skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is one of the few companies in the world with unbounded potential. It's a cultural phenomenon that has changed the way people use the internet and, more importantly, has changed the way people interact with their real friends. Very few companies change culture and daily interaction like this.

Is it worth $33b today? Not sure. Could it be worth $200b someday? Could Facebook be bigger than Microsoft? Bigger than Google? Bigger than Exxon? Maybe. I can't think of any other company for which "maybe" is a reasonable answer.

That's why investors value it so highly.
Modifying page tables is just a store on x86; since you would be reducing protections (going from unmapped, to mapped read-only), there is no need for TLB flush or shootdown (both of which are, admittedly, getting relatively more costly).
Old technology is understood by kids such as a film strip for a movie and old telephone receiver. They are part of our cultural heritage. They might be boarding on quaint and old fashioned though.

I could see a bucket with an arrow pointing into it which would make a good icon for save. A telephone is a very easy to decipher icon even as a black and white icon.
A Digg for Facebook Likes: My Experiment
Dumb question. What does MVP stand for in this context?
Never knew about that one... that's awesome. Many many thanks!
Plan to Learn, Plan to Fail
how much would it be for Indians / Chinese ?
I wonder if freemium games could fit into this contest? Get at least one person to spend money on your Facebook game by Oct. 31st?
Your old HN is still there in the archives - all things change;) I know what you're saying though, there was a long rant the other day about someone leaving HN and a lot of it rang true to me. For lack of a better word I'd say that a level of group-think has developed that was absent six months ago.
If you take #3 to its logical conclusion, any company's shares, if sold all sold at once, would be worth far less than the price at the nexus of supply and demand (the market price).

Price is simply a function of supply and demand. It's not customary to use a fire sale price as the sole basis of a company's valuation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_(finance)
This. I would find this post mildly creepy even if it were written about someone's who's an actual public figure. Writing it about someone whose claim to fame is writing a Bingo card generator and being #4-ranked in karma on a niche internet forum is just sick.
Very true. Indeed, I switched from Firefox to Chrome after Firefox hanged yet again with N tabs open, and I just couldn't figure which one it was and simply close that one. On chrome this never happened, and I never had to restart the browser.
Hi, I'm the guy who came up with the splice idea. It's based on what I learned doing this:

www.connectathon.org/talks96/bds.pdf

which was for the EIS (Earth Imaging System) project, a government effort to image the earth about 15 years ago. That project eventually had 200Mhz MIPS SMP boxes moving data through NFS at close to 1Gbyte/sec 24x7.
So far as I know, nobody else has ever come close to that even with 10x faster CPUs.

Most of the people in this thread pretty clearly don't understand the issues involved, Rob included (sorry, Rob, go talk to Greg). Moving lots and lots of data very quickly precludes looking at each byte by the CPU. The only thing that should look at each byte is a DMA engine.

Sendfile(2) is a hack, that's true. It is a subset of what I imagined splice(2) could be (actually splice(3), the syscalls are pull(2) and push(2)). But it's a necessary hack.

Jens' splice() implementation was a start but wasn't really what I imagined for splice(), to really go there you need to rethink how the OS thinks about moving data. Unless the buyin is pervasive splice() is sort of a wart.
I'm surprised this isn't bloody obvious. At one point AOL was worth $247 billion, and then an open internet steamrolled over it.

The same thing will happen to Facebook with the open web. At least AOL had subscription revenue.
They missed the main reason I switched to chrome. I constantly had issues where firefox had a (memory leak?) that slowed my whole computer down, usually causing me to kill the task couple days.

I love the extensibility of FF, and aza's usability contributions, but I can't live repeatedly restarting a browser in a world of webapps.

