skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, at least in my personal experience, Facebook hasn't been that big of a deal to me. And I suspect it's the same for lots of its casual users (which I further suspect make up most of its userbase).

Yes, you are right, in terms of "one-way" communication (status updates etc), it lets you keep tabs on your friends more easily. But that sort of status-updating functionality wasn't even in there (or at least emphasized) until Twitter came along. So give them some credit. And even then, I think you overestimate just how much people share on Facebook. I've noticed that some (like 10-15%) of my fb friends constantly post updates, pictures, etc., while the others (while still maintaining a "presence" on the site) just don't. And for the purposes of this post, I actually went and checked a few friends' profiles to be sure it wasn't just that I was only seeing a select few on my feed, heh. (I'm one of the ones who don't share much, and these days I don't even check Facebook much actually.)

In terms of two-way communication, it's only real innovation was to allow others to follow along with the conversation. Which is a pretty big deal, of course--allowing others to join in on digital conversations is a big boon. But that's really it... the rest of its functionality isn't as big of a deal and frankly was scraped from other sites anyway (even being able to follow a conversation on a profile based website was an idea from Myspace actually).

That's my take anyway. I've been on Facebook since 2006 (well, on and off--deleted my profile for about a year then made a new one a few months ago), and honestly it really hasn't been a part of my life nearly to the extent that computers and all the other services they provide have been. And for what its worth, I'm a pretty social, outgoing person, so my viewpoint shouldn't be slanted by introversion.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post.

EDIT: I should add (as danieldon noted) that events are a genuinely useful feature that Facebook had before any other site (to my knowledge). I give them credit for that. Anything else is pretty much fluff though, and while I understand the idea that even vacuous communication should lead to greater trust and social bonds in the real world, I disagree that that actually happens in practice.
Sounds like something Wikileaks should try...err... wait...nevermind. :)
They should know better than anyone what the state of their reserves are. It would be a pity for them to squander the wealth that comes from selling their oil without having created any lasting infrastructure.
Snow crash was great as well.

Also the "Daemon" series by Daniel Suarez is great along the same lines as snow crash.
Anything from Dave Ramsey.
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There's a ton of stuff that goes on in our lives that don't merit notifying everyone about directly, but might merit posting a status or picture to Facebook. It reduces the friction involved in sharing information. I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of the random events in the lives of my family and friends without Facebook. That's valuable to me. I also have a much better idea of the interests of acquaintances and people I haven't seen in a while since the links they share shed some light on that.

Of course more direct communication still happens outside of Facebook. I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to people that you're assuming. Presumably, people wouldn't use Facebook if they didn't find it valuable.
How About Going for International Container Shipping Solutions
If you are going for international relocation, whether it is to any Asian country, or to Europe, or Middle East, you need to plan on lot many things. The first and foremost process of planning begins
This is weird to me. I just get the feeling that... a lot of these miscellaneous commercial facilities are replaceable- not only that, but the market forces acting after an attack would encourage new facilities to be built or new locations of the resource to be discovered (in the case of cobalt).

I also feel that the ideologies might not line up really well with this. "We are going to destroy the American infidels... by destroying a Danish insulin factory!" The symbolism gets kinda lost.
Autonomous quadrotor navigation with a Kinect
I'm finding a hard time seeing how this leak is a positive thing. At least leaks related to violations of human rights and international law have legs to stand on.
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But it is the kind of security planning information that most people (in the US) wouldn't want leaked, and would actually support secrecy for (as opposed to things that "endanger" us by embarrassing us, things that receive classification because they document our moral failings (like take, say, the helicopter video)).
They're also going to use the track as a local test facility for rolling stock and ancillary equipment. Again, this is stuff that's easier done outside of a major metro area and this link will need to be built anyway. You may as well work out the kinks (and there will be kinks) in a cheap area were you only have to worry about engineering challenges rather than engineering challenges and NIMBY issues.
that would make you a potato farmer.
The significant difference seems to be that Groupon takes a 24 hour "risk" and pushes content to its users via email. If a platform like AdWords offered free advertising that delivered only the most relevant advertising to users, the list of companies hoping to have their ad seen would be enormous.

