skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You crossed a line on that one, facebook (again). It's getting really tiresome to keep updating my settings to keep you out of my life.

This sort of thing is what keeps people from doing anything substantial on facebook. Can you imagine "Facebook Docs", FMail, or anything of the sort? No. Because facebook would make it all public without telling anyone.

I really believe that in the very long run, this culture of invasion will limit facebook's potential.

I'm sure this was in the TOS somewhere, but really? It's just disrespectful.
Agree - I saw this a few days ago. When they are "syncing" their app they are taking your phone numbers, not just using it to display photos on your phone for your contacts, which is what I thought I remember this started out as.
No, any phone you install the Facebook App on. As Facebook has my phone contacts. I don't own an iPhone and only use a BB.
I disagree with the summation of the article, the point of advancement is to make something so common place and autonomous that it does not require understanding to use.

Advancement is not ignorance it is creative capacity used in different applications. Lets take for example electricity, at one point, it was only usable by those that knew how to generate it. At a certain point higher level interfaces where developed like the power line and then the outlet. At a certain point the generation of electricity was wholly separated from the consumption of electricity. People no longer needed to understand how to generate electricity to use it, even if they where developing new and novel technology that relied on electricity. They may need to know a little about the consumption characteristics of electricity but they could be totally ignorant about how to generate it.

I see the computer as very similar, we have moved beyond the implementation. For most tasks the hardware has been abstracted away allowing the creative to focus their efforts on higher level advancements. It does not mean they are some how dumber just that their understanding may be focused on more advanced subjects.
Pretty harsh response to a post from an intern, dudes and dudettes.

Yeah, the erlang server code was pretty gross. It was one of the very first things written when we started Mixpanel over 2 years ago, and it's only been updated a few times since then.

I feel like the big thing you guys are missing is how little time we have. It's not like we don't know when we have bad code, or we don't realize that we made mistakes in the initial server design - we just have a million things on our collective plate. Fixing a very simple server - (accept request, validate json, put on queue) that is doing its job okay hasn't been a high priority thing.

When this code was written, Mixpanel had zero customers and we weren't sure what we were building yet. In that regard, Erlang has been a rock. We've barely had to touch it during the rampup from 0 to thousands of requests per second.

Now that we have the manpower, and we've learned what we really need, we can rewrite it to make things easier on ourselves. If we can get acceptable performance in python, there is no reason to use erlang.

I think there's some merit to the other complaints (error codes, etc), but that's another symptom of this thing being written so long ago. We want to improve things incrementally (and backwards-compatibly) for now, but it will be dramatically simpler for us to make changes to the server now that it's written in python.

Ultimately, we have skeletons in the closet, just like the rest of you - I'm sure all of you have some bad code in production somewhere. Now we're saying "Look, we're getting rid of our skeletons!" and you guys are like "OMG WHY YOU HAVE SKELETONS" instead of "sweet, no more skeletons".
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This is definitely the wrong crowed to present following facts, but I feel it might enrich the conversation.

<Quote>

...but I’ve seldom heard a usability expert end a discourse on human
factors by acknowledging that graphical systems are only really
the “best” solution for a certain group of people or a particular
set of tasks. Most take the graphical desktop as ground truth –
it’s just the way we do things.

</Quote>

The Human brain has estimated 2 billions nerves in the V1 & V2 region. Those regions are responsible for rudimentary visual recognition, of objects with different: Form (grouping, orientation, size), Color, Motion, Spatial position. This is one of the most powerful parallel computational systems known to men. It takes humans about 10 milliseconds to recognize an object standing out in those respects (e.g. gray text and one red word).

Why am I putting this down? / What are GUI's good for:

scan 1.3 million pixels (1280*1024 screen)
ignore all text fields
find all buttons
identify a symbolic representation of the task at hand (e.g. save)

The whole thing took ~40 milliseconds and most importantly: it is a task done so fast and effortlessly by the human brain, that we don't even think about it.

Humans are visual animals, GUI's are a result of our evolutionary history.

I am not stating that GUI's are the fastest way to get the job done. You still have to move the mouse, etc. A skilled Command Line user can get the job done without a 40 milliseconds delay and moving the mouse might take longer than typing the command. However, teaching the average person to use a new piece of software is near impossible without utilizing their incredible brain power for visual recognition.

Graying a button out, making it red, green,... gives the skilled UX designer the ability to convey a lot of information without making people think.
AND if you agree to uploading it. I think you are asked the firs time you start the app. I didn't do this. So I only see the phone numbers of FB friends who added their numbers to the FB account.

Edit: Also, this is really old news: http://www.blackberryforums.com/aftermarket-software/192419-...
"Cheap, Fast, Good. Choose two" is a pretty true statement.

