skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is not really that special.

1) Facebook, unlike Google is not a technological advance. It means that copying Facebook is easier.

2) People can also jump ship en-masse from one social network to another within a few years. Many people migrated from Myspace to Facebook. Its not limited to social networking sites. I was amazed when almost everyone of my friends migrated from Yahoo Messenger to Google Talk within about a month. I had about 30-35 regularly online friends at Yahoo and suddenly almost all of them migrated to Google Talk. This was when GTalk didnt even have emoticons. Of course Yahoo Messenger is still ahead of Google Talk in terms of users but this was just an example to show that even if a previous communication medium has all your friends, that does not mean you are locked in. It may so happen that suddenly everyone just simply without explanation migrate to another platform. This process is not very rational and completely unpredictable.

3) Also consider the fact Facebook does not seem popular in countries like India and China. Within some years these countries will be far bigger in terms of number of users compared to the US.
The premise that social news sites must degrade over time?
No, don't ban them; It's not going to solve anything.
A non-compete, like any contract, doesn't mean anything until a court actually enforces it. I'm no lawyer, but given the circumstances, I doubt these contracts will hold up in court well. Also, I'm pretty sure non-compete clauses are less enforcable when the employer does the termination.
Terra-forming Mars would be pretty hard.

According to Dan Simmons in the novel Hyperion, we will need to develop artificial intelligence to the point of singularity. Their gift to us from the AI's evolved beyind singularity will be space/time singularities which will allow us to travel and prosper in other worlds.
I have to grudgingly vote no, only because I think they have a good article on the front page here right now. I generally dislike them.

Now if you were to suggest banning any Ask News.YC posts with the word recession in the title...
I think a karma cost for posting stories is a really bad idea.

Firstly, it would not solve this problem since Valleywag stories tend to get lots of upvotes. Indeed, it would encourage posting link-baiting stories, since they also tend to be karma-baiting stories.

Secondly, it would stop people from posting borderline, but valid stuff. I often don't post things I'm unsure people will like, but many times posts that seem borderline to me end up getting loads of upvotes. With a karma cost for posting, people would simply not post these kinds of stories.

A karma cost for posting is a recipie for encouraging lowest-common-denominator stuff.
Does a Business Guy have a Place in Software Startups?
Building Better Silos
I do, but I'm not sure why.
I totally disagree - fb build something people want simple as that. you may not like it / get it, but their growth and engagement metrics are simply off the charts, they have deep, deep talent and plenty of growth paths left. im surprised your not considering doing a fantasy sports app on fb - its a winning space.

as for overall utility fb's platform is the major innovation on the web in the last 5 years and its still very young (less than a year). Additionally photo, mobile, media sharing, and virtual goods apps are both technically powerful and very easy to use.

they are aggregating the primary social activities on the web and a wrapping them together in one box that people are familiar with.

there is a lot of hype in the valley, yes or course, but dismissing fb as a fad is a bit shortsighted. with the level of traction they have achieved to date and the opportunities ahead fb is in a very good spot.
Any early risers are welcome to join us at the Bootstrapper Tue April 15 in Sunnyvale or Fri May 2 in Palo Alto. 7:30-9am everyone buys their own breakfast and we meet in a back room. We've been meeting for a year and half; details at http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com
v important: "real names, identities and relationships"
Usually every upgrade of Windows makes sense. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 were logical but then Windows ME didn't make any sense as it didn't improve much upon 98. Windows XP made sense as it was a real improvement but the move from Windows XP to Vista didn't gain any real benefits to the end user and since you are only as good as your last product, MS is getting a great deal of blowback.

Windows Vista to "Windows 7" may make sense if Microsoft is rewriting the core to handle legacy apps differently then installing 2 gigabytes of unneeded files. If they scrap out the high level stuff that manages DRM, scrape off the extra crud they added, they will be fine again and Vista will be in the past.
PG,
I have one suggestion - for many people, YC funding amount is not as important as the advice and networking they will get there.

Can you think of a mechanism where the next 10 promising or so YC applicants who didn't get funding in this cycle atleast get other benefits in return of some equity for YC?

For e.g., YC members can advice those 10 startups for weekly or bi-weekly basis. Also, these startups may get chance to attend those weekly dinner meetings or so. Of-course, this would take YC's extra energy, but they will be rewarded with some reasonable amount of equity as well.

What says? Does this make sense?
im so ready to switch from google
Agreed, I think the important thing is raising quality across the board. Two possible solutions:
a) stop people voting for crap b) get the community to filter out crap.