It is interesting to consider whether expertly targeted ads would see as many click throughs as the ads companies pay to have us see now.
There's always the Level-3 DNS servers... 4.2.2.[1-6]
The way I see it, people are not going on random threads and spamming this sentiment. They are only commenting on companies relevant to the recent events. Like anything else it'll die off with a long-tail...
Here's another good Ruby book: 'Learn to Program', by Chris Pine: http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
I find it healthy and refreshing to take a step back frequently and look at these things from such a perspective. Like, say the perspective of your parents. I think it's that kind of reflection which helps make businesses like Facebook and entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg successful.
iHN sounds good to me ... after all, we all shorten "Hacker News" to HN anyhow.
For what is worth: in Portuguese the adjective comes after the noun so the autocomplete map thingie wouldn't work so well. But I don't think syntax is relevant to the way most people use search in general and autocomplete in particular. At least from what I can glean from autocomplete suggestions people use mostly keywords, not sentences enclosed by "". So if you type Rio de Janeiro the first autocomplete suggestion is em guerra ("in war", sadly) but none of the other suggestions are well-formed Portuguese phrases, e.g., rio de janeiro turismo isn't a phrase. I might have misunderstood your question, though.
No, it doesn't sound credible. Add back in "according to that TOS" and it does again.
Repost #3 (I should make this into a macro or something): This is a threaded comment system. We can have as many discussions about something (post or other comment) as we want: go off on wild tangents, point out the spelling, have a pun thread, mention patterns of blogging/commenting the parent fits into, reply to the author on a separate subject, share anecdotes related to the subject of the post, and actually talk about the content of a post or comment, all at the same time, without breaking anything. That's what's so neat about threaded discussion: it doesn't require the "comparative notability" that a linear conversation needs in order to function.

jacquesm's comment (and this thread descending from it) does not in any way take away from our ability to talk about Route 53 as a technology.
Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician

I think it's pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman's remarks. Rather, Amazon did what they did because they thought it was the right to do: "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy".

I understand you're passionate about this, but let's not conflate what actually happened.
The real leaked material is that the US embassy have the opinion/analysis that X factories & mines are vital to the U.S.

I think that a small team of economists could have figured out what plants are vital to national security. It's not like this data is secret- it's just the embassy's thoughts that are secret. (So... thank god Jihadists don't know economics! Let's hope Julian doesn't leak any textbooks.)
Wave accepted into the ASF incubator
Posterous must be planning some marketing stunt around this. :D
I'd expect Amazon to at least wait for a court order before just shutting down a client like that.
God, I know.
Fun sidenote: the source of this article (thepoint.com) was andrew mason's first startup attempt and later the idea was spun into Groupon. He spoke about it at Startup School, I am sure many people already know this, but I thought there might be a few that didn't. Anyways here is the link: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180613
Yeah, that's a good point too. The core issue is the applicability of SBJA/QSBS to new startups and founder shares, I think -- that's potentially a savings on $10mm of capital gains and AMT preference, which could easily be $3mm by 2016.

The other trick this year is that you can convert 401k and IRA to Roth and split the income over 2011 and 2012 (2 years), or from 2010 forward, effective removal of income limits for Roth. Roth IRAs are awesome if you have really low income a few years (but some savings), and then future much higher income.
I agree that the data isn't particularly secret, but I also agree that there doesn't seem to be any possible public good served by leaking this information.
A "conversation" on HN is something with a diagonal shape (a comment replying to a comment replying to a comment, etc.) Adding a comment to something (a post or a comment) that already has other comments doesn't "disrupt" the conversation, it branches it. This isn't a phpBB.
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Great, so now they can also switch off your DNS if they don't like what you are hosting.
The stock must qualify as small business stock. What are the restrictions?

(quoting just a bit of the very detailed GROCO article)

For QSBS purchased between September 27, 2010 and December 31, 2010, a zero percent effective income tax rate will apply to at least the first $10 million of gain upon its ultimate sale if applicable requirements are met. Excluded gain from these investments will not be treated as a preference item for AMT purposes, so the benefits extend equally to AMT taxpayers. ...

http://www.groco.com/readingroom/invest_qsbs.aspx
Eminent Domain displaces people in the US all the time. When a developer wants a pretty lake by the highway to build a condo complex, guess where the trailer park that was next to the lake goes?

Kelo v. City of New London for just one example.
- A solid Android powered iPod Touch competitor in the ~$200 price range. Amazed nothing like this has taken off yet

- A new Zune HD, this time powered by full Windows Phone 7 without the phone stuff. Only makes sense to compete against the iPod Touch (which vastly increases the reach of iOS and the App Store).

- I'd love to see Apple make an unlocked iPhone 5 starting at $229 or so for the base model and drop the iPod Touch. If you really don't want a phone, you could just use it without a sim or new plan. This would also give them a leg-up against Android or Windows Phone 7 based iPod Touch competitors. Sadly, though, I don't think this one is very likely to happen.
esp considering that they spent a few days defending the child pedo guide on the grounds of free speech

The Guardian used Amazon to host the app they built that allowed readers to filter through and flag the Afghan war logs. No takedown from Amazon there!

