skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cough http://www.google.com/corporate/software_principles.html cough

apedley, in 2002 (2003?) or so, I spent a large fraction of my Christmas holidays with my in-laws in Omaha trying to uninstall all the scumware that had gotten on their machine. I was horrified to find out that Google had a business deal with one of the companies I found on my mother-in-law's computer. A bunch of us came back from that break determined not to spend next Christmas uninstalling scumware. We quickly kicked that scuzzy company out and put in place the guidelines linked above to keep Google from monetizing scumware/malware/etc.

Google may bundle its toolbar with some applications, but to the best of my knowledge we always insist on clear disclosure that the toolbar will be installed (we don't want users to be tricked) and easy removal. If you're aware of any counter-examples, please let me know and I'll ask someone to investigate it.

By the way, the best method to prevent scumware that I found back in those days: installing Firefox. No new scumware after the Firefox install plus some basic education.
It seems that the author is attempting to make a case against ads themselves. I'm not convinced there is anything in the post that is Facebook-specific, or couldn't be swapped out with 'Adwords' or 'radio ads' or even 'billboards.'

He makes a case that they are not like Google's ad platform and then goes on to only account for a small subset of Google's ad platform (the part that is on Google.com search). Facebook ads are really much closer to Google's ad platform on (for instance) gmail.com or any non-google website, but he ignores these.

Most of his post could have replaced "Facebook" with "Billboard" or "radio ad" and be written in 1920.

As an aside, I have clicked on Facebook ads. Mopeds are listed as one of my interests, and two months ago there was an ad from Honda for the new Elite 110cc. I had no idea that they brought the Elite back. Targeted Facebook ads actually informed me of that.

It goes without much saying that the vast majority of ads are never clicked on or even noticed. But that's the case with Facebook, adwords, billboards, and so on.
Leaving a "happy birthday" used to mean you actually remember the date, not that you had a message requesting you to wish someone a happy birthday. The people I really care about get a phone call, not a dummy "wall post".

Maybe I'm a bit of an antisocial, but I really liked the days before social networks. My friends where on my IM contact list, colleagues on forums or mailing lists.
Difficult, sure, but all that Valve needs to do is announce "Portal 3, I can smell the Cake" and throw in a free ScentScape (with starter smell cartridge) with the deluxe boxed set, and it's mainstream on launch day.
It's easy to grow in percentage terms when you're starting from nothing.
Facebook promises big returns on ad spending, but delivers nothing. Yet, their value and growth continues because they can use that money to grow their user-base more and assert profitability (in this sense it's not quite entirely a ponzi scheme, but there is no closer idea).

In other words: not a Ponzi scheme, just an ad platform that is ineffective for some kinds of campaigns.
The brilliance of Facebook is that it draws in lots of users. Their funnel is amazing. The app at the bottom of that funnel isn't that great, but manages to deliver value because of the huge userbase.
This audience is not atypical with regard to time wasting. (It is typical).

I'm 'wasting' time right now skimming this article, reading this thread, posting a response about how i'm wasting time right now.

The difference is that I think it is interesting to read about failing software startups with billions of dollars invested in them. So it is atypical with regard to subject matter. I have no interest in american idol or tom cruise or Oprah or glen beck.

I also find that I am most productive at programming when I approach it as a fun game that I am 'wasting time' at.

(apologies for going meta).
Feds Will File Charges On 120,000 iPad 'Data Breach'
For those unfamiliar: these are awesome, but pretty basic, features of Org. In addition to a plain-text syntax for outlining and making lists (for tasks or otherwise), Org syntax offers:

- tags

- properties (key/value pairs that can affect things like export behavior, but also have their own API)

- dates, timestamps, ranges of these, and repeating dates/timestamps, as well as more complicated complicated scheduling via integration with Emacs diary (e.g., a class that meets every Monday from January until May)

- per-file configuration variables (e.g., configure your TODO workflow in a given file to be: TODO -> INPROGRESS -> WAITING -> DONE)

- priority of TODO items

- hyperlinks to local documents, URLs, emails, address book entries, etc.

and more. I'm just listing the syntax I use. And this is to say nothing of Org's many great features beyond its syntax, like the capture interface, the publishing framework, and the many useful exporters.
The Amiga had a full port of Unix
As one of the sibling responses points out, it's not a Ponzi scheme.