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried FF 4 yet, but experienced the same issues last spring when I tried to switch back to FF for treeview tabs)

(Disclaimer 2: I suppose there's ways to workaround it - searching led me to this: http://blog.skdev.net/2009/02/12/how-to-fix-firefox-memory-l... )
I would go even further and say that "The Idiocy and Tragedy of Sebastian Marshall" is that he thinks earnings are some measure of a human being's self worth.
I've try a bunch of little micro business experiments like making iphone apps etc. I wouldn't bother with any legal framework until the $$ starts rolling in. Keep it real.
Given that I actually was hurt by bugs in filesystems as old and stable as xfs, I'd still wait a little more than that before using btrfs in a large scale. I'll build and set up about 1.2 PB of storage this year....
It's the converse that tends to be true, but many people have trouble distinguishing between converse and contrapositive. Rich people tend to be smart.

There are lots of bright ideas. The few that turn into successful companies are the ones that, at a few critical points, didn't fail. A good way to fail is to make mistakes and do nothing. So, to avoid failure, one must learn from mistakes, which tends to make people smart and is something smart people tend to do.

The extra axiom necessary for showing smart->rich is risk taking. Smart people who don't take a chance and do something drastic are no more likely than anybody else to get rich. There are people who pay others to be smart, but they generally don't pay much more than a normal salary.
FCC votes unanimously in favor of using whitespace for 'super WiFi'
What? Did I not make myself clear or are you incapable of reading?

I am not "complaining about now", I am complaining about 10 years ago. Specifically '98-00. Fireup Wikipedia and do a little MS history research.

I want my software to look fresh and fit in with the UI of the environment. I said was coding for the future, i.e. use the most cutting edge software today, so by the time we put the software on shelves, it doesn't look old.

My #1 issue with MS, really, is that they let the official API stagnate and forced us developers to use Office and IE components, in the hope of integrating them with Windows.

I would make sense of your writing if it wasn't so weirdly phrased.
What evidence do you have that the first kind is ultimately more profitable? The second group of games you listed are some of the most successful games of all time... even Civ can't compare to WoW in profits.
"He did that while working a substantially-more-than-full-time salary man job."

I know. He put lots of effort into his products. However, success is based on results, not effort. A successful business to me means you can pay all of your bills, the business's bills, and have some savings with revenue. If he isn't quitting his job, it means:

1) His business isn't making enough for him to survive or

or

2) It's making more than enough, but he still has enough time during the day to run his biz and hold down a full-time job.

Just looking at the numbers, it's obvious it was #1. Still, he only just quit his job after how many years?

A smart business person needs to know if there is a market for their product and if that market is profitable enough to sustain a business. It's obvious the bingo card market is very small and probably won't reliably sustain a business. Even the main users of the bingo card creator app are very cheap and probably won't be willing to pay for very much. So we have a small niche market with users that aren't willing to spend money a lot of money (or can't afford it).

The question is: if he finds out that his new service (the appointment reminder) has a small, unprofitable market, will he waste another 6 years trying to make it a success?
I don't see why the buffers have to be specifically page aligned. But there certainly exists some hardware, that requires some specific (unrelated to page size) alignment of it's DMA buffers. But more importantly, such buffers have to be placed in physical memory such that they are accessible to said hardware, which often means in lowest 4GB of physical address space and both kernel (does not know what just allocated page is going to be used for) and user space (cannot influence page allocation) has no way to ensure this without copying pages. IOMMU should solve this problem, but then you have additional costs coming from reprogramming IOMMU.
I found that thanks to Blockbuster's late fees (I was habitually unable to return movies on time) I would spend at least $25 a month, and in exchange I usually was able to watch two movies.

Sometimes I'd rent a movie and never even have time to watch it. I'd end up bringing it back a week later, unwatched, and have to pay another ten bucks in late fees on it because I sat on it too long.

I switched to Netflix 7 years ago and never looked back. I still have DVDs sitting around that I haven't watched yet, in spite of them having been mailed to me 2 weeks ago. I do watch a streaming title two or three nights a week. For all that I pay way less than I ever did to Blockbuster.