I don't have any good ideas for option a), and I dislike reddit-style downvoting for option b) since it has the same problem of people upvoting bad stuff, just in reverse.

One idea which could work for b) is a digg-like 'bury' option (i.e. a 'this is crap' button) - but only in tandem with a high karma minimum for being allowed to use it, and some statistical cleverness for deciding when a post should be buried. But I'm terribly enthused with this idea either.
I still can't believe that the Google guys didn't work with the Django team on having a full port of it ready to go when they released Appengine.

It would be like someone releasing a Ruby hosting service but not having a Rails port ready to go on it.
While yau are at it dailymail.co.uk please...
Valleywag stories tend to get lots of upvotes.

In that case, the "let's ban valleywag" approach is even more wrong. The problem of "garbage gets voted up" is one which ought to be solved long before the problem of "people submit garbage".
Its pretty crazy how slow the XP => Vista migration has been going. But most of the stuff Gartner reports is old news.

How many people here are staying with XP, and when do you plan to migrate, personally?
Weekend weather outlook in Redmond: sunny skies with a 95% chance of flying chairs.
I agree, thats pretty much what I was getting at. I favor a systemic solution, not banning sites. The problem isn't that people submit bad stuff, its that the community upvotes it and has no ability to filter it.
Just out of curiosity, what is the cut off point between young and old programmers? If it's somewhere between 40-50, I would agree that you see fewer programmers in this age range. But I think that also has something to do with fewer positions available at the top compared to all the junior level positions.

If you assume the average programmer will start their career by their mid 20s, ten years seems a little early for "old" programmers to start a mass defection. I would not be surprised if many of the commenters here could be considered "old programmers" by that definition. I don't have a big sample, but in my experience, you're not an "old" programmer until you hit 45-50.
You ban one site, you'll have people knocking your door down to ban others. Just let it be what it is.

Agree that VW is linkbait but I enjoy reading it anyways :P
Custom ban filter. I was thinking about posting a feature request of something similar but I didn't.

Like this huddlechat / campfire business over the last couple of days, i wanted to strip out that content.
Your first example takes

<brian> parentOf <bct>
<brian> name 'Brian'
<bct> name 'Brendan'

and deduces

'Brendan' hasParentNamed 'Brian'

How is this substantially different from the second example? Forgive me if I'm thick; I'm honestly trying to understand.
Why are we linking to flamebait Valleywag?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160704
It's not X's fault. It's your fault.
Ruby hack offers YC news feed with full articles
blogged here: http://6brand.com/scraping-hacker-news-success
I am convert now; using ubuntu linux full time on laptop & desktop both.(I just posted the same here http://ketankhairnar.blogspot.com )

Actually linux still has to go long way and programmers have to contribute more not only by improving the desktop experience(which distros like fedora/debian are doing); but also by showcasing alternative approaches like ubuntu/fedora and its usability to other people who are lost into windows world.

I know this shift is happening faster than ever before. I may not do significant contrubution on development part but surely would make people around me aware of alternative (which in turn would make lot of people happy about hardware/cost and performance )
Do you want to work on ads? Or change life?
The problem is, the "other benefits" are what's in short supply, not money.
You have a basic right to earn a living, no contract can take that away from you.
It's not worth the paper it written on.
Any thoughts on how to overcome this one?

Perhaps try to achieve better ranking before interviews? You might do psychological profiles or tests to estimate technical ability.
Just send them an nice email, be a little unique and you'll probably get covered. Be prepared for a traffic spike, as well as all the people who re-blog mashable's content.
"Women tend to be more interested in individual relationships than men, and you can't have a relationship with a computer."

OK, firstly, my Mac started crying when he read that. Poor mac!

Secondly, the broad generalisations that you make about men and women is exactly the problem. Here's a hint: Women working in IT, and particularly programming, are there precisely because we too are interested in technical subjects and having very analytical minds. The problem is, as roadtripgeek has already alluded to, men see us in the workplace, and make the assumption that we are just like the hairdresser, or the secretary that they talk to on coffee breaks: into communications more than cold hard code.

I look at my situation. My entire floor at the ofice is taken up by programmers and their direct managers. I am the only woman on the floor. It's not the technical conversations that get me, it's all the other crap. Guys that want to talk about poker, or brewing beer, or the football results, or how they got lucky with a hot babe in the carpark of the Sheraton last weekend. Or it's when they decide to use a clip from a porno film as the test flow for a new product that we are working on. Or the fact that a few of the guys have decided that, seeing as I'm the only woman on the floor, that I shouldn't have a bathroom all to myself, and who won't even put the damned seat back down after they have finished pissing!