But it's certainly a completely useless advertising medium, from my limited experience with them for a few months. We spent hundreds of dollars of advertising on an iPhone app, and I don't think even moved the needle once.
I don't know. The author seems to think we'll become Zuckerberg's zombie army due to extended Facebook use. So was the same true of the time UseNet? MSN Messenger? And all those others when they were highly popular? Weren't we trapped in their creators' worlds? With before, when new tech comes along, with an interface, or "world" we prefer to use, then we'll move on. We'll interface with people on the web in a different way. Habits come and go.
Wario Ware: Smell Ya Later!

Though by the looks of him I don't think I want to smell Wario.
well, Im glad you didn't. VLC is by far the best Vid player out there and only is getting better. I hate spam and the non-super users would sadly accidentally install it.
Hi.. Thanks for your comments and it really gave me a good thought. but i was trying to explain "how the processor waste it time when delay commands fired from OS". i gave an example related to 8085 system where it does no job operation. because processor has to do something. As per modern OS concern, it takes up some other job to increase its throughput.. as you mentioned . I do agree with you.. but lower power does not apply to processor. i feel, the processor switch power of monitor, mouse and other external device.. but CPU hardly go for sleep on delay state.. Yes, certainly it decreases processing..
The Dawn of Paid Search Without Keywords
On the other hand, it also removes the need to contact that person since you already know all the latest news. I'm not comfortable in situations when I meet people I don't see often and they tell me things that I already know, and I have to pretend to not knowing it to avoid the stalkerish feeling it gives me.
ohashi beat me to it. That's almost certainly a website that you've visited using retargetting. More info: http://www.bizreport.com/2010/03/google_adwords_finally_gets... . Article starts out "While Yahoo, ValueClick and other ad networks have offered ad retargeting for some time, Google has only just released it to their AdWords customers after twelve months in beta."
How many type foundries do you think would be trumpeting their fonts' inclusion in the HTML5 logo?

One of the many reasons I love Hoefler & Frere Jones.

Gotham + Mercury + Knockout, all from @h_fj, make the HTML-5 logo. http://www.w3.org/html/logo/ #next #stop, #webfonts
http://twitter.com/H_FJ/status/27369279905071104
This is good advice. Be smart, make other smart people work for you. I guess this all depends on circumstances. What if I don't have smart people around me, I don't reside in Silicon Valley where you have budding entrepreneurs but a desolate city of Toronto where everyone wants a more secure Job and doesn't want to risk much. Should I move to where smart people are? I also held the view that if there is a will you can really create a successful business yourself . All you need is access to a computer and some programming resources. But in this day and age the emphasis is not on idea or the execution but how much money you can pump into a business for it's marketing.
> "It seems that the author is attempting to make a case against ads themselves."

I didn't read that at all. I got the clear impression that his case was based on Facebook Ads being ineffective as compared to ads on other platforms.
Hacking Customer’s Technology Adoption Cycles
How to Hack Jet Lag with 4 Simple Tools
How to Set Up Ruby on Rails
Publishing Intel from RAND Corporation
PowerVocab iPhone app is released
> that's exactly how Heroku works

$ git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:myapp.git
$ git push heroku

Just beautiful.

http://heroku.com/how/workflow
NodeJS looks like a very nice new way to do ServerSide
I saw a review of this JS implementation to server side stuff beating most of the other options available today.
Portuguese version Original(http://akitaonrails.com/2010/03/16/brincando-com-node-js-tornado-and-thin)
English Google Translated version
(http://translate.google.com.br/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=pt-BR&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=pt&tl=en&u=http://akitaonrails.com/2010/03/16/brincando-com-node-js-tornado-and-thin)

And it's JS, it's a very common language that almost everyone know a little bit.
I wouldn't call it useless.

