skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDIT: I tend to agree with the response from Facebook employees that me claiming there is covert action on this forum is very questionable. I put some strikethrough in the original post. Now, let's get back to the points that aren't so ad hominem.

===================

1)devil's bargain - the person offers his or her soul in exchange for diabolical favors - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil

As a Facebook employee, you might not like the analogy, but it's a good metaphor. I really want what FourSquare has to offer - I want to connect with all my Facebook friends. However, the catch is that I can literally ONLY get this by allowing them to post to my wall. How is that not a good parallel to a devil's bargin?

2) "preys on our children" - As I understand it, minors can use Facebook. Minors then get tricked into allowing wall posts in order to get gems and little nothings in games. That's preying on children, much the same way Angry Birds and the social iPad games prey on children with the Mighty Eagle and what not.

3. covert influence by engineers - I just don't believe the sudden rush of Facebook engineers to comment on Hacker News didn't start with some conversations in Facebook. I don't really have any proof for this, except I've never heard from any of you on this forum until recently, and then several people all at once.

Also, typically commenters who have affiliations will call them out in their comment - it's nice that you and these other guys list yourselves as Facebook employees in your profiles, but not doing the disclosure explicitly seems to smack of the same attitude that makes the Facebook platform so insidious.

I think the article's point is fair - that the Facebook platform basically mandates developers ask people for all sorts of permissions when they want to do just once thing. And I don't blame FourSquare.

As for the rhetoric, I regret it - not because I think it's unfair, but because it didn't get the article the attention I think it deserves, so I failed.
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Is the dichotomy better described as popular vs. useful?
I assume there was some context in previous posts in this series, but I have no idea what's going on here.

Why are these guys trying to build a pen? What's a "minimal" pen? What's wrong with a fifty-cent Bic?
I have never had any desire to go to any conference, ever. What I tend to find is that talking gets very little done, and often not much is learned beyond a few truisms. If I want to talk to people I do it online, it is just more time-effective. At a conference, I don't necessarily know who a given person is, but online I have full access to their information (typically), and I only talk to the people I want to.

If I want to get into a good party (which is seldom), I go to whatever club is the current flavor of the month and shove a filthy wad of cash in the bouncer's hand. I could give two shits about an "exclusive" SV party, and I would hope most Facebook employees feel the same way.
Wasn't it Foursquare thst in this case pushed you to the wall-post level? Sure, Facebook provided the tool, but Foursquare made the decision most proximate to your discomfort - maybe they should get top-billing in the critique.
Sometimes I feel compelled to take a one-year break from all computers.

But I know that if I did, I'd just feel compelled to blog about it.
I'm familiar with database views, thanks.

Wikipedia credits Trygve Reenskaug with inventing the term "model-view-controller", he was a Smalltalk guy with Xerox at that time - I don't think there's any relation in the origin of that terminology to the notion of a "database view" - otherwise not sure what you're referring to here (here's a link to the original paper: http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/users/smarch/st-docs/mvc.html)
FourSquare didn't do this with my GMail or Twitter contacts. It's only because Facebook allows and encourages it that it happens.
Facebook Timeline Going To Make It Easier For Hackers To Get Your Other Accounts
Quick Context link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cwandt/pen-type-a-a-mini...

Short version:
They want to take the venerable Hi-Tec-C pen and put it in a steel body with a steel ruler sleeve. It will retail for $99.
How difficult would this be for someone with minimal linear algebra knowledge?
Those 11 lines of reimplemented bsearch are correct.
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Does this apply to patents as well?
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I heard that onstar has a near perfect track record for returning stolen vehicles. Is this true? And if so isn't a certain level of privacy breach necessary for this kind of success?
This was a pretty good article and I like that it was written with a level of candor that is fair to both sides and factually telling the information. However, it was very long and I stopped reading half way through.
Editorial: Facebook’s new sharing is anything but ‘frictionless’
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If maintenance is being done every three months, it seems (from an admittedly naive perspective) that there is no reason that zero-days should live in the wild for more than 92 days. Fine, don't bring the system down just for IT patches, but once you're bringing it down, update all the systems while you're at it.
It would hardly be a great programming feat to create 3 states: 'good', 'marked as spam, hidden', and 'deleted, remove from the DB at earliest convienence'.

Hell, my mail client has been doing that as long as I can remember.
Ask HN: What're your thoughts on #occupyWallStreet?
"The factory owner tried to tell us that in China laser etching is synonymous with CNC milling. We were not amused."

