those who didn't usually went to MySpace, because their local friends were all there and they felt they had less in common with those of us who were college-bound. Those who did would post messages on their LJ that said "I'm on FaceBook as Jane Smith @ SomeCollege", and then everyone else would comment with "OMG I HAZ FACEBOOK! Friended you! [And if they're polite, they'd say what their real name was, so the person didn't get lots of friend requests that they had no idea about.]"

Similarly, when LJ did something stupid and pissed off all of fandom at once, there was a mass exodus of people for GreatestJournal. Everyone would post "I'm now at username@greatestjournal.com", their friends would leave too, and they'd all friend each other on the new site.

Analysts are right that nobody ever leaves a social network site while all their friends are there. Instead, they leave as groups. It's very much like the tipping point where somebody grabs their coat at a party and then everyone gets up to leave.

EBay is very different, because if you're finding a seller for a rare item, you have no other means of communication other than EBay. EBay holds a monopoly on your means of finding the person you're looking for. FaceBook deals with real social relationships, and real social relationships always have backchannels. If you're FaceBook friends, you probably have regular buddy chats over instant-messaging, or you see each other at school, or you go out for lunch. If something better comes along, you can say "Oh, I found this cool social networking site, let's all go check it out."
Looks like the site has a lot of potential. I love a good laugh. I was rolling on the floor after reading the FAQs.
Off topic, but I read your profile description and I had actually thought of doing something similar a few years ago. At the time bandwidth was still prohibitively expensive though. Nowadays, I don't think that's been adequately solved yet, and it would be much more realistic with services like AWS now. Good luck with that! :)
Amazon Gets Serious About AWS, Adds Premium Support
Web Form Design: Modern Solutions and Creative Ideas
In 2008, I'm impressed with any online video company barely breaking even. I figure today's ventures are just attempts to build a brand in anticipation of when costs come down and profitability is realistic.
5 Business Decisions You Will Be Proud Of
Second Life needs kindergarten lessons
You think that people will pay to host (smaller) photos, but not (larger) videos?
SQL Server 2005 SP3 to be released after SQL Server 2008
Various Facebook ad neworks offer CPMs in the range of about 1-10 cents.

Now, you aren't dealing with nearly the bandwidth costs...
I just reran the numbers a bit through S3 calculator and came up with 780K per month at that traffic level, so costs are already dropping but still not a very big profit margin, and that is assuming you can put ads on all your videos and you get to keep the entire 1$ CPM.

And if someone puts any ads on my family birthday videos I'll be irked.
If Facebook could roll in degrees of separation, it'd be interesting.

What about adding an "is this person important to me" web service for email. For example-- I get an unsolicited email via Gmail. Gmail looks at the sender, pings Facebook's social graph to determine if I know the person or happen to be a degree or two of separation away.

Voila-- a foil for spam and a tool to allow you the ability to sort email based on social "proximity".

Of course, the social graph isn't new. Gmail has a pretty good read on the Social graph. Not as much explicit relationships, but it could determine relationship strength by frequency and size of correspondence.

Facebook has a good start, though I think they have a long road before they have enough data (especially among older generations) to be useful.
Very cool, just going through it now. It has the feel of my course slides in university, but much more to the point and with better examples.
The fact that people are willing to pay for smaller photos is a fantastic sign that they would pay for larger videos!

They might pay to host higher quality or longer videos. Here are some things a premium youtube could provide:

- longer videos

- higher quality videos (for screencast, plays, etc)

- spam filtering or policing comments

- ???

The fact that people are willing to pay for smaller photos is a fantastic sign that they would pay for larger videos!
Does Google Index Hacker News In Real Time?
Hey check this out: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2234/2420746731_3162f2c759_o....

( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166529 )
The acceptance rate to the good MBA schools is very low, which is already a barrier to entry. In MBA land, it makes a big difference if you go to a top 10 school or Local U. A degree from Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Sloan, or Kellogg pretty much guarantees you a hedge fund, private equity, or investment banking position, if you want one. Also, a LARGE portion of Fortune 500 CEOs come from the top schools. However, you must be rather smart and have great work experience (or have very good work experience while being female/minority) to get into those schools.
That is one badass web app you've got there. I'm enjoying it right now. One GUI issue: The controls and song info are displayed on top of the slideshow, which leads to them being unreadable 25% of the time. (When they're on top of very bright or white pictures) I would move it down below the slideshow onto a stable background.

There's also no home link from the listen page.

Once again, nice app. I'll be using for a bit. Oh, and you should block Pandora adds from your Adsense account.
> We sold Justin.tv on eBay for $250k, which is around the neighborhood you'd want.