I remember in university we could reserve a small budget (25-50$ to advertise our events for software students (SOEN/CS) and spend it on Facebook because of the amazing targeting. We could ask that the ads only be send to people from our school who had their majors put in and hadn't yet graduated. That's perfect targeting and it actually worked pretty well. Better than papering the university walls with flyers that's for sure; no one ever read those.
A new way to hack into your smartphone
I jokingly asked a friend of mine that works in finance if he could securitize a pre-IPO company for the purpose of shorting them.

He immediately understood that I meant Facebook and after chuckling he actually paused thoughtfully.

Fingers-crossed, but I think his current fund is too conservative for that sort of thing.
If you are talking about VKontakte in Russia, you are wrong. VKontakte (launched 2006) is a clone of Facebook (even the design is copied from FB). It's criticized in Russia for the same reasons as FB here.

FB lost because VK was specifically targeted at Russian audience from the beginning.
Anybody enjoy hacking food? I find it is another creative outlet. Same way that I view programming, really.

It has taken me forever to get my pizza dough and pie crusts to where I want them - ignoring much advice and experimenting instead. But it's fun.
Yup, I immediately thought of that when I saw the logo. Did anyone scroll down further to the "Badge Builder 5000"?

Anyway, only people in the developers 'echo chamber' will have any idea what this means. Most people have no idea the difference between html4, javascript, flash or silverlight, and probably don't care.
This seems to me an implementation detail, are there any observable differences?
And this is also its weakness because if its only virtue is that it's "the cool place to hang out in cyberspace" then this is very vulnerable to changes in fashion (see MySpace/Second Life/LiveJournal/GeoCities).
There has to be a better business model than simple display ads for something as amazing as the social graph of all humans. The question is: what?

The Facebook Credits virtual currency stuff also has huge potential but I just don't think Facebook has found their "AdSense" yet.
Sorry about that, we're working on it. In the meantime you can work around it by refreshing the page or re-visiting http://Nurph.com
Author makes a false assumption that Facebook will never improve their ad platform.

As it stands right now, sure, Facebook ads suck. They're all the way to the right, and they're tiny and unremarkable.

But right now FB is focused on growing their platform. Why wouldn't they be? It's not like they're beholden to any public shareholders. Once that changes, and those shareholders begin to pressure them, FB will turn their attention to ads. How could any sane business owner ignore that?

EDIT: Deleted my sub-response to Tom b/c it wasn't phrased well. I'm not interested in the author's contention, because whatever point he's making assumes that FB won't improve their ads. He even says:

"Mark Zuckerberg might have a fit of brilliance and then announce a revolutionary ad platform that somehow actually works on social networks. My guess is not."

FB is a company with 1000 bright engineers and a strong data team. I'd be shocked if they didn't know how poorly their ads are performing, and I'd also be shocked if they weren't working on a better ad platform right now. Dismissing a company with FB's user base, funding, and engineering team with a ridiculous quote like above isn't a compelling argument.
A Simple System to Achieve Your Goals
I run it on a single server. That said, I imagine in a distributed environment (where you have a couple of machines, not tens, hundreds or more) you can do something like this on each machine you have (probably not in parrallel though, if something happens you don't want to mess up all the servers?).

If someone has a link to a good article / book / video about best practices with this, please post it?

There's a lot of talk about how someone did massively scallable systems or deployments (and it's really interesting, lots of cool engineering problems & solutions there), but a real world "here's what we figured works really well for us for a smaller-scale distributed operation" would be really useful, too.
This is amazing news, and I hope that someday we will be able to buy a game itself, instead of buying a game tied to a platform.

