skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TV ads, if nothing else, enforce branding in people's minds. Like a funny Miller Lite commercial isn't trying to get an immediate purchase of Miller Lite, but just get the brand to stick in someone's mind the next time they are thinking of buying something. Facebook ads don't offer that same brand awareness (or at least it seems to take a lot more money to achieve the same awareness)
Honestly? Facebook gives me a ton of value. I keep in closer contact than I otherwise would, with more people I care about. It's simply a more scalable means of keeping in touch with people.

I find it odd that people say things like "that's what we have email and messenger and calendars and sms for". That's the point - I've replaced 5 programs with 1. I still use email and sms (messenger, not so much). But it's now all in one place, with all the people I care about right there, without having to start exchanging usernames.
Samsung Says 2mil TV Apps Have Been Download
If you watch discovery kids, you'll see ads about diapers, toys, etc. Watch comedy central? erection pills, ggw, etc

Targeted ads work, just like google. But facebook is like a 24/7 annoying infomercial channel.
They talk about producing 10k gallons of ethanol and then about scaling that up to 25k gallons. You're looking at 557 MWh adjusting for ethanol and an adjusted efficiency of ~9%.
This is definitely way off base. He's taking a sampling of people who don't know how to optimize ads on Facebook and suggesting that they perform poorly for everyone. There's a reason that his ads were unprofitable: someone else is making money (profiting) and able to bid higher because they can monetize the same market segment he was targeting more effectively.
They did, actually. Just not very well. Only a few games had that cross-play (Lost Planet and Shadowrun are the only one that come to mind) and there doesn't seem to be very much incentive to implement it further. I would hope a positive response from this would make Microsoft reconsider their halfhearted attempt.

Me, I'm excited for this increases the chances of me getting one of my friends to actually play a multiplayer game in the same room. Hurrah!
Is it possible to use it with node.js for example ?

that would make it a killer server side scripting language.
It seems like success itself is more a matter of circumstances rather than innovation and persistence.
Code Mash magazine
Do you want spoiler alerts on history books as well? :)
Six Billion Crash Test Dummies (comic)
Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire
AdSense ads could arguably be put in this same boat (when I'm reading a blog am I looking for products?), and yet they provide more click-throughs. Why? Because they look like natural links on the page to many people. Perhaps Facebook needs to make its ads less obviously ads like Google does.
Aaah, I see.

Still, I give a big "WTF?!??" to the idea of paying $597 for any version of this book. I mean, I'm sure it's a good book, but $597 worth????

Heck, even $215 seems a bit crazy.
You can still mash "get mail" on a mail client.
Is hackernews running slow / not responding for anyone?
[This is not a complaint or negative in any way]

A couple of us at the office have been noticing this and wonder if it's just our connection or HN.
I know the feeling. In that circumstance, since the person apparently wants to talk about that news, I try to find something to ask them about it that I don't already know the answer to. Which could even just be to ask them how they feel about that news (which can be in the form "I bet you're happy about that...", etc), since I don't usually know that. That way, they get to talk about what they want to talk about and I get to hear about things I don't already know. Whether to make it clear that I already knew the basics or not depends on the circumstance.
I'm not sure how much this adds to the conversation, since I think it's a pretty common experience, but I honestly can't recall a single thing advertised in facebook. I don't have AdBlock running, I've just developed a complete blind-spot for the right margin of facebook. I don't see how this could be very effective long-term. Conversely, I have clicked on ads in Bing, Google, and Reddit.
I finally made it to the eval/apply video of the SICP series... so many hours in then you get that gift. A crazy, 70s synth-filled, wizard induced gift.

I'm determined to learn Lisp now just so I can buy myself a cape and a fez.
Amiga Unix
Tools To Create Your Own Bumper Sticker
If you want to make your own bumper stickers, you will firstly need to use the most upright and relevant methods so that uniqueness may be maintained for long time. This way, it might not be an absurd choice for you to put into action coral draw software because this is the most enchanting and versatile graphic design tool through which you will be surely able to draw unique bumper decal designs in a clean and tidy manner.
Re: Jobs's absence, AAPL stock increased by 52% while he was gone from January 2009 to the start of July 2009.

Given that the iPhone 5 has been effectively complete for a little while, and given Apple's performance during 2009H1, I really don't see why there's a question about Apple's performance in 2011.
LottoLaff - a funny new way to win a Jackpot. Play free w/ coupon code: "HACKER"
You might give it too much weight--remember, comparitive advantage says humans have something to offer AIs; it doesn't say whether that something is worth more than our care and feeding or constituent atoms.

