skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook’s biggest weakness is that its core value proposition to users is that everybody you know is on it. Any business whose core value proposition is that “everyone is doing it” is essentially a fad. Its success and usage is driven primarily by peer pressure.

Sure Facebook is a decently designed site that makes sharing your photos, videos, comments, links, etc. easy. But that’s not hard to replicate (the backend scaling parts are hard, but invisible to the end user). When people find the new social network that all the cool kids are using, they’ll flock to it and abandon Facebook in an instant, leaving shareholders dazed and confused. I doubt Facebook will die as quick & horrible a death as MySpace (in addition to being more fad-driven, MySpace was also centered around a fad-ish industry and had horrible usability), but it will die a similar death.

Google on the other hand has developed revolutionary technologies that other companies find nearly impossible to find the talent & resources necessary to replicate and improve upon. They provide a real, unique, non-fad value proposition to the end user. Same with Amazon, Apple and many other established tech companies.

Facebook investors' problem is, will they be able to get a return on their money before a new social network becomes the trendier place to be.
It's hard to overstate the damage this is causing for merchants that prominently display FB like on their pages - lots of big ugly blank spaces / errors out there.

Realize this is temporary but shows why if you install any external vendor tool as a part of your site make contingency plans that switch on errors.
You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies
I've heard good things about finding gigs on Craigs List too, but I have found all of my work by networking.
> It's a little different than that - there's some smart and accomplished people who read my site, and I was hoping to introduce them and connect them with Patrick, maybe creating some opportunities.

I'm sure that if that was your true goal that there would have been better ways of going about it.
With Ruby, anything you can call from the command line can work via system() (http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Kernel.html#M005971).

Alternatively, you can wrap into a gem with a C extension and call it with all the Ruby goodness you should expect (recommended route).

Pseudo-code (wordier than it need be):

class MyModel

def self.ocr(file)

result = system("my_ocr_prog", file.path)

return result

end

end

A good example of a gem with a C extension might be RMagick (http://github.com/rmagick/rmagick/tree/master/ext/RMagick/)
There was two other things I wanted to do - increase Patrick's profile in a positive way

Well, way to mess it up. Suppose he wanted to take your advice -- you've just undermined him in any future negotiations.

Negotiating with sharks is not the same as friendly banter with your hacker friends.

Idiotic!
On behalf of

Groupon.com
Orbitz.com
Feedburner.com
CareerBuilder.com
TicketsNow.com
Peapod.com
Apartments.com
Restaurant.com
ShopLocal.com
Legacy.com
GrubHub.com
EveryBlock.com
Apoolicious.com
Threadless.com
Newser.com
Songza.com
ViewPoints.com
Timelines.com
SitterCity.com
BlockShopper.com
CarePages.com
SurePayroll.com
OneWed.com

...and many other Chicago-based internet companies

Fuck off.
This guy doesn't understand Patrick and he doesn't understand Paul Graham either.
2 billion active users is almost 1/3 of the worlds population. That seems like a strech.

Also you can't link the 33billion to expected. 33billion is their "valuation" now with 500M active users. There's a certain expectation that your valuation should go up as users increase.

Personally I think the per-user deal is kind of a red-herring. Revenues and Profits are the only things that really matter. Users are just a one (good) dataset for estimating growth - but hardly the only one.
Some fonts are also specially designed to render under specific font rendering engines (and will look crappy elsewhere, or just not as good).
It's the kind of thing that led _why to abandon his public life.
Amazing website and gorgeous concept! Bad timing with Facebook being down but I'll check as soon as Facebook's back up.