I did Rails contracting for several years for various startups and the biggest mistake I've seen over and over is startups relying on contractors solely for development. A contractor has no emotional investment in your product. Your huge downtime emergency is just another task to deal with for them. The bug that has your customers pissed off is just another task for them. And if you don't have any developer experience yourself you have no idea when they are lying to you or giving you the run around. Or how to even evaluate whether their rate of work is reasonable.

You don't want to put the livelihood of your company in someone's hands who the company succeeding or failing makes little difference too. There are always more contracts in the sea for them.

And as div suggested picking up RoR or Django yourself is probably a good route to go. It will take longer than outsourcing it but you'll end up in a much more stable place. The other route I would suggest would be a technical founder. But that's a hard thing to find.

Also a great bonus if you go the learn it yourself route and the startup ends up failing, you've learned a very valuable life skill (programming). And a job skill (RoR) that pays quite well.
Absolutely not true. They ganked it from my phone.
Keep in mind that when you choose ASP.NET you're only locking yourself to a platform, not a language. At my office, for example, we're looking forward to using F# -- by all means a well-designed, thoughtful language in the ML family -- to replace some particularly awkward and gunky C# code, and using F# won't require any more than a few tweaks to our build scripts and tools.

As for hiring: we've yet to hire a programmer who primarily worked in .NET before starting; good devs are language agnostic, and the people who built amazing software in Cocoa, Smalltalk, Lisps, and Ocaml prior help us build amazing software on .NET today.
Misleading title but scary nonetheless. It's not my complete phonebook... not even close. But it does have numbers of friends who aren't in my phone (which is useful and possibly OK considering they added me as friends).

Nevertheless i never explicitly opted into this which is bad.
NASA Lauches Jupiter Probe (Juno)
I'd say, that drawback had changed drastically over past 3-4 years. Website Spark, BizSpark minimize licensing costs during the startup phase. If business picks up, the cost of software will not be an issue anyway, otherwise both programs do not have any sort of "exit costs". As for hosting - there's plenty of affordable options right now.
thanks for the update!
.NET has a lot there in its web framework out of the box, so you if you know it well you can do sophisticated things very quickly. There is even strong javascript/ajax integration these days, and new MVC patterns. Overall, I also think C# is a very strong, modern language with tons of benefits.

However, the issue comes when trying to find off the shelf components. Unlike with Python and Ruby where there are tons of OSS projects you can integrate, with .NET you will have to either build everything on your own or pay a LOT of money for components.

Another thins to keep in mind is that working in .NET requires VS and all the suite of .NET profilers/debuggers which are not free like they are for Python and Ruby. Therefore when growing your dev team you will have to pay a lot in software per seat.
>I, too, thought that the job losses were permanent. Until there was an article posted here the other week with quotes in news outlets from several different eras since the industrial revolution claiming the same thing.

// It's like peak oil isn't it. We keep getting "we're at [or passed] peak oil" but then a new oil field or new extraction method makes this seem less likely. Thing is that oil will run out.

To me technological changes haven't converted in to less jobs because we've exploited those changes to increase resource use, and hence production. As natural resources falter then we can no longer have the increased resource use and so the removal of jobs via technological improvements can't be mitigated by the addition of jobs in new areas.

There are various resource pressures and financial problems that suggest to me that we're at the turning point. It would be nice to be wrong about that in some ways.
>Because of those low rates, the amount the U.S. government pays to service its debt is, relative to the size of the economy, less than it was paying throughout the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s and for most of the last decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that net interest on the debt (which is what the government pays to service it) would be $225 billion for fiscal year 2011. The latest figures put that a bit higher, so let’s call it $250 billion. That’s about 1.6% of American output, which is lower than at any point since the 1970s – except for 2003 through 2005, when it was closer to 1.4%.

http://moneyland.time.com/2011/07/15/the-u-s-is-not-drowning...

Yes, we should do what we can as a matter of course to pay down the national debt, but we really weren't any worse off in our ability to pay than we've been in decades.

At the very least, manufacturing a crisis out of the matter -- and this one was completely manufactured by the GOP -- that has resulted in making it harder to pay down the debt we already have was a completely daft move.
I'm pretty sure this information is explicitly imported by the user in Adroid/iPhone/BlackBerry apps when he or she allows the apps to use profile pictures as contact photos.
As a professional C++ programmer, I wonder if your response would be the same for my case?

Tongue in cheek...
I think your reasoning is unfounded.