Netflix is probably making tons of money off me since I am so slow to mail back movies, and yet I'm totally happy with the service I'm getting and feel it's worth the price I pay.
Testing Mincemeat.py MapReduce Scalability using GridCentric
"....mature sciences deteriorate into ideologies...."

That is true.

Thinking about why this happens.... could it be the vanity of people that causes this? Sticking to ideas or practices because its 'their' ideas/practices/traditions (irrespective of if they have been passed down or been indoctrinated themselves) instead of looking at the logic behind them or their relevance to the present or future or a situation? and then decide if they should be still held on to or not?

What if we define 'ideology' as the thought/belief equivalent of 'tradition' as 'tradition' is to practices/rituals - both being 'holding on to something' irrespective of its relevance? I guess that would make both of our statements mean absolutely the same.
The maps do include the shortcuts.

I have had memorable "experiences" at Ikea.
Fun clones of fun games is also fine. They don't necessarily 'need' to evolve, so long as they are fun.
Maybe in your axiomatic dreamworld where people don't respond to stimuli.
Great teachers are really, really valuable.

Tim Robins makes more than 600k/year.
Too much text, needs editing.

TLDR: tldr
Http://fileserve.com/dashboard.php
Jappy - Die Internet-Community
read() then write() is expensive even using zero-copy techniques because there are at minimum 4 context switches for every chunk of data.

Further, every time the process stops running (another is scheduled say) the copy stops. With sendfile as a system call, this is not a problem as the kernel is working at this transfer every time it is running. (i.e. every context switch and every interrupt -- actually with dma, it the send could be happening even when the kernel is not running...)
Difficult is not impossible.

And most of than not, nothing that is really worth,... is easy.
Yeah I know that the times are a changin', but sometimes I wish there would be some kind of personalization feature where I could get filters on either what interests me, what I have been reading before, or something like that. Heck, today's headlines make me want to have a simple black list feature...
I was actually struggling with wording my post so it didn't look like an attack in any way, because I really don't mean to be negative at all.

I'm not attacking Patrick at all! I think Patrick is a great guy! I think Patrick works very hard at what he does, which includes engaging with the community and branding himself in a certain way, and he deserves all of the respect this community gives him.

From a personal branding perspective, it's interesting to see someone rise from obscurity to pg-like levels of fandom simply through hard work and providing value. It's great as a case study/learning experience.
You don't have to use Chrome, Chromium works as well and I don't believe it shares data with Google.

Also while I'm not a huge fan of lots of small unreadable tabs, I'm not really a fan of scrolling tabs either, it just seems so slow. I typically just group like tabs into their own windows and it isn't really much of an issue anymore.
For a little perspective: Blockbuster's biggest competitor in the western US, Hollywood Video, had much worse late fees. They wanted to charge my mom something like $100 for a video she kept a few days over. (It's been more than a decade since then, so I don't remember the precise details, but I do remember it was several times the purchase price of the movie.)
Chrome is definitely awesome, but I've been using FF a lot more recently because Vimperator is better than Vimium.
Russia vs US
>> " But... You know, there are lots of people out there who >> are good at business, the details of AdWords/marketing, can >> write well, can recruit people, etc"

Just because Patrick isn't the only one to do this doesn't make his accomplishments any less worthwhile. And most of those others don't share their knowledge on HN.
I used to call them "Ballbuster" due to their late fee policy. They were worse than taking out a loan from the the mafia, and eventually I started to avoid them in favor of Netflix where I could return the DVD when it was convient for me.
Netflix arrived in Canada yesterday - but their selection is terrible.

The most entertaining thing about them is their suggestions:

Type in say "Sherlock Holmes" and it says - we don't have that but you might like "Miss Marple investigates", then underneath it says we don't have "Shrek" but you might like "cats and dogs - the rip off TV series".

So it somehow matches Sherlock with Shrek - then it actually suggests movies they don't stock - the whole thing is like the monty python (which they don't stock) cheese shop sketch
Ask HN: How do you deal with friends' "Facebook for X..." pitches?
I get them all the time, some of them are not that bad but almost all will have huge problems reaching critical mass. In my experience, it often seems they expect me to love it, start it for them and write them a check when it hits the big time. Usually, they genuinely believe they have something.