edit: Looks like Facebook's back up. One note: I'd edit some of the color choices. Some of the website (like some colors in the top menu) becomes hard to read. What are you thinking of doing with this service?
A related rant: http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/
Don't underestimate the ability to put a physical object on a shelf, so as to broadcast your identity: http://randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/08/08/the_book_stalke...
You can use keywords in Chrome: go to Options > Basics > Default search > Manage, pick a search engine, click Edit, and enter your keyword. It's a few more steps than in Firefox, but at least it doesn't clutter your bookmarks.
Amazon.com's bookstore of the future: pay to preview content patent?
I habitually check the new page right after checking the main page. I upvote stuff that I think is interesting to the community. Anyone else can do the same.
I believe a flip side to this is that stories are staying on the front page longer. Not too long ago I recall that each day I opened HN for the first time, every story on the front page was brand new to me. Recently stories seem to stay on the front page for 2-3 days sometimes.
Freelance Ruby On Rails Developer Philippines
Funny and novel, why not adopt the loseit or loseit model and make people put up money? If they complete their task, they keep the money. If they don't, it goes to charity. (Might be kinda complicated and more than you're willing to do).
Yes. http://i.imgur.com/VfAoa.png
This has been going on for a long long time.
i like to know too. but only about the innovators and leaders, not so much the 100 me-too startups that try to make the same thing but with a different name.
Ask HN : Is facebook down for you? Help understand which countries it is hitting
From TC :

Update 2: Here’s the statement from Facebook:

We’re currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

It appears that it is down to not only "some" users.

Is it down for you ?

It is down for me at this very moment, connecting from China using a VPN with server located in Los Angeles,USA
In a busy day Apple updates all iWork Apps and Filemaker Go for the iPad
One bug that I've seen that is not developer friendly is that you need to run with --enable-ipv6 on Linux to be able to access 127.0.0.1 or localhost when you don't have a network/internet connection. It's especially annoying that it gives a name lookup error when trying to access 127.0.0.1... IT'S AN IP ADDRESS!
The scuba divers who put fish on my hooks use various graphs like that. I figure I gotta first get out of the swimming pool, somehow.

God says...

second fallacies proofread emotion population hid unsure
quick singular weak UNDER being knowest us descend directions
Canticles
I am very surprised how little Apple stock Steve Jobs has. Most of Jobs worth is actually in Disney stock (obtained from the sale of Pixar). Considering that he does not take a salary either, Apple are getting a pretty good deal on a CEO from him.
Here are mirrors/copies/backups (trying to hit all the keywords people might browser search the page for later) for if/when Sebastian pulls the post:

http://ompldr.org/vNW1pMw/the_genius_and_tragedy_of_patrick_...

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/img/screenshots/the_genius_...

And of the HTML:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1506151/html/the_genius_and_tragedy...
> It's just that he could have made so much more, vast amounts more, if he'd taken a bit of risk.

Someone down the street where I used to live won the lottery, it was just a bit of risk. I'll never win the lottery because I'm not that kind of person.

Instead I very slowly year by year move forward. Invariably when I do take risks I either lose big time or I move forward a bit, on the whole that seems to work out to a slight net positive but it hasn't been a real game changer for me.

Patrick seems to prefer 'monotonic upwards' instead of 'rollercoaster', and that's his privilege.

He might have made so much more, or he could have lost it all, who is there to know for sure.
It would be cool to integrate notifo with grawlnotify for mac users. This way we can see the notification directly on the screen and avoid polluting our inboxes.
Wondering if this is is hitting other countries as well. Please list the country you are connecting from.
Or people who rely on Facebook for shared login...that must be down as well.
A while back there were a few things that a number of GreaseMonkey scripts used that was not available in Chrome. (GreaseMonkey 'API' things)
Not strictly a repost, but basically the same story was discussed to death yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717850
Sebastian, you seem like a nice enough guy, but have you ever considered turning this microscope on yourself? There's a really high chance that if I see a huge nuanced argument on HN it's coming from you. Why not put that time and energy into something more valuable than karma?
... but I can still harvest my cows ...
Massey University's (massey.ac.nz) introductory computer science papers are all in C#/.Net. I found this surprising as well.
I thought I had a crappy router, I didn't realise it was that crappy!
It's weird, creepy, and disturbing.

