skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product.

There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once.

I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always.

What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.
Reminds me of this classic comment by Frank Atanassow on Lambda the Ultimate: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1562#comment-18623

> "Dynamic" is technical jargon used by programmers, meaning "good". It derives from the Latin dyno mite, meaning "I am extremely pleased", and is first recorded in the historical work Bona Aetas of noted Roman sage and pundit J.J. Walker. Its meaning evolved in the 4th century after monks copying an obscure manuscript on programming linguistics in their ignorance tried to deduce its meaning from context. [...]

(the comment continues at the link; read the whole thing, it's pretty funny whether or not you agree with the sentiment)
The process was conceptually identical, AFAICT. Actual implementation differed insofar as coolant was sprayed onto the hot strip rather than being contained in a bath as shown in the linked graphic.

BHP's steelmaking research in the early 90's was IMO pretty leading edge - google "BHP Project M" for example. Unfortunately, the accountants decided that there was little future in steelmaking in Australia, and spun off BHP's steelmaking arm as a separate company (OneSteel) in yr 2000. The R&D focus died off around the same time.

Back to Flash Bainite - I am not totally dissing it, since some particular combination of steel composition and time-temperature path through the alloy phase diagram might produce an especially good result. What I am saying is that analogous heat treatments have been extensively studied in the past - but not implemented commercially due to problems the researchers were unable to overcome.
this is my business, thanks for the friendly mention :)
For one thing each package needs a different build environment, so the overlay filesystem wouldn't necessarily help much. For another, can you say with confidence that the build process (which typically runs some steps as root) will not affect any system state outside of the filesystem?
Here are some sites written in Rails: http://rubyonrails.org/applications
Prolog is awesome as a library, embedded in another "normal" language.

Prolog as a culture is amazing; the depth of it, specially when it's submerged in other disciplines, like constraint logic programming.

But, standalone, as a language, by itself: it either forces your problem into a text-book toy exercise, or drives you to frustration. It does all the difficult stuff out of the box, but you will need to cut through it with a machete to accomplish the mundane.
Wireless Surveillance Systems 
Wireless Surveillance Systems provide a versatile Wireless Surveillance Camera Systems that adapts to your ever-changing needs. A wireless surveillance camera systems makes changing the position or location of the camera quick and effortless, allowing you to capture the footage you need without any hassle.
Excellent analysis and something that well quantifies a general feeling that long-term TC readers have had.

The real takeaway for me though that you found a creative way to get your startup on Techcrunch and probably get a lot more eyeballs than just your press pitch may have received.
Facebook is absolutely fabulously done (complaints about it concern privacy and abuse potential but the interface is top-notch).

The thing about Facebook though, is
A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers.
B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant growth and its quality as the thing that's happening.

If it instead is faced with a slow decrease in users and a feeling that it's "jumped the shark(tm)", it will have a lot of trouble keeping its economics, its talent and thus the quality of the interface. So I imagine that FB could fall apart in some medium-scale time frame. Oddly enough, I think the end of Facebook wouldn't be good news for those plots "alternatives" to it.

I actually hope Facebook IPOs soon, might postpone some problems...
I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point.

My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example.

As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.
Ask HN: good resources for startup product validation strategies?
Can you please share any good reading you have on product validation strategies?
Pandora’s box of rising music costs
And will a Chinese student meet a German one and bah blah etc. on Facebook in 10 years? I guess we'll see whether it's even around in 10 years. My belief is that people will have moved on by then. 10 years is a long time and there's nothing particularly special about Facebook.
Louis Vuitton Women's Shoes - Louis Vuitton Women's Shoes for sale
I think he's referring to backwards nature of string joining in general.
55 Examples of Minimalistic Web Design
Resilience in the Storm
Twisted isn't very Pythonic, in that very few Python code-bases grow to have as much code as Twisted does, and the coping mechanisms Twisted has evolved to keep that code manageable wind up looking like Java because that language is also designed to make large projects manageable.