So, how do you handle them?
This is timely. I just thought of a really simple game that I want to make to learn iOS development. Definitely doing this.
Jacques, I'm curious as to where you put your effort in terms of marketing (contacting people to get backlinks, SEO optimization, etc) and in the end, what were the main sources of that steady growth in the second graph? Or did you just ignore marketing and work on your product?
If the supposed billion dollars Facebook is allegedly pulling in this year was happening at anywhere a decent margin, they wouldn’t have needed a series E round of $120 million from Elevation Partners just three months ago.

It's actually not at all uncommon for wildly profitable companies to take an additional round so they can continue to ramp up at accelerative rates.
Google Instant, the Network Killer?
Yes, and didn't he already say he had a post-BingoCardCreator project that he was working on?
> They know about the problem

I consider silent, automatic updates to be a HUGE problem.
What I mean is that when Mozilla announced auto-updating people were crying all over the place about being "forced" to upgrade even when they don't want to and about privacy concerns.
JS: The Good Parts is will be a quick and informative read if you've already done a bit of JS programming. Once you're done with that, the next book I'd read is ppk on Javascript (http://www.amazon.com/ppk-JavaScript-1-Peter-Paul-Koch/dp/03...), as it's the only JS book I've found that talks at length about the BOM (browser object model). Finally, once you're comfortable with writing JS but really only need a library reference, you can pick up JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan, although you can probably do without it if your patience and Google-fu is strong enough.
Let me explain better: Google does not stop at using Python, it embraces and backs it. And every grey suit knows Google.
http://lwn.net/Articles/253361/
The best thing we can do is to constantly go through the new postings and upvote links that we like and flag links that are inappropriate.
There is a legitimate debate about the performance vs. elegance tradeoff that sendfile represents. Putting D-Bus in the kernel is just a bad idea.
Patrick isn't getting any great financial benefit from "promotes himself" here. If he wanted to invest his time and energies on promotion, it wouldn't be on HN. He does it for non-financial reasons. The other "thousands of entrepreneurs" you know aren't doing it for a good reason.
I think it's a fools errand to try to make one browser for every single type of web browsing user on the planet. I use the browser a lot differently - web development, checking HTTP headers, etc - than my girlfriend does - browsing facebook and looking up clothes on the Anthropologie website.

Firefox + Firebug, Web Developers Toolbar + all my other extensions make it a wonderful browser for doing we development, but makes it _terrible_ (and slower) for doing casual browsing...which is why I'm not writing this comment in Firefox :)

The iPad does this exceptionally well. It did a great job of showing that while the laptop platform is a superset of all iPad functionality, it was the actual _platform_ (bigger hardware, short(er) battery life, needing mouse/trackpad, etc) that got in the way from the best user experience of consuming content.
agreed on the new york tech scene. all the events i've been to are very networky and have little substance. i used to live in boston which had more "techy" tech events. i would love to hear about better events in new york.
I use Chrome at work and FF everywhere else. Chrome is bloody fast.

But, FF keywords and awesome bar are so much better than what Chrome does. Totally miss '/', and ctrl-u to view source. An extension to bring those back would make me 37% happier!

Next version of FF claims big speed improvements. And since they've delivered on speed and memory improvements in the past I'm hopeful. I'll probably be switching back to FF only when that's out.
There are a lot of things I really love about chrome, and it is very tempting to make the switch. I would bet in a few years it is as large as or larger then IE.

Im not switching from firefox, but from Opera. I haven't been able to use Firefox as my default browser without being annoyed to hell for some time.

However I still feel chrome is not as polished as Opera but I still enjoy using chrome and there are so many things that are better then Opera. However there are still 2 game breakers that are keeping me from switching to chrome.