An observation I feel comfortable making about another HNer? Sebastian Marshall clearly spends way too much time on this site.
Better yet, http://notifo.com/desktop - NotifoGrowl does exactly this.
The other way is for multiple people to post the same link, which adds to the total. Maybe if people started submitting more, or submissions from high karma types had more initial karma, it would have a cumulative effect.
Some people know how to make wealth but aren't the best at getting money.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Fortunately, once you have a vision, you can often get others on board who better understand how to make sales and get paid.
This is a pretty genius way to get members of a messageboard/site to use your service.

One minor critique: the instructions say "Once you have subscribed to HN alerts, go to the Hacker News Service Settings page and make sure that Send Email Notifications is checked", but I do not see any "Send Email Notifications" checkbox on the page linked to.
what do you mean exactly ?
No, I'm saying an attacker would also have to find and destroy the immutable central logging store that all the stuff goes to. They'd also have to reach through the sands of time to get the stuff that's already been blowing up my phone. Get over yourself.

It's worth mentioning that no one is perfectly secure, either. A sufficiently bored, persistent and motivated attacker WILL find some kind of way in. I'll give you that. I've seen it play out enough times. But with centralized logging, transaction shipping for hot-site replication, and sufficient effort placed on separation of duties, an organization can minimize the impact a successful attacker can have, and can ensure that all audit trails remain intact in some way or another.
It is up sporadically for me, but some features are broken. I'm in Los Angeles, CA
We're working on a "Pro Version" of the app that will be similar to what you're describing. Thanks for the suggestion!
Ask PG: Polite ways to scrape HN?
Hi, I've been thinking about doing an HN related project and was wondering if the topic of crawling HN has been covered before. A search of "Ask PG" didn't bring up anything relevant nor did the guidelines and FAQ links. I'm also unaware of any api availability. There seems to be new HN side projects popping up every few weeks or so. How are you getting your HN data?

Obviously the basic rules apply, aka. don't hammer my server, duh. Assuming sequential article id's currently clocking in at ~1721000+ It would take a fare amount of time to slurp down HN even at 1k pages/day. Maybe look into pulling down the google cache. Eh, I dunno. Don't want to get any of my ip addrs banned or worse (hehe). Just looking for some guidance... Thanks in advance.
Touche!

Thanks to both of you for setting a great example.
Re: Uncertainty about what data is shared with Google, for OS X users Little Snitch ( http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html ) is an eye-opening (and quite possibly alarming) way to see just how much data an application is sending out from your computer. Chrome is very "chatty."

I do not know the names of equivalent software for *nix or Windows. Does anyone else?
They closed shop after DHH's scathing criticism.
From USA as well?
Ah yes, I missed the part about the size of the dataset. I'm running with a 3GB corpus of text.
You're trashing one of your cofounders in public? Even if all you say is true, it reflects on you a fair bit...
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.

The latter you could have done without using patio11's real name.

The former - you are misguided. I accept that you didn't intend it, but the thing reads like "this guy is too dumb to make money from his assets".
But I can still harvest my cows ...
The Best alternative tablets to ipad.
Not really. They are both professional writers of online publications. This forum is the perfect place for them to stir up controversy to entertain their target audience. I'm entertained, at least.
Gourmet Magazine relaunched as an iPad app (achievements for reading)
It's down for me, on the East Coast of the US.

The message I'm currently getting, attempting to view photos, is
"Service Unavailable - Zero size object

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.
Reference #[REDACTED]"

I was able to access it briefly--enough to get from the homepage to my profile, then click "photos." But after that, it stopped working altogether for me.
Welcome to the world of crappy font rendering for the majority of browsers. Even with @font-face in the wild, it's going to be years before we finally see properly rendered fonts for our end-users.
You should take a chill-pill and go check out reddit sometimes.
They are not impinging on any right of yours.
Here it just says :
Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to www.facebook.com
Thanks :) That was a fun grammar error.
Value is determined by what someone- anyone- will pay for something.