The number of classes and interfaces in Twisted is a bit of a stumbling block, but I've never come across anyone with a better, more "Pythonic" way to express the same ideas or provide the same flexibility. The ABCs introduced in modern Python are inferior to the interfaces Twisted uses, and the most recent PEP I've seen for Futures is but a pale shadow of Twisted's Deferreds.
It's been a year already, and still I don't think I've ever visited a non-Latin-script URL. You would think the web would be the end of parochialism.
Nashville and Austin. Perhaps Austin has been ahead of the curve a bit with SXSW, but Nashville is really starting to take off with healthcare tech.
I took the path you described (I went from doing web-based stuff in PHP from 12-14 to reverse-engineering network protocols and file formats, which is still my expertise from 15-23), and outside of a lot of dumb luck, I can completely attribute my success to it. I found it was interesting, and I just started doing it; that thought process has gotten me where I am today.

The only thing I'd disagree with is "Read a book" -- while there are many fine books out there, they should be used to fill in gaps while you're doing things, IMO. Start doing something, and when you run into issues or have questions about how certain things behave, open up a relevant book and figure out what's going on.
Have you used Jess? If so, do you have any observations on their relative pros/cons?
purely educational the question, been thinking heavily of getting an MBA for several years already. Figured my fascination with CS would make a good pair anyway.
In the example you gave (and it was a very good one, it makes sense), wouldn't it be more prudent to link to a github profile or something otherwise reduces the layers necessary to obtain access to what makes you relevant to the viewer's interests?
Facebook pulls in anything a user you've requested to be a friend of shares publicly. It's not because you're part of a group, it's because of the privacy settings on their status updates.
I concur with you.
the mba in my opinion isn't "to do business" per se, its to grow a network, earn a pedigree more than learning hard "skills" to do business with.
Paid advertising: 10 things to think about
Nike Spongebob Dunk High Yellow Blue Smart Deals
It is a non sequitur argument to suggest that had telco's not been deregulated in the '80s, we would still have had CLECs building out the dialin and ISDN Internet of the '90s; that argument leaves out the fact that the RBOCs the CLECs piggybacked on were themselves the product of deregulation.
Apple iPhone 4S Coming to Sprint
Do Small-RAM Devices Have a Future?
> If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them.

This is what I would guess. I suspect that one of Facebook's problems is that people naturally overshoot with their social network and at some point you end up with "too many" friends and logging into Facebook reveals less interesting content and more noise. I know this has certainly happened to me. 80% of the content I see upon logging in is information from people that I couldn't care less about. Facebook has encouraged this from the start by avoiding support for stratifying friends into separate groups. It's worked well for them by simplifying things, but I think they'll begin to experience some natural attrition from it as time goes by - social networks just naturally grow and grow because you very rarely "unfriend" someone. At some point it becomes burdensome to check it instead of fun and then it's all over.
Search and social networking are very different in their ability to persist, IMO.

While switching costs are low with search, the ability to offer a better product is difficult. Momentum gives you little advantage in search. For example, Bing is not marginally better positioned with 14% market share vs when it had 9%.

Social networks are almost the polar opposite. It's hard to get any traction at all in social because switching costs are high. But if Facebook sees a competitor get 5% of its user base and then a few months later have 10% they should be scared to death. It probably means Facebook is already dead and just don't know it yet.
Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there.

Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
I'll have to agree with you there, the part about trashing MS is a little bit silly, Apple is at the top of it's game right now and MS is near the depths of it's game, yet the market cap of the companies are similar and MS just spent the last 10 years being harangued by the DOJ.

It's going to take a couple years to get out of that mindset and into the mobile mindset. It's a little bit silly to think that a company with a market cap of 199 B on a PE of 9 which is highly profitable cannot compete with a company worth 300 B on a PE of 15.