Really?
Maybe I'm approaching this differently since I teach college. My initial response was, "Why was that guy charging a subscription fee for a gradebook?" Granted, the gradebooks that come with the Angel and Blackboard learning management systems probably aren't as good as his was. Still, they do what I need them to and I'm not paying for them.

I always figured K-12 teachers had similar services available. Assuming they don't, it's not that big of a deal to throw together a gradebook in Excel.

I feel bad for this guy; based on the demonstration video it looks like he put an awful lot of work into producing a well-polished product. I just don't see how using it would save me any time or improve my teaching.
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I would love to see a comparison to manufacturing experiences in locations known for quality (Italy, Japan, US, etc). Is their experience common to all product manufacturing, or is this a China/low price issue?

Unfortunately product manufacturers don't seem as open as software people in discussing their processes and failures.
From the course page:

No particular math background is assumed, and we will go over the math concepts you need in the first couple of weeks.
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Pen Type-A is a stainless steel replacement for the Hi-Tec-C's cheap plastic housing. To us, the Hi-Tec-C cartridges deserve a more durable home.

This is kind of funny, I sort of did the same thing -- though my solution was much cheaper. I write a ton with ink and I had a hell of a time finding a pen that wrote smoothly, was gel, was rectractible (pen tops are a PITA), didn't smear, gave consistent lines, and was available at office stores for an affordable price. Well, the Pentel Energel pens met these requirements but the pen casing is flimsy and fat and very cheap feeling. So I just buy the refills and put them in a Sarasa SE pen casing. My only gripe is I would prefer a finer point. The Pentels only go to 0.7mm and I'd like at least 0.5mm, but this is good enough. Every gel pen I've used that size has problems (scratchy, suffers roller ball blowouts, etc.) so maybe good gel roller balls at that size present engineering problems.

Oh, and I also tried that Mont Blanc "hack" where you modify the refill cartridge so it fits in a cheapo Pilot G2 casing. I'm not willing to regularly pay $10-$15 for 2 ink refills, I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. The writing was mediocre at best. Most noticeable was the problems I had with skipping and inconsistency. The value of Mont Blanc pens certainly does not come from the ink cartridges.
Official websites of 7 major Syrian city hacked by Anonymous for #OpSyria
No, I don't think that captures the ideas in Richard Gabriel's essays. Simple vs. The Right Thing are the two sides, where the right thing is a complete and polished piece of software full of features, what a typical young engineer would create if given lots of time and resources to do things "the right way".

I think he calls it "worse" as a way of emphasizing that e better course of action may not feel fully responsible, as in the PC-losering example.
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why is heroku the only PaaS option offered on facebook right now?
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To answer your questions ...

1. Yes, they are. They're very useful for certain things. For example, want to update your fulltext index in Postgres after certain table cells change or when new rows are inserted? You'll need to use a trigger.

2. Knowing more rather than less is probably a good thing. Understanding the underlying model of relational data will help you build SQL databases that make sense given the data you're working with.

Of course, you won't use SQL in every project or job, but it's awfully useful. Ignore the hype that NoSQL is the wave of the future. It may be a wave of the future but so is SQL.
I was hoping to use Javascript to encrypt the file locally and then upload the encrypted file to my servers for email or downloading. I'm not really sure on exactly how I would do it yet. :) Maybe with some HTML5 local storage?
Arrington's TechCrunch Biased Anti Islam Zionist, Did It Favor Jewish Startups?
LOL! People who believe this BS are always good for a laugh. There is not a single shred of credible evidence to support the speculation that alien life has visited earth.
It is a pen snob thing. Apparently, there's these Pilot G-Tec-C gel roller ball pens that write really well and are available in really fine points (down to 0.25mm). The pens themselves are cheap plastic and are also not available in most retail places in the US. So they engineered a pen casing that they felt addressed these shortcomings (well... still not available in US retail stores) and that fits these G-Tec-C refills.
We've gone far off the topic now, but I hope we can come back to it someday.

"I've never heard from any of you on this forum until recently"

I've been an HN user under this handle since it was called "Startup News", and I've seen your username here and there for years. For what it's worth, I'm a longtime HN user and I care about what goes on here.

I can't help that you think it's "insidious". If you look at my comments I often also mention that I work for FB explicitly. Honestly it gets tiresome, and I feel as though it can hurt what I'm saying as much as it helps, as it can come across as boosterism.

I really am spending an afternoon on the couch reading these things, because blooms of posts often occur after feature launches. I care what people think, and I don't always agree with the things we launch, and there are often very insightful critiques, eg randomwalker. No one asks me to do it. If someone makes a claim about, say, security or ads, I might ping a friend who knows more about that area. We're not omniscient.

