skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter duplicates a lot of the wall/status part of Facebook, and you'll notice hardly anyone has a social media suite that copies Facebook statuses to Twitter, it's always the other way around.

Nobody really cares about Facebook games. The business pages are there for the users, and the users are there to share photos.

One of the most attractive things about the HN community is that people understand that the big business opportunities are connected to pre-existing human domains of activity transformed.

Facebook has taken the whole activity of bringing a carousel of slides over to your neighbour's house and showing them your trip to Peru and put it under one roof. That is a big deal.

On the other hand, just like Googlers always say, "the competition is only a click away". The strength and ease of use of Facebook also derives from digital photography. Any other website can take advantage of how much easier it is to share digital photos and the future competitor will likely enjoy a similar opportunity to scale up because the departure from Facebook will start as a trickle and grow slowly before tipping over in the same nightmare scenario that Mark Zuckerberg awakes from in a cold sweat every night.

His destiny is controlled by the 100,000,000 users in aggregate. While there's a great deal of inertia in that many people, you can't deny the flexibility of the Web.
>The stock market is all about the future, not the past. A lot of people see Microsoft's future as being less profitable than its past. That's why people belittle it.

Google's stock is worth less than what it was 4 years ago, it has also basically stagnated.

> but they make less money than they used to

No, they make more money in absolute terms than they used to. Their margins went down because they're investing more in mobile and tablets.
"On Verizon" This is an issue with the carriers. Buy this one if you want instant updates: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=galaxy_nexu...
The only reason I would buy facebook stock is to sell it to fools at a profit. Enron is a better long term investment.
I've got a Dell WP7 phone. Microsoft has a long B2B relationship with them.

I doubt they would jeopardize that for a Nokia exclusive. It's not really in Microsoft's DNA.
i guess the display business model doesnot work well. we have already seen the case with yahoo. but facebook is in better position with all that user data.
CLOS FSM with MOP Sauce
"I've said this repeatedly: Facebook is a high-risk proposition, particularly as an investment (disclaimer: I work for Google). "Intent" as other commenters have noted is a big part of the story but it's not the only story."

As a Google employee, what do you think of Google as an investment? If you look forward 5+ years, everyone is doing much of their internetting via their phone (certainly some or all of that will be web vs. apps-- who knows?). Google gains some extra data with searches, like location. So "pizza" searches get a LOT more targeted. But many searches do not.

The rub is that Google has near-zero ad inventory on mobile. You can't show 6 adwords ads, you can show 1. Additionally, consumer's bar for tapping an ad is MUCH higher (given the relative speeds of mobile browsing). As searching moves mobile, how does Google's revenue shake out?
Is the problem with GM's ads or FB's platform? Ie - What's Ford, Toyota or Hyundai doing with their ad spend on FB? We might be jumping to conclusions a little too quickly here.
I assure you that plenty of Facebook employee time was likely spent trying to optimize their campaigns. Ten million dollar clients don't learn; they're taught.
after I saw that it was posting to my facebook stream, I immediately deleted the posts and removed socialcam's permission to do so.

unfortunately most people who use it don't know how to do either. I should post a how-to for my fb friends :)
I had a few confused minutes the other day after noticing a persistent affiliate tag when browsing Amazon. Seemed to overwrite my having come through a friend's affiliate link (testing). Worried that it was malware until I realised it was the monetisation scheme of clea.nr (YouTube/Amazon simplifier which is otherwise fairly good).
That write-up contains a little too much hype for my tastes. And as soon as I saw the words Java and C++ I lost 95% of any curiousity I have about ragel.
Ballmer might be worst CEO
Look at recent US (and global) adoption rates of Windows Phone [1]. It's increasing, and with Nokia and their Lumia phones it is bound to continue. WP7 is a good OS, and more and more developers are backing it, and consumer satisfaction is excellent, and more and more people are starting to realize all this.

"Market research company Kantar WorldPanel has revealed in the last 12 weeks to mid-April Windows Phone has shown strong growth in the 7 major markets they monitor on the strength of Nokia’s offerings.

In 5 of the 7 markets (Germany, Britain, Italy, France and United States) Windows Phone market share is now in the 3-4% range, up from less than 2% in January 2012. In Germany Windows Phone market share more than doubled year on year to 6%.

In contrast RIM saw its US market share collapse to just 3% from 9% a year earlier, suggesting Windows Phone may have matched or even passed RIM’s market share in USA.

Kantar has predicted in January Windows Phone market share may hit 10% in Europe in the second half of 2012, and it seems to me with more Windows Phones being announced all the time that this may very well be achievable."

[1] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WmPowerUser/~3/Uofacrd8iKQ/
Not that this means anything but back in 2009 I implemented this behavior on a VERY big project for Cisco. It's the only time I've done that.

It's useful in that when you get a login error you can unmask your password and easily correct a typo instead of re-keying the entire password.
back up 200 years and replace coding with reading...
Referring to [1]: So, if I would try to sell libraries targeted at avionics there is no way for me to get certification for that specific library? Is there a way to guarantee "certifiability"?

Sorry for the late reply.
Show HN: YouTube Audio Player
Infographic: Surprise! Congress Has Almost No Independent Thinkers
"Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight."