Hilarious kind of mistyping there. Obviously that was supposed to read "We sold Kiko on eBay..."
Linux 2.6.25 Released
In 2004 IBM was considering a switch to linux. I hope they are successful with the mac push.

"First, our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux based desktop before the end of 2005. This means replacing productivity, web access and viewing tools with open standards based equivalents."

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2004/01/07/inter...
Just b/c it isn't designed for the wealthy doesn't mean they won't shell out for it :)

I tried to make that distinction, that it's a good fit is your time has value and you make decisions based on that value - if you have your own business, if you have clients, if you manage people, if you are a consultant, etc. If it helps you use one hour a month better, then it has already paid its $20 fee.

In contrast, my time is full of a) salaried work where I do what I'm told and b) family and housework that doesn't pay and needs to be done anyway. So a) my incremental time a) doesn't pay more and b) I don't have prerequisite chains or project-based work, just tasks.
Measuring and Fixing Linux Latency
Out of curiosity, how many users are in your beta? (insert usual deference to proprietary info, etc)

Also, what are your thoughts on public beta feedback like my article? I figure it's better written than if I just emailed you (since I'm claiming it forevermore) and it also drives some traffic and awareness to the site. I've written a few others for other products and they've appreciated it.
Are we all hopelessly stupid, that we cannot learn to avoid this mistake?

Many of us are, though I wouldn't say it is necessarily only stupid people who do it.

I consider it a good principle that the words in a reply in forums like this stand by themselves. If you or pg or anyone else wants to say something about lisp, you got to back it up. If you have already backed it up in "several hundred blog posts and news.YC comments, posted over several years", it should be easy for you to reference some of this material in support of your views.

You saying that the exact same argument, presented word-for-word the same, is not worth as much as the same thing when it comes out of an authority's keyboard, is an appeal to authority. However, if this other person has already defended this view, all he has to do is reference it to make the post worth more. But then the posts aren't word-for-word identical. Then one contains a reference to a justification and one doesn't.

Your example involves a question of how much to trust a person. This is one of the cases where it matters who's making the comment. It's a straightforward question of whether you want to trust that the person who says "Most of the smart programmers that I've met would rather work in Lisp than in Java" is speaking the truth or not, and it's clear that a habitual liar isn't as trustworthy as someone known for their honesty. It's not even an argument, it's just a truth claim.

However, the moment it becomes an argument (e.g., "lisp is better than java"), trusting it on authority becomes a fallacy. If Paul Graham wrote, "Lisp rocks", his comment is not worth any more than your comment if you wrote the same. But if he wrote, "Lisp rocks, for reasons I have detailed in this essay here: <...>", it would be worth more. But then it would no longer be "exactly the same words".
Community Design: Points as Motivation
It's possible that it considers Hacker News as a source of potential blog posts, which it seems to index very quickly. You probably just got really lucky.
First Facebook Beacon Lawsuit Hits Blockbuster
nice examples. just a note, pickle shouldn't be used for serialization if the source is untrusted.
Inbox 3.0 Brings Better RSS to Outlook
If I had a penny for every time I have heard about the BCCI setting up a website via selling rights to a company I would be a very rich man;-)

Congrats!

Can you share info on how you guys managed to win this deal?

Another interesting thing to note is the streaming rights were sold for 1/10 the price......
I think people got this all wrong.

The money-making potential of videos should be compared with televisions, not clicks.

One hour of YouTube time should eventually make about the same amount of money than one hour of TV, that's the future and that's its potential. The cost, of course, will be lower.

To achieve this, YouTube may need enterprise sales etc. But these are just means, the primary goal is still to get people spend time on online video.
I assume Google can do this cheaper than your S3 calculations. Amazon still needs to make a profit on the hosting so I assume their actual cost of providing the service is much lower. I'm not sure exactly how much lower since I don't know Amazon's margins. Anyone care to take a guess?
Thanks to everyone for their input so far. I now have a few things to look at and research - the main thing is to move it forward. If I can sell it, then it will give me additional capital that will be useful, and another company who can market my existing product better than us can take it forward. Thanks once again - I really appreciate everyones comments
Thanks for the feedback -- it's funny, I showed my design mockup to a bunch of designer friends, and they all said take the borders/boxes off of things, and leave as much white space as possible :).

As for colour on the site, I deliberately left it monochrome with the intent of focusing your attention not on the surrounding bits, but on the text in the content area. I'm guessing this might not be working in that case!

As for the font -- are you using Safari? When I was cross-browser testing I found that Safari seems to render black courier font almost grey-ishly. The reason I'm using it is because it seems to be the least represented standard font-family on the internet. It feels like it comes from another era.