Hypocrites.
They actually were pretty careful about that from what I gather, with the 5 news agencies they worked with telling them how to redact them and what to release:

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/12/03/general-eu-wikilea...
I know HN isn't the place for jokes but- this just popped into my head due to your textbooks comment

What if Wikileaks leaked the text of all the bills from congress to the press from the past year? If senators and the press actually read them fully, it would be the first time any of them had actually read the full contents!
Looking behind me at the two huge overflowing bookcases, I would have sent myself a blank journal with the following note on the first page:

1) Read less, code more.

2) Major in math, minor in comp sci.

3) Every time you learn something, write it in this book.
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Even the Neo Nazis have a right to free speech. And they're despicable too. That does not mean that free speech as such is wrong, just that some speech is reprehensible.
They have hardly any refining capacity to actually use those reserves.

There's no doubt though that they feel having nuclear weapons will be a deterrent after how close they came to having their government wiped out by Cheney et. al.
I don't think any of this information was terribly secret though. I think any other nation's government that wanted this and had any intelligence service would be able to figure them out too.

We teach children that honesty is a good thing right? Why does our government need so many secrets to really keep us safe? Without those things are we really unsafe, or is the simple perception of safety gone (but no one is actually harmed).
I don't think I ever would've seen as many pictures of
the random events in the lives of my family and friends
without Facebook

That hasn't been my experience at all. Seriously. Savy people use/used flickr, others used Myspace, and handful used photobucket, others use/used awful photo sharing sites like kodak's and others use/used email. In my experience, most of the additional volume of photos on my wall are from people I should probably defriend since I barely know who they are.

I think that "random nonsense" is more valuable to
people that you're assuming

It seems to me, both by looking at my own wall and what people post online, that the nonsense is at most a simple diversion, just like many other diversions that exist and have existed for years. Despite the fact that many of my friends and family members are productive people who are well-known in their respective fields, I have yet to see anything of any substance actually occur on facebook. The closest thing to actual substance in that regard would be events. And the computer illiterates? The volume hasn't changed, they just post their stuff to facebook rather than CCing everyone in their address book 1-3 times a day.
A VC: Where Should Mobile Developers Focus?
Me too, and in that case I would not have a problem with it.

It's not as if they didn't know what wikileaks was up to before this happened.
Reminds me of the Gerald Bull assassination, also thought to be carried out by Mossad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull
What's this new Facebook layout I'm seeing?
I'm seeing the layout for friend's profiles, but I don't have it on mine at the moment. What a shame.
Right, but the categorized list of businesses ads are enormous already.

I'm not saying replace the models they have in place, but just offering up something different from a social perspective which google doesn't seem to have a lot of luck with. It will really even the playing field for non-big dollar advertisers.
:) "Read the Bills Act" http://www.downsizedc.org/read-the-laws #offtopic
CALM Act passed, will quiet loud TV commercials within a year
Adwords on Google considers CTR as well as Quality Score to determine which ad will display, not the CPC that you're willing to bid.
You can enable it on your account: http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/
ATM malware
There are potential terrorism targets literally everywhere. This whole issue is way overblown. Even the 9/11 perpetrators didn't want to "kill teh infidel", more reduce US involvement in the middle east.
Name a Theorem
We learn what our Government is spending our money on.
Managed DNS like this is interesting. We keep a Slicehost account around because it's DNS manager is top-notch. When the command-line tools get better for this, it might be a good alternative.

Here's where this will rock: if I could sign up for S3, Route 53 and Cloudfront, then deploy a site entirely hosted on AWS. Use Route 53 to point the A records of my domain directly at the Cloudfront distribution and the MX records at Google Apps. Is this possible?
Kelo-style eminent domain is uncommon. The idea is that the land is taken for the benefit of the public, and usually that benefit is direct, like a new highway. In Kelo, the public benefit was the jobs and tax revenue from new private development, which is why it went to the Supreme Court.
Not taking the MSFT offer will go down as the biggest blunder in tech business of the past 10 years.

What the hell were they thinking.
facepalm Talking to the gf tonight in Minneapolis who was having internet problems. Totally spaced walking her through trying this.
Unless this leak contains information which could point out that the US is protecting facilities owned by any particular corporation(s) in the name of national security, releasing it is not warranted.
"I hate Illinois Nazis."
I saw this this morning and it seemed like the first example of something that should severely not be leaked. I wanted to contact them privately and directly and bring their attention to it but there turns out being no discernable channel to do that.