Built in RSS reader - I don't want another program to handle RSS for me. This is a key thing keeping me on opera and I really hope they don't try to force you to go to Google Reader.

Mouse Gestures - Every plugin for this sucks. They are awful, slow, inaccurate and annoying. Big time game breaker for me.
IRIX did page flipping on the way out to users (read(2)) and copy-on-write page borrowing on the way in from users (write(2)). That's for networking.

For file I/O, if you used O_DIRECT, then the data was dma-ed to/from your pages directly, never went through the kernel's file cache at all.

All the file performance came from getting many disk DMA engines running in parallel.
There is a relevant (albeit vague) U.S. bill in committee to establish a "National Fab Lab Network":
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-6003
Do you have a specific example of something you feel Rails doesn't do? Maybe that way somebody can tell you where in the rails ecosystem that falls.
HN, like everything else, has waves. Some up. Others down.

Yesterday, I loved the homepage. Arrington's Bar Story accompanied by a million Angels defending/proving his story.

Today, I hate the homepage. Who cares what DHH thinks about Facebook? I agree with you there.

Tomorrow, I have no idea what will happen. The best thing about HN is that on its good days, it's phenomenal. And, on its worst days, it's still the best website out there for tech news and discussion.

Just my $0.02
I'm not sure it's unbelievable. I'd say it's a mark of Patrick's success at building his personal brand that:

1) His words are watched

2) He inspires conversations and entire, lengthy blog posts

I completely disagree with the author's position and assumptions (as I've detailed in another comment) but this is hardly bad news for Patrick. We're all sitting here debating how much more money he should be making. This submission is the second-most popular story on HN right now.

This is an extraordinary win for Patrick's personal branding efforts, even if it comes with a pretty uncomfortable smell to it. It's unbelievable, inasmuch as Patrick has hacked a non-computer system for personal gain.

Bravo, patio11.
I think this is the reasoning behind the Facebook Questions product that they're trying out right now. If it works, it's a way to harvest intent.
I don't know, but just realize that it is good to read things outside of your interest areas. The only thing that really matters, is if the majority starts downvoting the minority. There's still a bunch of good stuff around here, it just isn't all technical.
You're going to have to get busy making passive income streams to beat down that debt. I have the same issue.
I've been using Chrome as my browser for almost a couple of years now. I switched from firefox for basically one reason.

The browser is fast. Blazing fast. Starts-faster-than-notepad-while-my-system-is-still-settling-down fast.

I don't like how tabs get obscured if you have too many open. And there are some crashing bugs (I'm running the developer channel) but I still prefer it to any other browser.

There are some other nice features it has:

1) Silent updates that don't ask you questions. One day I'll click on the bookmark organizer and find that its been revamped completely since the last time I saw it. One day the tools menu has new items in it. I keep getting improvements pushed down as and when they are released and I've never had to notice it or take any action on it.

2) Automatically registers search engines whenever you search with it.

3) Syncs across multiple machines. Re-arranging the bookmarks on my Mac show up on my Windows system the next time I open Chrome on it.

That said, I still keep Firefox around as a container for Firebug. The chrome developer tools are nice but not on the same level as Firebug.
> This is unbelievable. If the author absolutely can't resist giving patio11 a bunch of advice about how to live his life, then write an email.

There was two other things I wanted to do - increase Patrick's profile in a positive way, and also make the point at the very bottom especially to young people in technology who are underpaid because they don't value/price their skills enough.

> If the author wants to tell us how super important it is to self-promote and make a lot of money, then don't make an example out of a dude whose mind and motivations are clearly completely fucking opaque to you.

He was saying he was upset when a public school teacher wanted wanted a discount because the teacher only made $60k - and he said he'd never made $60k.

Anyways, it looks like this has been popular with a lot of people and hopefully helpful, but also drawn some really strong negative reactions. I guess that's okay - ideally some good things comes out of this, I think it's quite possible. We'll see.
Zone-Alarm Using Scammy Scareware Tactics