It's all that crap that makes IT unattractive for women, not the actual work itself.

Personally, like many of us here on HN, I'm working on my exit strategy - work for myself, where I can still code my little heart out, without having to put up with all the male bonding crap that I'm automatically excluded from in the workplace.

Owning a startup FTW...
Debian etch
Do We Really Want Fine-Grained News Personalization?
Email has become a broken platform for spam - similar to facebook.
Relational Databases are Dead, Long Live Relational Databases
More fluff from Matt Maroon. This is starting to irritate me. Matt is probably a nice guy, but does this article contain any insight for anyone?

If not, why exactly is it the top story?
AKA "How self-referential clickbait linking to generic info is the ruin of sites like Hacker News."
"facebook friends" != real friends
Why you cannot believe banks' audited financial statements
It makes for decent discussion.
How about time-regulated voting for a)? ( see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147383 ) Presumably, people who go on an impulse voting spree do it without much thought and would be greatly discouraged by periodic voting prevention, whereas those who take the time to make thoughtful votes and comments wouldn't mind the regulation as much.
I have noticed lately, that title has become more important than ever to stories here. When it's too much to truly keep up with the new page, a link/clickbait title just does better than shorter and sometimes more accurately descriptive titles.
Twitter Profile Page Ideas
While the startup itself does sound cool, this link is not informative and little more than a dressed-up employment ad.

Suggestion - instead post a blog entry or link to a page describing what you're doing and why we absolutely have to join. You can do better than 5 bullet points on a scribd document.
your insinuating that one who uses MySpace will ever "graduate" to Facebook as if it were a step up.

Show me a fan who connected with a musician on Facebook the way they connect with on MySpace. MySpace is a lot more content/entertainment oriented (as it has been since its origin) while Facebook was always more about connecting with friends and messaging.

I don't fall into any of the groups your stereotyping; however, I do find them extremely offensive and ignorant, as if a Facebook user were a super elite.

In fact, that would only reinforce the point that it's just not for everybody.
How you can sign your code and why you should
I've still never used a vista machine. MSFT should probably take a cue from apple and make more-or-less meaningless updates to the OS and call it a new version. Charge 50 bucks for an upgrade, but do them every year like clockwork. You have de facto subscription software at that point.
Ritalin is prescribed for OCD occasionally. It's just not an advertised use.
As with any social app, banning sites/users/apps that aren't deliberately damaging (like spam, trolls, whatever) is basically saying your system isn't working, and you can't be bothered to change it.

It's like 'fixing' a bug in software by simply suppressing the error messages. It will come back to bite you in the ass.
How to Get Customer Service via Twitter
Those rights were never theirs to buy. This country banned slavery long ago.
It makes for some discussion, but it doesn't start at a particularly high point. I have read much more interesting articles about social networks on this very site, stuff written by Marc Andreesen and Paul Buchheit.

For example, the potential of social networks as consumer distribution model or as magnifying social capital is completely ignored here.
I certainly hope this poll isn't decided by a simple majority. Imagine how many things would get banned if it only required a simple majority vote. Things should not be banned without an overwhelming majority of people thinking it is necessary.
I don't think they should be banned, and I have this as a systemic fix: allow individuals to filter out sites they don't like to see in the new or home page lists. This will contain the "Valleywag submissions" to the people who really like them and vote them up.

With this data in mind, you could then say that given that x% of our members have filtered out a site, we should block their submission. x could be defined in a number of ways and tweaking that will be another discussion.

Pierre
We don't know how to program...
laughable considering the strength of Facebook has been it's college-aged crowd who post hundreds of thousands of pictures from "beer & more beer" events
Eric Dela Cruz: My Life As a Google Chef
"""Because of the startup time of the virtual machine?"""

Fact is, we have hundreds of JVMs running that have uptimes of months. So really, we don't care about a JVM and app server starting up in 15 seconds. That is short term thinking. I'm rather fond of the long term stability though :)
I do, because there was a dead post linked to that I couldn't see otherwise. Or something along those lines. Since then it hasn't been annoying enough to turn off.
"Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the Games. They all deserved to win."

That is weak-minded pablum. Just because you sacrifice a lot for something doesn't mean you "deserve to win".
AmazingStartups, makes your startup famous...
Ubuntu. But I would love to deploy more on Solaris or Open Solaris. When you have to deal with performance issues then Solaris is king. It has so many excellent tools to figure out what applications are doing. Standard linux can't even show on a per-process basis what is causing disk io for example. Stuff like that is a no-brainer on Solaris.
“paradigm shift”

You should look that up (i.e. read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions), because it does not mean what you think it means. (Except when used as a bullshit buzzword by “enterprise” software executives)
"""Does anybody have experience with Ubuntu Server?"""