It's way too early to be calling the death of Microsoft, Windows might not be cool, but look around any office of an SMB. The idea that these companies are going to switch to Macs (or iPads) and retrain their entire staff is a little ludicrous.
Five step approach to plan your startup
The sites looks good. Is the signup page (and CC processing) your own or are you using a service? It looks great--congrats!
Facebook lasting a hundred years? WHAT?! I hardly see Facebook as being in the same league as technology companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon. In fact, I don't really see Facebook as much of a technology company at all, at least in comparison to those I mentioned.

I wonder if the author would have said the same thing about Myspace 5 years ago. I bet he would have.
Printing Flyers and Books with Google Docs
7M ตารางบอล ตารางบอลวันนี้ ตารางบอลคืนนี้ ตารางบอลพรีเมียร์ลีก
Contributors to Debian code World Map (Google Fusion Tables)
I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.

In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.

On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.

Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.

Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if you could afford it.
16 years old gives mathematics formula capable of dividing by Zero
Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8
> How come you're not bothered by C's numerous deficiencies, like being the one language responsible for majority of security issues, ease of corrupting memory, tediousness of manually managing memory and the fact that half of professional programmers can't decipher C type declarations of medium complexity (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/ECC-Fun-Writing-Compilers).

Every language choice has trade-offs. To address your specific request, I am not bothered by the issues you raise because there are strategies to ameliorate them. Security issues and corrupting memory largely come from unbounded data. C has fantastic tooling to profile and analyze applications. Unlike Go, there is always something you can do to achieve your desired behavior. YES there are warts and problems a-plenty, but they are well-known and there is a vast collection of people and articles about dealing with them.

I never meant to imply that C was more safe than Go. Erlang is, which I meant to imply with the comment about immutable message passing concurrency. Immutable message passing concurrency is amazingly safe and free from classes of errors that Go programmers still have to deal with (race conditions!) In Go, the canonical style is to pass pointers through channels (and pass ownership along with it.) Two goroutines can still mutate the same object out from under each other, leading to all of the potential issues you run into with multithreading in C.

The Go garbage collector sucks, currently (check out the recent mailing list threads with trivial applications that trip it up.) They know this and it is on the roadmap for development, but it isn't there yet; stopping the world to do your work (and taking a LONG time to do so in perverse cases) is not something I want to deal with. When using a "systems" language, I want to have repeatable and knowable performance.

Using the unsafe package defeats all of the benefits of using Go while maintaining all of its shortcomings. Additionally, there is great difficulty with incorporating existing C libraries (yes, cgo is an option but it does not work with gccgo and it is poorly documented -- for instance, how do you make the Go garbage collector aware of C struct lifetimes?) Even if you stay within the language, you have to choose lightweight go-routines or optimized code generation (gc vs gccgo.)

Another irritating thing is that Go maps cannot have binary data as keys, only certain types (numbers and strings, basically.) Discovering this was not easy, and the suggested answer is to coerce an array of bytes to a string (making a copy) for storage and every time the key should be accessed.

> If you looked at Go, it must have been from a very, very far away.

Just because I have come to different conclusions than you have, please do not assume my view lacks research or analysis.
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.
Definitely wasn't a laptop - back then the big thing was "Portable", no one considered doing stuff on the go. Once we got to the TRS-80 Model 100 (and its relatives) a couple years later then we were thinking laptops.
If you listen to the audio tape of "The Goal", Mr. Goldratt tells the heartbreaking story of why he wrote the book and what happened afterwards.

As a grad student, he developed software to manage the production of certain key components needed for his research. He then ended up starting a successful software company selling those tools into manufacturing companies.

He wrote "The Goal" as a sales tool to help his customers adopt the software and practices.

The heartbreaking part is that he found the companies that purchased his book were more successful than companies that purchased his software or companies that purchased both.