I prefer hearing from real people than PR-pasturized stuff two days later. But now you're giving me stick for doing even that. What would you prefer? No response at all?
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What most people fail to realize is this... Facebook is not the product Facebook is trying to sell. YOU (and everything about your life!) are what Facebook wants to sell.

Facebook is the next great advertising platform, after Google.
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Facebook = SkyNet
I tried sending test messages but it doesn't seem to work. It looks like you're using Flash, which I have disabled. It won't be that useful if it requires Flash since it won't work on mobile platforms.
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This is such a common mistake in C (and other curly brace languages) that it's surprising that compilers don't generate a warning based on weird indentation like that. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to add a check for, but maybe the interactions with the preprocessor make it more complicated than I am imagining?
Yes TC was biased, and why the media wants to make Muslims as terrorist In fact Muslims are the victims not the terrorist. why techcrunch calls islam a satanic religion?
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this technology is very cool, and has a lot of future promise for treating illness and detecting disorders before they manifest themselves.

One thing i an extremely concerned about is what other uses this kind of data will be put to, is your genetic data one National Security Letter away from being put in a government DNA database? I'm also certain that insurance companies would really like to get their hands on this kind of data/analysis. What about certain kinds of jobs, will you be required to submit a genetic profile to prove you can preform your duties?

I think a situation like Gattaca[1] is not too far off if we dont tightly control who is allowed access to this kind of information.

[1]https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gattaca

e: corrected "gattica" typo
This is exactly what I came to say. I usually end up cooking food.
Obviously Facebook employees talk to each other about when they're being slammed to the degree that we (as a company, and as individuals) have been recently. There's been no rallying cry for everyone to rush to HN - we want to be here and correct factually inaccurate information and explain how things work and why things are being done from a vision and technical point of view.

You'll note that pretty much everyone who posts to HN are long-time members (aristus created his account nearly 5 years ago, and has 4k+ karma, lbrandy 3.5 years ago with 2k+ karma). I only created an account of my own 9-ish months ago (before I started at Facebook), although I'm a long-time reader. This isn't a sudden rush of support from people who don't consider themselves part of this community.

We usually identify ourselves as employees (you can take a look through comments from aristus, mkjones, finiteloop, myself), and as you say, most of us include our affiliation in our profiles as well in case we forget to on a particular comment. This isn't by chance - we're told early on that anonymously/covertly posting about Facebook is incredibly not cool.
Fair enough. I will follow up. FWIW, the act cookie is always set to session only.
Google is preparing to launch a web-based storage service called "Google Drive,"
Why is there no Nobel Prize in Mathematics?
"Note: According to facebook’s privacy policy, messages on facebook can not be deleted anymore. If you click on ‘delete’ the messages will only be invisible to you. US law enforcement agencies can access this information at there own liking, without judicial review."

That last one is scary indeed. People were arguing a while ago whether these companies should keep data only for 6 months, or for a year, or 18 months - but Facebook is simply keeping it forever. Even 10 years from now law enforcement could verify your Facebook data.

Facebook Timeline should give them a nice UI, too, in case you don't delete anything. But they would still want to dig deep. I wonder if Facebook built a special Timeline product for law enforcement to see everything about everyone. Remember when they admitted a while ago that they provide law enforcement a special software for the data? I wonder if the idea of Timeline for users comes from that.

Julian Assange was dead-on that Facebook is the biggest spying machine.
I am a huge fan of Churchill. I've read several biography's and no one ever offered the behind the scenes story of how he became Prime Minister. In 1940 he was a party leader but no ones choice to lead.

Even with his friends help if Hitler had invaded a day or two later he might still have not made it.
How about pulling fiber through instead of a string assuming the copper is worth more than the fiber? Clear some debt as well as covering the cost of the fiber and upgrade the network at the same time.
It's called an opinion. Why has this suddenly become illegal now?
Any idea why the AI class website looks so different to the ML and DB classes? It doesn't even use the same TLD, let alone have the same style.
I don't understand this community. I thought you were wolves, but here you are taking the part of the sheep. Instead of being outraged, you should be trying to get your own piece of the data pie. Every single web startup is doing exactly that.
I love the course. But I'll admit, the XML section; I was fighting to stay awake.

And relational algebra? Com'on...
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Ask me here or on the Arch bug page (preferred as I will be notified) and I shall provide all details you might need. For starters, I have BCM4311 card and use broadcom-wl driver, i.e. the open source driver released by Broadcom.
A big reason for this is that it breaks a fundamental contract of web interaction, in place since the beginnings of the web, that users have come to rely upon.