These especially struck me as dangerous;

http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&hl=%3...

Specifically;

2. (C) There are three main industrial facilities of interest that if destroyed, or if their production is disrupted, could have an immediate effect on U.S. national economic security. In order of priority, these are Ras Laffan Industrial City (RLIC), Mesaieed Industrial City (MIC) and port complex, and Dukhan Industrial City. All three industrial centers are under the control and supervision of Qatar Petroleum (QP), a semi-autonomous government organization whose Chairman, Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, is also the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry. Natural gas production is primarily centered around the coast and offshore areas in the northeast of Qatar, in and round Ras Laffan; while, oil production is concentrated on the western coast near Dukhan as well as offshore platforms.

In both the #startups and #wikileaks channels on freenode people variously assured me that they had already considered it or I was just being a troll. I suppose it really is naive to expect unmitigated good to come of this episode, but I really wish they would not hand ammunition to the opposition in this fashion.

I wish there was a way to privately contact them to ask them to reconsider a particular release without drawing attention to it in a public fashion.

P.S. I will happily edit this message to omit the sensitive information directly in the event that anyone can tell me how to bring the necessary attention to it in a more private way.
if you visit a friend that has the new profile you will see on top that you have the option to try the new profile
I'm not a very good programming yet, outside of html/css/jquery, but I studied up on basic application design, got some ideas, dug into document database specs (mongo), and then designed it for somebody else to code :\

Now I have more than a blog, I have a website/CMS engine that is fairly easy to customize for clients.

Document databases are awesome like that.
Mathematical immortality? Give a theorem your name
You could raise similar doubts about most affiliate links that aren't precisely equivalent to a banner ad. For example, a blog with a review that uses affiliate links for monetization? Well, I usually look for reviews when I'm thinking of buying a product anyway.

At any rate, the heavy coupon shoppers I know tend to be more malleable than average based on what deals they find, so I doubt this is a low-quality referral source.
Terrorist don't give a damn about ports and cable stations, they go after office workers and schoolchildren.

The government's and terrorist's idea of vulnerable is fundamentally different. In Russia they were securing gas pipes, nuclear stations, cabbage sorting plants and whatnot, but terrorist hit apartment buildings, theaters, hospitals and schools.
He will find out eventually that he both needs a website, and that they cost more than $50. He can either go straight to the $2000 solution, or find out the hard way with two or three cheap sites that don't work and end up at the $2000 solution 6-12 months later anyway.

The best clients are those who either understand or who have already burnt through months or years of frustration with the cheap shops.

Use that as part of the pitch, ie. 'Ye you can get somebody offshore for $100, and I will see you in a year, or we can just get it done properly now'
Predator drone logo... ominous.
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Are you suggested gathering information about users and providing ads based upon it?
If you like AWS or not: It's not a good idea to have everything in one account.

It's a single point of failiure anway and you want to distribute your core infrastructure between different parties. It's cool to run a DNS by AWS but not cool if you don't have mirrors/secondary nameservers, too.
Uh... when you pay them at least $20/month already, yes.
Where I live, a company-paid car lease is pretty much standard for every non-junior developer. It sounds decadent and it probably isn't the "best" non-cash benefit one can come up with, but it does bring a lot of value since paying for a car myself would be a significant portion of my income.
I wonder what caused the spike during the war years, 39-43? Lower factory standards due to the war effort? I have no idea. Anyone got a clue?
"Innovation & Entrepreneurship" by Peter F. Drucker.

A book from 1985 that makes many books discussed here on Hacker News seem obsolete ("Four steps to the epiphany", etc.).

Drucker discusses 7 sources for finding the right idea, entrepreneurial management and startup strategies.

I was really suprised how good this book was: Very insightful and fun to read.

Price was 1,93 an Amazon Germany.

Bottom line: the best book an entrepreneurship I ever read.
PS all of this is not to say there aren't plenty of legitimate criticisms of what wikileaks is doing. Clearly there is some stuff on there that does need discretion if it's genuinely endangering lives and there are parts that should be redacted for the public interest. But the coverage from The New York Times and other traditional media as well as across the web shows there is genuine public interest and public good served in exposure of where there is wrong doing. There is clearly scope for sensible discourse about it. But I don't believe in government assassination hit-lists or smear campaigns and trumped up sex crime charges as a replacement for honest discourse over matters of genuine and valid fourth estate purview.