This is unexamined Econ 101 dogma. See the other posts on intrinsic value.
6 things you need to have in your VC pitch
Have you enabled Receive Email Notifications under the Advanced Settings? http://notifo.com/user/settings/advanced - this will display the email checkboxes on the service settings pages.
Parsing XML files easily
(edited for clarity)

Maybe notifo could act as a clearing house for all HN events. This way anyone could access new post or new comment events.

In other words, my application could use notifo to subscribe to ALL HN events.

HN would of course have to ping notifo every time an event happens, instead of only pinging when someone replies to a HN user with a notifo account defined.

Also, if I fill out my notifo box with my notifo name on my HN profile, HN sends a one time message saying "johnrob_notifo" wants to follow "reply-johnrob" events.
I don't generally talk in public forum about the specific products I use, but if you want to play with an IDS at home: snort or suricata would be good toys to play with.

In the enterprise, there are so many IDS/IDP and SIEM products out there, and they're all different. Some are great for mixed environments of Windows, UNIX and infrastructure. Others are better for specific platforms. Your best bet is to get demo licenses and start playing with them instead of relying on word-of-mouth or shiny pamphlets from marketing-types.
I wish I had the expertise or the time to give a better rebuttal to this, instead I'll just point out a few things:

First, the 2.4ghz spectrum is not the best for wireless comms, there were many reasons for opening up that spectrum and very few of those reasons were because it was an optimal signal frequency.

Second, bandwidth. The 2.4ghz spectrum is confined within an 82mhz band. The available whitespace spectrum has a significantly larger bandwidth.

Third, technology. 802.11b and g are based on technology that is now stale by more than a decade. Today's wireless broadband tech makes those protocols look like a 56k modem.

The combination of these factors allows for stunning possibilities. More efficient broadband technologies, better broadcast frequencies, more bandwidth. These allow for more users with higher data rates at farther distances from base stations. It also makes things like bridging access points a lot easier. There's little reason to believe that in 10 years whitespace broadband access points won't be utterly ubiquitous.

As for WiMax, that's not open spectrum, consumers can't buy a WiMax AP on newegg. That makes it an entirely different beast.
I agree completely. The blog post was poorly written and reeks of the same style of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. The point isn't to be informative or insightful, but to get the 37signals name out there by saying anything. 37signals has put out some decent software that serves a purpose, but I feel they're fairly hype driven and I think they're starting to jump the shark.
I think it would be better just called 'finishit' - but having both domains would be the best option.
Secondly, EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD that has shares that trade is valued by taking the last share traded and multiplying by the number of shares outstanding. It's just the DEFINITION of valuation

Facebook is not (yet) public, which is a massive factor relative to the calculation of its book valuation. Presumably, at least on the surface, all of this facebook hype of late would indicate that what used to be a closely-held entity is quickly becoming ripe for the IPO market. What the actual valuation is (or will be) cannot be determined until the free market goes to work on it.

But then again, speculation, anticipation, and fear . . . these have all been attributed to major market fluctuations, crashes, overnight millionaires . . .
Oops! Apparently I skipped step #2 :)
I love your service.

Any plans for a WP7 native client and/or a NotifoGrowl Windows app?
Programming Workflow Survey
“There’s no reason at all Apple can’t grow much, much bigger,” said Jane Snorek, an analyst with Minneapolis-based First American Funds, which has more than $100 billion under management, with Apple as its largest technology holding.

Holy Conflict of Interest, Batman. This is the kind of crap that makes financial 'journalism' so awful.
Get better, faster, and smarter than them. If you can't, think of a new angle to your product/market and keep working at it. Good luck!
Don't place 3rd party javascript on your pages if you don't really need it.
That was a very good list. There aren't too many database discussion around here.
Web analytics, privacy and the WAA code of ethic
ah, wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
Service Unavailable - DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

So, yes.
Wait, doesn't Facebook already have 500 million enemies?
> Value is determined by what someone- anyone- will pay for something.