How have users come to rely on GET? Ok, it makes a useful "Would you like to resubmit this action?" popup when you click the back button. And it can be useful to prevent XSF attacks. But neither of these is really relevant to frictionless sharing. Really the only thing I can think of that may be problematic is the possibility that spammers might be able to use it for spam. But then again, I'm pretty sure I violate HTTP on a daily basis. Maybe I'm one of the bad guys.
Like most legal matter it's a bit more complex than that. As far as I know, you can be targeted by foreign laws with a .com domain, and servers physically in the US.

If you specifically target/advertize (e.g. with translated interfaces) your services to EU citizens, a judge might decide that EU laws apply to you.
The post shows clear bias and misunderstanding, especially in the post comparing it to Satanism.

If you had actually read the article you'd see it said it's NOT TRUE. That it's just pattern matching and no such thing is happening.

Second, it was comparing pro-Islam audio showing up in unexpected places just like people used to claim the same about Satanism. (eg play some music backwards and you hear pro-Satan lyrics) It was not comparing the two subjects or saying that Islam = Satanism.

Third, Satanism isn't what most people think. The Church of Satan, arguably the largest group of so-called Satanists, is actually atheistic. Its members don't believe in the supernatural, Christian or Islamic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Satan
Hey! You're right, it's using Flash as the transport at the moment.. Not for long though, in the coming days I'm going to switch it up to use Socket.IO which supports virtually all platform/browser combinations (including mobile). Thanks for giving it a spin though, would you be interested in giving it another shot later?
From what I understand, this is an entirely new permission and is part of the new "Add to Timeline" system. I don't work on that part of Facebook myself, but this is how it was described in the F8 introduction to the system.

See also ptarjan's comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034233
If they really wanted to encourage startups, they should allow 'employment at will' (like one can do in the US).

Theoretically, someone would be paid a little more for the risk that they could be fired at any time for no compensation. OTOH, small businesses would be able to hire 'frictionlessly', since the risk of each employee is dramatically reduced.

In fact, that's a major factor in stopping my business opening an office in the UK.
The way that Facebook termed this "Frictionless Sharing", along with the video game achievement image, was a marvelous piece of PR. Who doesn't like things to be easier, and who wouldn't object to their game achievements being automatically posted?

I predict it'll be a matter of weeks before people discover that they really do not want apps to transparently post all of their activities for the world (or even their 'friends') to see and there's a public outcry.
What type of safeguards? And are you saying Facebook messages are off limits from data mining?
There was an interesting (and entertaining) book written about the Cold Fusion Hype, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science:_The_Short_Life_and...

From Gary Taubes' (the author) website: Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion is book of science history by Gary Taubes about the early years (1989–1991) of the cold fusion controversy. It is not a scholarly work, but a popular retelling of the events, based on interviews with over 260 people. The book presents a timeline of the events, making the case that the cold fusion field has many examples of poorly-performed science. The actions of Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, and Steven E. Jones, the scientists who made the dramatic first claims of fusion, are described in rich detail. The book then shows the worldwide reaction and later disrepute of the cold fusion field, with Taubes placing himself in the side of "good science". Taubes says at the end that cold fusion had only demonstrated that research can continue even if the phenomena doesn't actually exist, as long as there is funding available. Taubes had previously written an article for Science in which he insinuates that the cold fusion work of A&M University was fraudulent.
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I'm right there with you. I can learn more from a good book and an online chat than I can from a conference. As a developer, I never expect to get work done as a result of attending a conference because I feel that they are strictly social events.
The conflict that's weirdest for me is that he internally conflates mindshare, educational reform, etc with him earning cash money. It's as if he believed there was a direct correlation between his rising income and teachers' decreasing entitlement.

And now that he hasn't earned any significant cash, he can claim that teachers/education have a warped sense of value... right.
nice summary of online marketing "fragmentation" by fred wilson. robads standard aims to unite ads and make them shareable and searchable; which is exactly against this fragmentation. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3022998
Founders of Foursquare, Quora, Dropbox & Airbnb Speak at MIT’s Startup Bootcamp
You're allowed to (and should) black out your photograph and your social security number, they don't need those for ID. Only your government, your employer and a list of government-sanctioned organisations can require social security numbers for ID purposes. the rules for photo ID are even more strict.

Additionally you should write in big letters over the scan "Request to access Facebook Data <date>", so that nobody else can use the scan of your ID-card for anything else.

The rest of the data, Facebook already knows (name, date of birth) or is useless (passport/ID document number).

Source: https://pim.bof.nl/gebruikers/geef-niet-meer-dan-nodig/ (Dutch)
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No worries - good luck!
That browsers work first. For example Google Chrome has issues with SVG leaving trailing images when you move an object.