Ubuntu is great. We decided to go for Ubuntu because at the time we made that decision, Debian was still at 3.1 and very outdated. They have played catchup since then and 4.0 is much more modern (i'm mostly talking about more recent versions of popular stuff like postfix, postgres, mysql, gcc, etc.).

We standardized on 6.06/LTS but I've been also been playing with the 8.04/LTS release that is coming up. Looks very nice and we will probably switch to it. For new installations. Old stuff still runs rock solid.
Agreed - it's a community problem, not a technology problem.

A while ago I suggested a 'name and shame' approach, where 'bozo' votes, if there are enough of them, reveal who voted for a story.
Here you go:

http://json.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON

I use JSON when I'm doing Ajax things. Jquery and Django both have methods to encode/ decode JSON.
This rant is uninsightful and frankly pointless: it boils down to “I don’t find Facebook very useful for me, therefore there’s nothing to it,” with added bitter invective.

Matt should go read some of danah boyd’s sociology papers about social networking sites, if he wants to be convinced that there’s more than just a “nifty utility” there. She does a much better job exploring their significance than random unsubstantiated comments in this rather inane discussion.
How many people here use windows? I'd expect it to be a pretty small % these days.
i don't see / understand how it would, so can you please elaborate a bit on your idea ? thanks !
Shockingly, I have never met a passionate MySpace user before. I'm glad there are people like you out there. It adds balance.

MySpace is generally considered to be a poorly designed, unkept "social network" while Facebook is generally considered to be a clean, open, and sophisticated networking application. There is a very clear, highly researched demographic divide between the younger generation (middle/high school) using myspace and older, more sophisticated generation using Facebook. There is also a clear point of transfer, High School => College, where many people "graduate" to Facebook. It's a progression. (There are studies saying that MySpace also caters to the "older" population >30yo, but those are not the people I am considering.)

Facebook is not for everybody. I highly doubt the "too old" population I stereotyped will ever use Facebook. But as time goes on, I can see people in my generation (early twenties) replacing the "too old" generation while still using things like Facebook, so that huge market will slowly be absorbed.

There will always be a MySpace. It's amazingly good for connecting artists, like you mentioned. But it's still a shitty, poorly run, poorly designed, and non-user-centric organization. I wish Virb would have taken over.
it _is_ world changing for them. it completely restructures their social lives and the opportunities available to them for both serious and non-serious social interaction. facebook has had a larger impact on many people's lives than google. do you think most people really care about somewhat better search results and somewhat better webmail over having access to four times (pulled that number out of my ass, but you can bet that it's a multiplier) as many social events and people as they did before?
People want to know what their friends are doing. That information really has nothing to do with it. It's about coordinating events among social groups, and Facebook is especially powerful at doing that among people who aren't very familiar with each other but have talked long enough to click "Add to Friends."
I'd argue that Facebook has the best 'quality' when compared to the other social networks in the USA. The UI and feature set are much better than any of its competitors. Facebook is dominant in the USA; the only competitor is MySpace which seems to fill a different niche.

Facebook = keep tabs on people you know, or sorta know.

MySpace = meet random people you don't know, get spammed by porn bots, irritate your ex by posting salacious photos of yourself with a new fling, browse photos of potential mates in a criminally inappropriate age bracket from yourself, etc.
Another Reason Not To Use Network Solutions
The demand for the fast, free flow of information about your friends' and acquaintances' lives and events, not only to tell you about who and what you already know, but about who and what you'd like to know; And it works.
Blocking ads is a more and more widely required feature by users that advertisers as well as product companies will have to deal with. Demonizing doesn't seem to be the best strategy...
The number for inactive blogs (or inactive users in web-applications) is surely much higher because its even easier to create a blog. People play around with something new, find something better, etc.
What are the stats for valleywag articles? I don't recall seeing any on the front page for quite some time, aside from the latest one about the google noncompete.

There are a lot of other linkbait articles that float up to the front page. The "businesshackers" guy comes to mind. There have also been a number of completely vapid articles recently, such as the "to be a programmer, you need these 10 things: 1. text editor..." article. I can only hope these are linkbait for some SEO scam network; the thought that these articles are written and upmodded by actual hackers is too depressing.

Anyway, at least we know Valleywag is a "real" site which sometimes has humor or interesting gossip. The other linkbait sites that make it to the front page truly have nothing to offer. The current moderation scheme deals with Valleywag just fine. If you must ban, there are other sites which seem to be a higher priority.