Overall, the design was going for a 'film noir' aesthetic. Weird font, labeled headings, and contemporary content with a classic broadsheet-looking feel. I could be way off though, let's just say I didn't spend too much time iterating it...
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The whole "walled garden" meme is, at best, uninformed. It has an open API (has had one for a long time), it is an open platform (anyone can write apps, any language). What walls are you referring to?
indeed, the school also makes a difference, but, IMO, the biggest difference among schools is not in the quality of the MBA, its the networking and prestige that comes along with it.

you don't go to harvard to get an MBA from harvard, you go to harvard so you can say you got an MBA from harvard; to form the connections, networks, and for the prestige that comes with the harvard name. thats what you pay for -- you pay for that up front so you can get paid more later by waving your diploma around.
Apple's MacBook Pro with 128GB SSD: Performance and Battery Life Investigated
indeed. there are other issues at play in which a lot of stuff is based on. you pay more for a more prestigious school so you can get paid more upon graduation. and not all MBAs are created exactly equal. it is definitely true that some are a little harder (and some coloring books are harder to color within the lines on), and that some are easier. but the underlying principle is still the same, and unless you're graduating from a prestigious school or a school with a terrible reputation, all other MBAs are approximately equivalent.
Thanks. I agree with you, though we've done 'ok' so far. Feel free to get in touch if its an area you're interested in. Email address is now in profile
In a way Google is doing QA on the whole web. This will expose all kinds of bugs sites have hidden behind their form-processing scripts. Databases will get filled up with random junk ('Google was here'), but that is also good for QA. On the other hand, a lot of that junk data will be reflected back to the web by sites which post this stuff.. not so good for the SNR of the Internet as a whole.
That question by Paul Graham of do we want search engines spidering this site....
Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings)
Neat idea, but I'd like to see something more visual. When I'm looking for comedy online, I'm in more of a "stop reading, just watch" mode. That's what works well with funnyordie.com, although that feels like it's becoming more of a showcase site for already famous comedians to advertise their upcoming movies... Even the Onion has pictures with their stories.

What about allowing some images and even home-made videos in posts as well (e.g., jokes, routines, skits)? I imagine there's help for people afraid of moving pictures somewhere in Alberta... ;)
Ask YC: Recent *nix history..
This seems to be a meme going around. run this and paste what you get:

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

It'll be interesting to see what most people spend their time with.

this is what I get for my user:

83 ssh

51 ls

44 ec2-describe-instances

44 cd

40 sudo

20 ec2-run-instances

17 ec2-terminate-instances

15 ping

15 ifconfig

15 ec2-describe-images
home link is called search, and the best way to use it is in full screen mode, then the controls are clear enough. Ideal situation is just to start it off and let it fill your day with music similar to your first choice.

b
yeah, this is using alexa rankings, so it's far from perfect and misses a lot of other data, so take it for what it's worth.
Neither, actually. FriendFeed doesn't gather much identity information, certainly not like Facebook. FriendFeed is more content oriented, which is valuable for different reasons.

I wrote the blog post because I thought people might be interested in understanding what exactly they are building over there. I don't particularly care what people think of FB or social networks though.
I pay for the Economist. But I have a dead tree subscription and get the web one as a bonus.
will add this function asap, thanks

b
And that's exactly why I don't trust them.

I'm very wary of what any entity with that much personal information might do with it.
GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service
Gah another article about this?

Don't be evil simply isn't a mission statement. You can't define a purpose by simply stating a behavior to avoid, especially something as vague as 'evil.'
and my friend's htpc

117 sudo

85 ls

45 cd

38 exit

21 yes

19 vlc

17 screen

11 ssh

10 dmesg

8 mplayer
Scribd is growing quickly and actively hiring all kinds of developers (ruby on rails, flash/actionscript, C++, etc) so please contact us, hackers@scribd.com, if you're interested. Check out our jobs page here: http://www.scribd.com/static/jobs

Here's a link to our traffic graph on alexa:

http://snipurl.com/24rqq
> Facebook is not going become the next Google. If they do get lucky, they may be the next Microsoft, though.

What do you mean by this statement? Microsoft is larger and makes more money that Google, do you think that Facebook will be bigger that Google?

I'm not sure I'd agree with that; what make you think this?
"Don't waste time" -- good luck with that one! Might as well rewrite this how-to as "just do it, you lazy bums!"

"How to make a million dollars: 1. Work diligently at something that will make you a million dollars. 2. Just buy a winning lottery ticket."