It's easy for the income level guaranteed by comparitive advantage to fall below subsistence income; it happened to most horses a century ago.
> Leaving a "happy birthday" used to mean you
> actually remember the date

Really? I'm sure there are plenty of people that put those things into calendars. How is the Facebook reminder+wallpost that much different than using Google Calendar + Gmail to get reminded to send a happy birthday email?
Also the different version of the GPL are incompatible with each other. For example, you cannot distribute combinations of GPLv2 and GPLv3 works. The recommended way to deal with this is to add the optional (but not default) "or any later version". Then the user can promote the license to be compatible. e.g. GPLv2+ is compatible with GPLv3.
I too struggle with the idea of what Facebook has become and currently is, just like many others. However, I cannot help but feel that anyone who speaks against Facebook is simply jealous that they could not fit 500 million+ users into their own representation of social interactions taken online. Facebook just like many of it's predecessors (hotOrNot.com,addictinggames.com, forumns, aol instant messenger) has combined the best features of these already existent sites into a single trustworthy one. You no longer have to scour the internet to obtain the pleasure that these type of sites produced.

It is this concept of entertainment that makes Facebook what it is today. A single source of entertainment, and a place to peak deeper into the lives of those around you with or without participating in those lives. As with many different forms of entertainment if you indulge too deeply you are consumed by your indulgence.

For the time being Facebook has a place on the internet. Will it be a main stay for years to come? Well that is very hard to predict. I truly believe Facebook's biggest internet value add will come in the form of an online digital pass. I feel those leading Facebook's directions also believe that too. If they can satisfy the majority of its users basic desire for entertainment, continue to build out the graph API, and keep giving more reasons for businesses to utilize the graph API then soon enough Facebook will will realize what Microsoft never was able to with the Microsoft Passport from the Internets early days.
Lots of iPhone users are quite productive with just a home button and no back button. Not to say that it's definitively better that way (I think I prefer it, though I haven't spent nearly as much time with an Android device), but it's certainly not so much worse as to cause an outcry for it.
Big brands like P&G have begun buying lots of Facebook ads, and they seem quite satisfied with the results of their campaigns (at least satisfied enough to ask for more...).
Apple seeks exclusive right to use the phrase "App Store"
Indeed. I would love to get my paycheque via a proximity transaction on my smartphone.

(Yes, that is sarcasm.)
Sure, if you assume that everything will continue on the same trajectory in perpetuity. This is a fairly large assumption with little evidence to back it up.
I am not sure I see how useful it is. I think people who would care about HTML5 are already aware of it and the ones who don't will probably not be influenced by the logo. What remains seems to just be some kind of nerdy bragging thing: collect them all!

It reminds me of the "Netscape Now!" button campaign from the early web. The logo and badges looks nice tough.
Facebook games (and MMOs in general, for the most part) are designed tightly around a feedback loop meant to make the game as addictive as possible. It strongly reminds me of experiments where rats are given a choice between eating and receiving a shock of pleasure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center#Experiments_on_...

The worst part of these games is that they can act as a surrogate for success: your life may not be progressing in any way whatsoever, you may have goals and aspirations that you are not pursuing, but you are getting rewards and constantly progressing in a game - I'm not sure how good our brain is at distinguishing between real and virtual rewards (especially when the virtual rewards are guaranteed, but the real rewards are... well... hard).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system

All this is to say: other potential time wasters (TV is probably the most common) may be less likely to cause addictive and/or harmful behavior (I can't believe I'm arguing that TV may be less harmful than video games, but there it is). Sure, the majority of people can play causal games strictly in their downtime, but for some it spills over into what may otherwise be productive time, and for a relative few it can take over (where do you think Zynga's revenue is really coming from?)
What I don't understand is why Bing doesn't stop them...
What about taking on an employee to handle (some of?) the contract stuff? Your revenue stays the same but costs go up by one employee. You then have some time to work on your other projects.
The protocol around here seems to be re-submission every few months. At least that's the treatment popular links get.
Mini-universes or not, the first society on Earth to create and to use artilects – even ones only a magnitude intelligent than humans – will use strategic superiority to expand and to dominate most parts of the earth, in much the same way that Western society came to dominate North and South America and Australia during the Age of Imperialism.
Interesting stuff, but I'm pretty sure I already know what my games smell like, and it ain't flowers.
Silicon Valley in 72 Hours
It is great that he has come to his conclusion on whether he should delete or not. Though... I see the movie for what it is ... just a movie intended to inspire or incite dislike , how much of it is in line with facts who knows ( e.g. where was Adam D’Angelo ?) . To use it as any part of the deletion decision making process does not seem right and seems that maybe the approach/reason for joining the social network was not the correct one. For me this means losing years worth of photos, messages, events that I went to ... I lived my life through facebook and I didn't have to write a single word in a journal. With the new messaging platform http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ and personal email address contact with friends and acquaintances are now possible without wall posts.