Not "someone", but THE MARKET ... when you buy a piece of Facebook, but won't be able to sell at least at the same price, then you're the loser ;)

When multiple losers gather and start buying stupid shit with no value to THE MARKET, that's called a BUBBLE, that will burst sooner or later.

The trick for estimating if "the valuation goes up" is to see if that company actually provides value (i.e. actual profits, since that's the only goal of a company) ... and in that light, DHH's opinion makes a lot of sense.
Heh... I, too, found it funny that he used pg as an example of what Patrick should be doing. There was probably a time when someone could have written similar article about how much more money pg could be making as a consultant rather than mucking about with online catalogs.
the flaw here is that it assumes money is real. With no gold standard, money is entirely based upon perception. More fortunes have been made through adjusting this lens than actual hard work.
What other choice do you have? Give up? Pivot?

The good news is that you've just gotten validation that the market niche you've chosen is healthy. Take the opportunity to shake off whatever complacency might have been lurking, and get to it. Assess, analyze, iterate.
Ask HN: Cobra Insurance in MA
If I were to quit my job, where I get family medical insurance, and join a startup where medical insurance is not provided, what are my options? I live and work in MA. Am I entitled to Cobra? (I understand I would have to pay the full price instead of my employer paying most of it). If so, for how long? Has anyone done this?
If I had a nickel for every time I was at a stoplight and thought the same thing...
The High Cost of College - Megan McArdle
Please list your country as well.
The one day I choose to update my FBConnect code!
The rendering engine is pretty primitive by modern standards, and shows signs of being implemented by someone new to OpenGL. It displays all the performance issues that a typical first OpenGL implementation does like significant lag when turning around quickly where objects are swapped in and out of memory in a blocking manner.

It could benefit from significant optimizations in terms of algorithm and these would probably make it perform an order of magnitude even faster than porting the same code to C++ would ever do.

The OpenGL layer is not being utilized effectively. I think the game is currently CPU/VM bound and simply can't keep up with the GPU.

More aggressive use of the GPU, like through OpenGL or OpenCL calls, would improve performance considerably. I'm not sure how viable the OpenCL angle is on Java, though.
" As receiver electronics have gotten better, more selective and more error tolerant, these margin spaces became less necessary..."

More to the point, as the technology used to broadcast has completely changed from analog to digital the margin spaces have become completely unnecessary. Additionally, digital television does not use the entire spectrum previously allocated to analog broadcasts.

Edit: additionally, in locations where there aren't local television broadcasts on certain channels those channels can be used for wifi.
I like how their API response time chart intentionally doesn't have a Y scale. But clearly it is busted:

http://www.facebook.com/developers/chart.php?type=at_total_t...
This looks very interesting and I hope you do well, I am surprised I have not seen someone do anything something similar sooner.

I hope it works well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

> "The city posted a sign," means that an employee of the local government (but not the geographic location or all of its residents) posted a sign
This works great: http://api.ihackernews.com/
Here you go: http://api.ihackernews.com/

It's an unofficial API though and it might not do everything you need.
Finish that shit! (Couldn't resist.) I nudged a few procrastinators via Twitter too. Good fun.
Clearest discussion I have seen about why the cost has risen so much, and keeps rising, and probably will continue for a while yet.
It's not really an IP stack. But it does ping. So a more accurate name would be: Twing
Facebook is our biggest traffic source after Google. I'm inclined to forgive them for occasional outages.
Mostly, python v. ruby; they're different flavors of a pretty similar Kool-Aid.
It's curious you don't have a 'confirm email address' step. Do you figure abuse is not enough of a problem to warrant that step?

Also, why do need both a username and an email address?
Over 97% of emails sent are spam
Rarely use it so I didn't notice...
It looks OK in Firefox on Ubuntu:

http://imgur.com/wYEI8.png (760K)
Does anything ever reach a final version? :D