Safeway's doesn't have a huge margin, but so what? They employ people directly and indirectly: cashiers, truckers, stock clerks, people who work in canneries, farmers, chemists who formulate fertilizers, etc. It isn't as if a dollar spent at Safeway's ends up in an incinerator while a dollar spent at Apple mates with another dollar to make change.
Unofficial SwanTaxis API for Perth hackers.
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I remember at some point when authorizing the installation of the FB BB App (well over a year ago) it mentioned something about needing access to contacts to work. I presumed this to mean for the local app not for them to suck them up into the cloud.

FB continues to lead the way when it comes to "it's in our TOS but don't go reading it because it won't match our marketing copy"
+ 1 on bitlbee. I use it with weechat-curses.
Excellent presentation of the library. After reading the source, I am struck with how much of the code here is just one or two line wrappers; "convenience" functions that don't really do anything but pass on the arguments to another function or set or get a property.

I'm not a big fan of thin API wrappers like this. Why not dispense will all that code and let your library users access the underlying properties and methods instead? The library would be smaller, simpler, and faster.
This has been around for a long time... it's the phone numbers that your friends on Facebook willingly submitted, they just make it easy for you to see whose phone number you already have access to through Facebook without having to go to someones profile.
Breastfeeding is better for the mother and child. Choosing not to is like choosing not to give your child a decent diet. The WHO strongly advocate breastfeeding for a minimum of 12 months.

Women don't need to try to breastfeed unless they want to raise children.

If you want to be "equal to a man" then don't bear children. Simples.
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No - they also take phone numbers from your phone and upload them to Facebook (if you use a mobile Facebook app).
There was a hubbub about this a while ago. How it works is, you have to install the Facebook app on your phone and then enable contact syncing. When you do that, you get a big confirmation screen that says this:

If you enable this feature, all contacts from your device (name, email address, phone number) will be sent to Facebook and be subject to Facebook's Privacy Policy, and your friends' profile photos and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone address book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information. [Cancel] [I Agree]

EDIT:
However, IIRC they added or strengthened this warning after the initial controversy.

I would argue this is bad UX because it forces the user to all at once make such a big nebulous decision about what their friends are comfortable with.
breastfeeding should not be used as an argument to guilt or coerce women into staying at home when they'd rather go back to work

I don't see anyone doing that. All I see is the notion that breastfeeding is a reason why, on aggregate, mothers choose to stay at home longer than fathers.

If anything, I'm reading your attitude as a way to guilt and coerce mothers into going back to work when they'd rather stay at home.
reminds me of the south park episode that ripped from the human centipede
They have the #1 news site, #1 sports site, #1 finance site, and #1 entertainment site (they call it omg!) on the web.
"Too afraid to learn Lisp"

This is sad. Very very sad.
We created Social Fortress[1] for this exact reason. Solve the root problem: Protect(AES256 Encrypt) and control your data transparently, prior to sending it anywhere, and you don't have to worry about this ever again.

[1] I'm involved with https://www.socialfortress.com
that's what i thought too, until i read this on that page:

"Facebook Phonebook displays contacts you have imported from your phone, as well as your Facebook friends.

If you would like to remove your mobile contacts from Facebook, you need to disable the feature on your mobile phone and visit this page."
My startup[1] is built on .NET (MVC 3). As I noted in a blog article [2], it's certainly reasonable to use .NET if you meet the same guidelines, and it sounds like your co-founder does.

I would, however, encourage you to use .NET MVC instead of WebForms. The former is very similar to Rails, Django, and other popular MVC frameworks, so if you find that you'd like to make a transition to another language/framework, it will be much easier this way. The latter is really just an antiquated technology with lots of problems and not very much of an OSS community.

At the end of the day, it's about getting to market fast and testing your hypothesis. Building your MVP is just the very beginning of your startup journey. You will probably have to change your product a lot, so go with what you can hack in quickly. If it turns out that you have the next StackExchange (which is built on .NET MVC) and you need to massively scale, then drop Spolsky or Atwood a line and I'm sure they'll be happy to give you some pointers. That's a good problem to have.

[1] http://effectcheck.com

[2] http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/04/10/building-a-startup-part...
How, exactly, do you propose "paying it back"? Social Security is already a TERRIBLE deal for current workers. The only options are to either limit benefits to retirees, who are already getting more than they paid in (payroll taxes are higher now than they were before 1983), or to make Social Security an even worse deal by taxing current workers even more.
You're wrong, it's actually a copy of the contacts stored on your phone. On my account, the local pizza place and haircutters are listed, which definitively do not have facebook user profiles.
That episode was so poignant about people not reading TOS's it kind of hurt.
I laud his inititiative. If herding cats takes talent, herding documentation-averse cats must be even harder. Best to make an attempt, get buy in and feedback, and move forward. If the people at the top say "bugger off", oh well. If they say, "Thanks for starting this, let's see where we can go from here", then not only are they being decent people, but also constructive.