In an even more amazing world, Steam is a protocol, not a service, and anyone can run their own digital game distribution service with all the convenience of Steam. Alas, I can only hope. :P
'Concrete Abstractions' looks interesting.

Can anyone here who's read it/is familiar to it comment on it?
Interview with Gil Zimmermann - Co-Founder of Aprigo
Um, still only for some values of "easy".
I think you missed his point (though I can't really blame you because he has a peculiar writing style).

The way I read it he has two basic points.

1. Facebook ads are different than Google ads (or other web site ads) because you go to Facebook to interact with friends while you go to the rest of the web to find information. So ads can fulfill the user's purpose on Google by providing information but they're just getting in the way of the user's purpose on Facebook.

2. Facebook's growth hides the fact that the ads don't work. Because from a revenue standpoint its hard to distinguish return customers from new customers and only return customers signal a successful platform. So people see Facebook successfully selling ads and assume the platform works when in fact its being driven by a stream of new customers who try it and fail.
Thanks for this - I'll take a look. The same code works fine when run through regular fsi.exe, so presumably something is going amiss over the Ajax interface.
Class Creation and Organization using the MooTools JavaScript Framework
a.) Not really relevant, the point is that TV shows that adverts can work even if they're not being shown somewhere where viewers are actively looking for something that might be advertised.

b.) There are plenty of websites out there which are profitable through advertising without the logic of "viewers came to the site to look for something". Maybe that's a better example. Again, you could argue that facebook adverts aren't identical to those found on most sites, but that doesn't change the fact that website advertising can (and often does) work.
I think that was kinda my point as well - if a developer or 'gamer distributor' (like MSFT or Sony) supported the product, it would avoid the chicken-and-egg problem. In their absence, it would be difficult.
Sounds pretty similar to the network "Up next" ads that run along the bottom everytime a show cuts back from commercial or is about to end.

The difference would be that you are "already watching TV", in the same sense that Google had you "already searching for something", but this same logic applies so long as the ad being placed is for something on Facebook, which many of them are.
Marking something as a sticky is like noting something as an FAQ -- usually for the benefit of those that come along later, as opposed to oneself.
If you up vote the post it gets saved in your profile under saved stories. (Click on your username up top then saved stories is towards the bottom.)
"Microsoft is in a position to do this sort of thing easily with Live, but they don't, and they didn't"

What sort of thing? Cross platform play? They've supported that (but for almost every type of game it sucks) and also giving the free extra copy is something Valve do, it doesn't really have anything to do with Sony...
> "not nice to try to fool Mother Nature"

You might want to define "Mother Nature" too for starters
I am a contractor, am incorporated and have a fortune 100 company as my client. I work 8 hours a day for them maintaining their intranet and extra net applications. It is fairly obvious to me that I have hit a roadblock as there is no way for me to climb the ladder without having my own business at this point. I have been striving day and night to achieve that very goal, getting 4 hours of sleep at nights but I want an honest opinion from HN, do you really think people like me can achieve success? If I was still in college I could have locked myself up in a basement for weeks and created the next AI browser but I do not have that luxury. So I try to squeeze out three to four hours every day to work on my projects and launch them. This is not good enough as the market this day is moving really fast with dozens of hot startups springing up daily.
I think it's great, but this should be the rule and not the exception.
Setup These Automated Emails
Does anyone else avoid Facebook because they themselves suck as person? I don't use FB because the activities on it are things I am better off not doing.

I felt strange doing anything on it because I felt people were judging me. It was like I had developed this persona of an educated and successful and fun person when I was on it because I hadn't made any new "friends" since beginning grad school and I was so stressed out, miserable and broke that I was never brave enough to admit it on my own.

After surfing through the countless photos of my friend's girlfriend or my ex gf, I honestly used to feel guilty with the voyeurism. I use to feel hurt seeing my ex gf happy, lonely seeing old friends enjoying themselves, smirk seeing my friend do something stupid. I hated when people tagged me for the same reasons.