In 2005-2006 (I just started at McGill) when it was still within campuses it was like wild fire and when I watched the movie , I completely related and recalled sitting down with room-mates and class-mates browsing dozens of girls in the school. There were no games just mainly wall posts and photos. You cannot relate that to now ... it is just not equivalent. Privacy was the same back then as it is now... people are just more aware of it or they grew older and understood the effects it wil have with their jobs, lives etc.

> What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Yes Zadie Smith is right ... this was never meant for the old folks (no offense), when it started those are the only people there were 18-22 year old college students looking for the bare minimum.

Times are changing though and these kids start to grow up, thus changes to try to satisfy all. But to me it seems harder and harder to define.

Russia has Vkontakte
Japan has Mixi

So hopefully the author finds what he is looking for. I would start by just picking up the phone and calling someone. That is my Dad's way of keeping up with his social network. After he finishes work everyday, he has a 5-10 convo with his old friends and co-workers. Sometimes he even visits... (It is a no-brainer but somehow these days people find this hard to do)

> 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore

Is a 26 year old billionaire in charge of a 500 M network something someone would want to fail ? Are the 2000 or so employees that work there doing it for the vision of Zuckerburg? Is jealousy that strong ? I dont want it to fail. I want to be some percentage of whatever he is when I reach 26 not by personality but achievement. Why should I wait for maturity to achieve things, I want to fall, get back up, fall and fall some more if it means I reach closer to what he did (no matter how simple the idea was). It is as if he is not allowed to mature or people are still looking at him as a sophomore that sent those sms messages. He does get assistance from his COO Sheryl Sandberg http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html so maybe back in creation the site was a reflection of the immature sophomore but now it is something different.
Not a single comment on that great blog post. Where is the discussion? In a vibrant community like Hacker News.

Facebook has something valuable... we've already logged in, so there's no barrier to making a comment that is voiced from our own identity. Fewer clicks, no barriers, and boom - the comment is public.

But Hacker News does that for me, since I have a long-lasting cookie that I don't clear... hence this comment... and nothing "social" happening on that blog. Interesting.
Great point about how a few months of measuring and local optimization can easily lead to a lot more complexity than anybody expects, so it's vital to step back and look at the overall flow.
Maybe I didn't express myself correctly (My English is not that good) I meant picking up a phone and calling, establishing a connection, a bond - ie: Something not automated.
how much did they offer to pay per install?
A Concise Guide to Erlang
Their business model is straight forward, if they can pull their technology off they have just created an entire industry that could spawn a whole new generation of electronics companies.

The difficulty is making the technology work, and you're kidding yourself if you think investors in this kind of company look at deals any smaller than the kinds of Plastic Logic bets.
Agreed. Every large company I've worked with has had scripts that create sanitized versions of the production DB, with PCI and PII stripped out or masked to allow for testing against full size datasets. It's not hard to do.
This is basically a longer version of an offhanded comment I made earlier regarding answering the "How will you get users?" question on the YC application. I wasn't sure if it made sense or not, so I tried talking through it. I'd be interested in hearing what you think. (This is by no means a canonical answer to that question, by the way -- it is just an extended riff on my particular way of looking at it.)
NodeFu Launches - Opensource Node.js hosting platform
You're focusing on too narrow a definition of beauty. There's lots more in there: skin texture, facial structure, proportions of various features, proportions of sizes of body parts, yadda yadda.

I'm perfectly OK with assuming for now that there are subtle cues that I'm not conscious of, but some instinctive things are tweaking my more overt reactions.
So...anecdotal evidence that the ads run by the OP and his friends aren't good on Facebook. I guess that's better than nothing for a company which isn't publicly listed, but my estimation of Facebook's value didn't change much based on this data.
"Mark Zuckerberg might have a fit of brilliance and then announce a revolutionary ad platform that somehow actually works on social networks."

I'm not sure it would be altogether brilliant for Facebook to improve their advertising to be action-oriented as opposed to passive. People use Facebook for events and will soon use it more for Q&A and eventually "what ___ should I buy?". I think it would be common sense at that point to have ads targeted to a user's planned action, just as in the past ads have been targeted to very specific demographics.
Facebook may have not yet found its cash cow, but it has a huge potential. A few ideas from the top of my head:

* They could compete with Groupon (Or buy them). Groupon is an inherently social business, and Facebook can enjoy it.
* They could compete with Skype and other VOIP service. Perhaps replacing telephony. Almost everyone has facebook, and you already have you friends inside, seems like a pretty direct step (After all, people come to facebook to communicate).
* They could replace photo sharing websites (Flickr, Picasa...) if they just improved their photo's app (e.g. being able to view high resolution images).
* They have the potential to become the internet ID for everyone, so that you could log in to almost any site with facebook.