I think the site looks fine, as in neither bad nor awesome. Similar for the official site. Nothing special, just different.
Excellent point. I should definitely add a few more things like that.
This is a strange belief. Why in your mind would payroll tax be necessarily cut just because social security expenses drop? You do realize that social security is actually still running in the black, right? They are, right now, bringing in more money than they spend.

Guess what happens to the rest of the money: It gets spent elsewhere. Social security buys US Government debt with any excess, meaning it goes directly into the budget. In theory the SS trust has assets, but in reality the money is gone. It's one account holding a bunch of IOUs from a second account, and both accounts are owned by the federal government.
Off topic, but Umberto Eco's novels in English are still written by Umberto Eco, regardless of the translator.
Tiny village in Nebraska hides world’s largest rare earth mineral deposits
and that was my main goal.
Same here on Android. The options were to add metadata like photos to contacts already in my phone, or to import my entire FB contact list into my phone (even if I didn't have them in my phone book). I chose the former.

At no point was it mentioned that they would be helping themselves to the rest of my contacts, to whom I have no connection to on Facebook.

Pissed off doesn't even begin to cover it.
The contacts listed on that page aren't even in my phonebook.

It seems like that page only lists the numbers from people who willingly shared their number if you canceled out of the import feature after installing the facebook app on your phone.
Had you used mutt instead of Gmail, you would have simply used: SHIFT-zSHIFT-z. When you want to compose mail in one of these programs, it opens your specified text editor and uses the whatever text you enter as the contents of your message. It works a lot like the 'Intents' feature which has been Android has received so much praise for, only it's decades old.

Actually, there's no reason for this to depend on the cli. In Firefox, there are plugins which give you a button to click under every text box which open your favorite text editor with a buffer already open containing the contents of the text box. Edit the buffer and save, and your changed appear in the text box. (This is, in fact, how I am editing this comment.) On Unix systems, a graphical mail program could easily use a shell call to get text from an external program. The only problem is, this just doesn't really happen. Vendors prefer proprietary interop with their own products rather than more universal interop methods.
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Complexity, is the enemy.

The most sophisticated solutions are often very simple, because they were written from a sophisticated perspective, not a naive perspective.

erlang has stood the test of time, and produced great results because, really, it is very simple.

It just comes from a sophisticated perspective.
For the iPhone, if you want to check if you are sharing your contacts, open the Facebook app, go to Main Menu > Friends, click the icon on the upper right and then Sync Contacts.

I believe the syncing option is off by default
The ideal lifestyle if life was perfect would be that of Genghis Khan. There'd be no use for religion, spirituality, philosophy, etc. All of philosophy stems from "I can't have everything that I want, so...". But if you can have everything you want: endless supply of women.. then life is all grand. You conquer, You win, You build, you get endless orgasms. No need to master your emotions and deal with unfairness.
Upvoted for making me laugh. :P
I haven't done OpenGL programming since college and starting in web development. So glad to have a reason to get back into linear algebra :)
9 of 170 friends, not very complete.
Perhaps I'm a bit weird, but it doesn't entirely surprise or upset me. In fact, I just found a lot of people I'd lost touch with and didn't think to check for them on Facebook.

They should have asked, but whatever. Are you shocked? Iirc I synced my Address Book to Facebook anyhow.

My Address Book is on Apple's server, my TimeMachine drive, Google's servers, apparently Facebook, and any number of other online services. I don't really care. I'd much rather have the data backed up than risk losing it. And having it on Facebook has obvious utility.
I acknowledge that. I remember that the facebook-app on my android phone asked me whether I wanted to sync my phones addressbook to FB or not. I've chosen not to, and thus there are no phone-numbers FROM MY PHONE shown on the linked facebook-page, only the numbers my friends have put in themselves (some aren't even in my phone...).
gui vs cli, interesting topic.

i used to use the command line for everything but recently
switched to using guis.

switched mainly because gui applications seem nicer to me for completing common desktop tasks, for example listening to music, i can just click the rhythmbox applet and select a song as opposed to something like "mplayer ~/Music/some\ artist/some\ album/*" or manipulating files, it seems a lot nicer to me to be able to pull a file onto my desktop than type out (even with tab-complete) "mv foo ~/Desktop". ofcourse, there are exceptions when using a shell is much easier, for instance if i want to copy a large number of files whose filenames have some similar pattern.

it's also very nice to be able to install some new program and just use it, why should i have to read long poorly written man pages?

at the same time i still use a shell everyday, but as a programming/administration tool.