I wasted tons of time friending people I would not even wish birthday. I spent countless awkward chat conversations that never went beyond "I had a great day". I spent useless time tweaking my photos and wall so that my family wouldn't see the language that I or my friends were using. I tried to post Go's result on my wall. It became less of enjoying the game than to acquire certain points so that I could post them on my wall.

I logged into Facebook when I didnt have anything to do, which happened a lot. I used to open Facebook like I opened my email and reddit. After a while I just felt too shitty.

I deleted the account. I share photos through Flickr. Not all my friends are there but those who are have taught me a lot about taking photographs. I joined Blip.fm. Not all my friends are there but those who are truly share the passion I have for music. I deleted all my contacts in the messenger and added only those that I truly feel comfortable talking to.

My girlfriend calls me anti social. But she too has come to accept that Facebook is prone to our weakest traits as humans. We love attentions. We love to think of ourselves as something we want to be. We trade our true feelings to be included. We want to be popular. We want our taste in music and art to be value. We crave for external success. It was like high school all over again.
I think he's saying that they will rise over the next 100 years (well, 89 actually). Not completely unreasonable if you think of the advances in technology over the last 100 years.
Maybe not rolling out for public use, but I've found OSQA perfect for internal knowledge bases. Doubles as a quick way to vote for one off things ("I'm doing a talk on HTML5, add and vote-up what you guys want me to talk about").
Some ideas:

* write an ebook about programming interviews

* offer consulting services for interview training or revising CVs/covering letters
Actually the author's contention, true or not, is that Facebook will never be able to improve their platform because people don't go to Facebook looking for information they go there to interact with their friends. So Facebook ads will always be something that's "in the way" and more of an annoyance than a benefit.
While I don't think I would go as far as to call Facebook a "Ponzi scheme", I do agree that Facebook has been lackluster about monetizing their huge user base. The author is right in pointing out that people rarely go to Facebook to research or buy a product. Unlike Google or Amazon, Facebook is not about consumption, it's about reconnecting and taking a break.

While I am by no means an expert in the field, they need to remember what they are and focus on that. Far more promising a prospect is the revenue sharing they do with companies such as Zynga. This model exploits all that Facebook does well: high retention to the site, and a high return rate. They need to stop focusing on ads as a form of revenue and monetize their social aspect creatively.
the closest we can get to ANSI color support is ANSICON http://adoxa.110mb.com/ansicon/index.html

Here's what it looks like with Rspec: http://www.bryanbibat.net/images/rspec-haml.png
It's not a pyramid scheme because the incentive to pay them money isn't tied to bringing in new customers.

All it is is a business model that the OP doesn't think will work, long-term. I thought the same thing about twitter once. But "a business model I wouldn't bet on" doesn't make as good of a blog title as 'ponzi scheme'.
"Now, it is possible that some extremely niche businesses have found limited utility from ads (for example, BustedTees and social games may be the lucky few)."

Um, I don't know that I'd refer to to social games as an "extremely niche business". Also, social commerce/group buying sites have received incredible ROI from advertising on Facebook.
*Facebook ads are different than Google ads (or other web site ads) because you go to Facebook to interact with friends while you go to the rest of the web to find information.

This is a false argument. If I interact with friends I talk about stuff I am interested about. There you have your connection with ad. Even just mentioning someone's look or hair color could immediately trigger an ad for something related to it and commercially interesting.
The author is making the false assumption that no one is successful with Facebook ads, no one is. I know many people who have been extremely successful with Facebook ad campaigns for pennies on the dollar.
Or it's a social effect of the educational process. IIRC teachers, coaches, mentors -- all have long been shown to give disproportionate attention, encouragement and preference to good-looking students.

It would be surprising to me if all that extra attention wasn't having a positive effect on all aspects of their lives.
"They spend hundreds or thousands or more on Facebook ads. At the end of the first run, they see bad ROIs."

I've heard this argument but have yet to see any substantial evidence.