I can probably come up with many more... I think the real question is whether Facebook can execute or not.
Your not the only one - http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does.... I personally think he's completely ridiculous.
One nice thing about HN, is that you occasionally stumble across the people that write the software you use. Thanks for VLC. And thank you for turning Zugo down. Priorities are everything.
When I saw the article title I thought maybe it referred to how Facebook is slowly tricking you to turn over all your friends contact names and emails and then you convince them to turn over theirs, etc.

Soon Facebook will know more names and email addresses than gmail and unlike Google it has no problems selling them to advertisers.
Yes, it's certainly well-targeted, and we used their demographic targeting to the ultimate degree. It still didn't do us any good.

Do you have any sense that people saw and acted on your ads?
"Theism is the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of individual humans. Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism ridiculous. The evidence against it is enormous. For example, last century, about 200-300 million people were killed for “political reasons,” e.g., wars, genocides, purges, ethnic cleansings, etc. It was the bloodiest century in history."

Unless that creator with a brain that makes yours look like that of a mouse's cares about the welfare of you. Made sure all those wars and killing occurred in just the right way just so that you could be here writing this article. If your brain is just a tiny mouse brain how could you possibly know?
I don't understand any of that (finance n00b). Can you let me in on the joke?
Or you could simply produce a php version of a winning entry to the Underhanded C Contest: http://underhanded.xcott.com/
The ad model is truly dying, and I agree that facebook's current revenue model is a placeholder, but facebook has so much cash that they can buy a real business when one comes along. Perhaps that is the idea...
It is not literally a ponzi scheme, as I state very directly in the article. The point is that it is bad in exactly the same way that false returns in ponzi schemes are and through similar mechanisms.

Paul Graham takes the same line of reasoning in declaring that Yahoo is a "de facto ponzi scheme". http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html .

Finally, and I didn't write this in the article (yet), but it's clear that it's acting much more like a literal ponzi scheme with the recent Goldman investment. Accel partners has mostly cashed out to new investors (http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/19/accel-facebook-chunks-of-st...), and I personally know of some major top investors who have cashed out of most of their stock in Facebook. They rode the wave and have sold on to new investors. Goldman is (literally) banking on the public investing later at an even higher valuation at the IPO they will be running themselves.
Ok, so I did the same thing as you (delete facebook), but you're wrong in thinking that you're not anti-social by avoiding Facebook.

Antisocial behavior is defined as "behaviour that lacks consideration for others and that may cause damage to society"

Because literally everyone else in your social circle is on Facebook, you're actually forcing them to go out of their way to interact with you, something that fits the definition to a T. Facebook is the preferred method of communication for most people, and if you're ignoring this and forcing people to conform, they'll resent it. Every interaction with you, therefore, has to be on your terms, instead of the agreed-upon social norms (therefore, not considering others).
HN language for migration from C++
My client pays for me and are not willing to have me replaced by anyone else. I have tried numerous times. I have seen a lot of people do contractual replacements where they hire people has employees and place them as contractors in other companies. That seems like a fairly stable revenue model but the goal here is to provide software as a service rather than the placement of resources. I guess one option could be to work for a startup and try to get some stake in the company fairly early.
They won't be selling everything at once; it'll be distributed over 30-40 years. They don't have that much saved either: http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/working-americans-have...

And, on top of all that, following the hump is another (albeit smaller) one filled with their kids.
TV channels also rely on subscribers, I believe.

Having said that - I still think Facebook ads might work in the long run. While they are annoying, they are also highly targeted and will only get more targeted in the future.
"They are distributing black and white versions like you mention. Moreover these can be easily colorized to subtly blend with a design. The ease of this transformation does show foresight."

I see your point .. setting a typeface involves decisions re. kerning and many fonts use 'hinting' to ensure they can be read well at varying sizes, and some display faces are altered to suit headline text or specific use cases - but I think most logos have aims which are more specific than a typeface.

If people are free to alter the colours of a logo to suit a design, and the rules for doing so aren't defining clearly - before long a logo isn't able to fulfil it's purpose, because the unifying elements of the design become unclear.

That's not to say that a logo has to be the same everywhere - a successful identity system can break the rules, but if it does so, it needs to be very consistent in the way those rules are broken. I think agencies like Wolf Olins provide a good example of this kind of thinking.

I don't think the the adaptation of the HTML5 logo for the smaller favicon format is a feature - it seems like an afterthought.