Once realizing that, he immediately ceased to be an effective salesman for his company and was pushed out as CEO.
Dwarf Fortress, perhaps?
It's like throwing a dinner party and inviting the guests to come see how you've neatly arranged the pots and pans on the floor, in the fashion of a stove. "It's fantastic," they'll say, "Perhaps you should include some carrots." "This is wonderful feedback!", you'll think, as you as begin to slice carrots for your floor-bound pots.
I've used Linux since '93. It was easier in the early days because the hardware was simpler. I lived in Emacs, so the desktop was irrelevant. The turning point was laptops. It was a nightmare to get any distribution going without hours of research and random driver tweaking. I ended up using Windows 98 on my laptop and rsh into desktop Linux. VMware was a godsend. I could finally use Linux for development and Windows for everything else. Nowadays Win7 (or OSX) + VMware's Unity makes the Linux desktop superfluous.
That's the problem with macros. It's hard enough to read Scala code as it is if the author wants to be clever. Throw in macros and it's game over. In languages with relatively inflexible or primitive syntaxes macros are a blessing but I think they're unnecessary in Scala.
"Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users..."

You know who else lost nearly 6 million users?

Yep. AOL.
And by technology company I mean:

Hardware (Apple, Amazon)
OS (Apple, Google)
Cloud services (Google, Amazon, Apple)
Web services like email, maps, search (Google)

Facebook has a very large user base. Whoopee. But does that mean staying power? Nope. Just ask Myspace, Yahoo, and countless dot bomb companies. You need to invest in R&D, become a technology provider, and succeed in more than one market. Beyond social networking, what does Facebook have?

This is a horrible article, especially by the Economist's standards.
> Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.

1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install

2. download, untar arc3.tar

3. see news.arc (hn source)
As someone else mentioned, they use Facebook's own advertising tool to estimate the numbers. And their could be many things wrong with it.
But if you put that number in the context of other metrics, such as Google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u...), then the numbers make sense.
Now the question is, are they gonna have slow sustained growth from now on like Skype (http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&#...) or fall off a cliff like MySpace (http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us...)? Remains to be seen.
Settlers of Catan: A low-tech island retreat for a plugged-in generation
Call this number to hear Pi
Ask HN: Thoughts on a hidden "meta" comment view?
I recently gained the ability to downvote comments, and I've been trying to take this (light) responsibility seriously. So far, the only comments that I have downvoted were those that I felt obviously did not add anything to the discussion.

As I downvoted one such comment, I had an urge to reply to it with an explanation of why I chose to do so. Of course, my explanation would not add anything to the discussion either, so I refrained.

It occurs to me that something like a normally hidden meta-chat view might be helpful. By default, none of the meta discussion would be visible, but a user could choose to view it. It would be a place for discussing the discussion, explaining site guidelines, etc. I think of it as sort of analogous to Wikipedia's discussion tab.

My idea here is that such a meta-chat view might help get crufty comments off the main view, as well as encourage more communication about why a comment is inappropriate. Another idea might be to allow comments to be voted into the meta category, so they would be hidden from the main view but still visible to those who care.

Have any other communities tried this sort of thing? What do you think of it?
TechCrunch uses tags for companies and a few products. Android and iOS were so common that I included them to give a sense of what TC covers within those companies.
I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least.

With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.

Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..

If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.
Remote Card Sorting tool (IA) is looking for testers
New, web-based and budget-friendly Card Sorting tool is looking for Beta users. Sign-up now and get a free unlimited access through the end of the year.
Tried to start on of these a while back on a forum. Made it to two people. Becareful who you send it to.
I'd encourage you to give some actual Scala coding a try. It can look dauntingly complex in short snippets and people often showoff complex stunts with the type system but once you actually start coding it makes a lot more sense.

You really can start by writing Java-in-Scala and then gradually making use of the more advanced features as you need them.

Clojure is great too, of course, but I think Scala is much more likely to gain a foothold in the programming mainstream.
They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level.

What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."
I guess the real question is if they have reached market saturation or not.