Admonishments regarding discipline are fairly useless without instruction on how to go about doing so, which is obviously needed if you have to advise someone to be disciplined -- if they already knew how to do it they wouldn't need your how-to.
The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone
The current system has an "accuracy" that sometimes can be most closely measured in miles (i.e., it's not accurate at all). Certainly, that's better than positioning in NYC when you're really in Zurich, but not by much.

Thus, any applications that would depend on pinpoint precise location are going to have problems anyway. It seems the moral of the story is (as an application developer) to use the location services as an advisory (but not as an authoritative) service. The user should be given the capability to override or further specify his/her location.
Alexa did a major update to it's ranking algorithm and source data yesterday. It's supposedly a lot better.
Warning: Google, MS storage of health records not covered by privacy law
Man. Fuck vacation and this work life balance crap. If I am on vacation there's this little voice in my head that says "you're that much closer to dying all so some poor people can serve you some drinks you don't like while pretending they don't think you're evil and resent your economic status, and none of your work has gotten done."

And, when I was a kid, there was nothing worse than family vacations. I wanted my parents to be at work so I could play video games or my commodore 64. Point 11 she makes is good.
It indexes Hacker News extremely quickly. In the few instances I've checked, new articles and comments were indexed in Google within minutes.

I'd imagine this makes our community a pretty heavy target for spammers.
You might be able to sell it to a gold farmer and then cash out the gold IRL.
Work well for railroads but with all those hungry hackers and greedy VCs, there will always be competition. If there's profit to be made, people will always be chasing it.
There's a greasemonkey script called UnFuck Facebook, which does exactly that - It hides all app things and auto ignores apps sent to you, hides all Facebook ads and makes it look very clean in general.
Work ethic probably outweighs everything else over time. Getting something done that is sub-optimal still beats a great design that's never implemented.
Probably Monday would be more likely (I'll be working on it starting Saturday at the StartupHappyDevHouse.)
180 ruby
86 cd
40 git
31 ls
20 vim
20 script/server
16 grep
9 ri
8 ssh
6 scp
Just drop off.
Nothing? Sandra Bullock could hack them.
That would be a heck of an A/B test - some users see free, some see $4.99, some see $9.99. I wonder how those splits would break out for different sites.
Biomimetics: Design by Nature
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of attracting enough of the right kind of users.
Ditto. Not really the same though.
I think your article is great - you pinpointed our current issues (which we have in the dev plan right now - we'll give you a view collaboration into the items you mentioned for you to check on our progress) and you appreciated the power that the software can give.

One of the things you didn't mention was our collaboration capability. Basically, from any object in the system, a project, a workflow, an action, a contact, a document, you can invite in collaborators (at no charge) to view or edit. That feature is under the people tab "collaborators", but we will put it on the top line tabs so it is easier to find.

For example, I currently give all my clients view access into the projects I'm working on with them as well as access to engineers and contractors and everyone else connected with the project. My clients have been really impressed, and the collaboration with all the other vendors on the project is very nicely streamlined now.

(We're not giving out user statistics right now :)
How do they know? Do they check your weezus or something?
Would you have signed up after a 30 day trial?
The current system has two components: 1. the GSM tower based one ("accuracy" measured in miles) and 2. the Skyhook WIFI based.

If the Skyhook one returns results, your "accuracy" will probably be within a hundred feet. If you want, you can add your own access point so your iPhone will now where exactly home is: http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php

The research in the article only targets Skyhook’s WPS system. From Skyhook's form, it's clear that they use the access points MAC address as an identifier. I hope that the researchers did not spend too much time and money to figure out that all they needed to do was spoof some MAC addresses.

From Skyhook's side, they should be able to get better accuracy by using multiple access points and signal strength to refine positioning. Of course that assumes they have sufficient access point density in their database for you location.

From the iPhone's side, it can check that the Skyhook results are within the GSM tower results. The GSM tower results are presumably more reliable and more difficult to spoof (compared to buying a $50 access point).
How is the cost lower, for comparable quality content? It seems to me that YouTube has higher costs per viewer than conventional TV, and that production quality must be at least as good as regular TV to attract the same ad revenue.
Apple seems too consumer focused to start putting in all sorts of crap just because someone from Walmart corporate suggested it.
Quick-UX. Quick Heuristics for User eXperience.
Surprised no one's mentioned IMDB.com; it's the first thing that leaps to my mind.

Also occasionally surprised to consider I get people to pay to use http://linkswarm.com/ -- not complaining, though.
109 sudo

48 s

42 cd

34 touch

30 apache (alias for sudo apachectl)

25 cp

24 gem

17 c

16 mate

14 irb
Get a Drink with Local Startups
Well, not as extremely. 16 minutes after your post I did a search for it and it was not in Google's index yet.