This doesn't actually follow logically. I know Mr Chow is implying that there's a lot of data that this interview obviously doesn't present, but there are serious problems with this thesis on the face of it. For one thing, if obesity correlates directly with the availability of food, then the most obese people ought to be those to whom food is most available. But the rich in our society are proportionally not as obese as those who face periodic food shortages; and low-income children are proportionally shown to be at much higher risk of suffering from obesity. [1]

Not only that, but the statement that food production has simply gone up and therefore food prices have simply gone down is incredibly... simplistic. There have been arguments for years [2] about what food prices have gone down or up and how that may or may not have affected obesity.

I want to believe that there's data behind this fellow's claims, but I can't help but feel as though, no matter what the data is, summarizing it in the way he does is deceptive.

[1] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?volume=303&issu...

[2] For example, http://www.good.is/post/the-inconvenient-truth-about-cheap-f...
I think it is quite obvious that Facebook has already succeeded; the only thing to be decided is to what degree.

> Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not very efficient at producing revenues.

Agreed. I would differentiate FB ads from your normal banners however, due to the against-the-wall approach of most banner buys (from larger advertisers) and the much more target - and interactive - approach of FB ads.

> Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it.

Very true, but this also brings a problem. There is much more money in creating demand vs. harvesting demand. In addition, by capturing users earlier in their decision process, an advertiser often cuts out later stages that may sap overall profit margin.

I think that we really should not be comparing Paid Search at all with Facebook Ads - the two really are completely different. What we should compare is businesses like Yahoo! Display and AOL's Advertising.com - those are the ones running scared from this.
Can you link to some screenshots with examples of ads in the newsfeed that someone like my mother would confuse as being from a friend or family member?

I'm inclined to agree with davvid on his point about how personality isn't a distinguishing factor between Google Ads and Google Search Results.

On top of that, intent is was drives the conversion. Even if my mom were to inadvertently click on an ad in her newsfeed thinking it was from a family member, the content of the page she was redirected to would definitely let her know she had made a mistake and that the status update definitely wasn't from a friend or family member.
Interesting. Thanks.

Seems like there is pretty good support now from AdaCore.

The main thrust of this appears to be that "fresh college graduates are not putting Ada on their resumes."

I suppose these guys from Lockheed know what they're talking about... but to me, the idea that you pick a language based on whether it's being taught in universities is just asinine. If your engineers are not smart enough to learn a new language, they're not smart enough to go near any kind of software that has anything to do with an airplane.

Even more troubling, this suggests that engineers are treated as "cogs" that can't be re-trained and just become obsolete as soon as the "main language they learned in school" (the top places don't focus down on one language too much IMO) becomes obsolete.
Pretty sweet, if you like cereal haha. What language did he use? I'm trying to learn to code too, and not sure what to focus on.
Winning the Social Gambling War
Hey, it's Jim! I've been to one of his classes - it's provocative stuff, really changed the way I think about development -- although most of my takeaways were about project management rather than about testing style.

There's a whole little community of really bright thinkers about Agile process in the Pacific Northwest - Jim Shore, Arlo Belshee, Ward Cunningham, Diana Larsen - who, mostly, seem to mostly talk face-to-face rather than posting things online, so the HN crowd may not be getting the benefits of what they come up with. I'd love to see that change.

(Here's a beer, Jim.)
Their first smart phone was windows mobile 2003. They been at it 9 years, 1 reboot and 2% market share. (longer if you count their pda days).

it's pretty much a failure.
People get arrested for shoplifting. So they spend at least a couple of hours in police cells while they're getting booked.

People get fined for shoplifting. Sometimes they don't pay the fines. They go to prison for not paying fines.
I've heard that too. Would you mind sharing more details of what you did to promote gut health/chemistry/flora?
Please decide if you're a producer or a consumer.
Perhaps not, but it seems that Dell isn't really interested in making any more anyway:

http://www.wpcentral.com/no-new-dell-windows-phone-75-device...

MS may have had to persuade Dell to make a phone, not the other way around.
Which is somewhat tangential to the original point. Hard-ball tactics might _succeed_ because fb ads don't work.
BitTorrent moves the bandwidth load towards the street-level networking gear, which is expensive to upgrade because there's lots of it. The copyright lobbies just give them a convenient excuse for getting rid of the problem.
I can't believe this comment is being upvoted. Do you somehow feel it's wrong that Wikipedia asks for donations?
Oracle makes 11th-hour proposal to keep big payday hopes alive
What is your programmer salary?
I know this is a very sensitive topic and please feel free to anonimize or give a reasonable range.

Me: Sr. software engineer with 8 yrs of experience and masters in computer science.

Where: Big public software company (you probably heard of) making consumer products. Location: valley.

How much:150K salary + 5-15% bonus depending on performance

I understand sites like Glassdoor has lots of data, but curious how the Hacker news people are doing.
Oh wow, a blank white screen. Took me a while to figure out what's going on, but I disabled Javascript for google.com (makes their search result pages so much less annoying).

Guess they forgot to put a "please enable JS to view this" message in.

But it looks nice! I haven't watched it entirely yet, though.
Ask HN: Review my business idea/model
I got rejected by my college’s summer incubator program and I have a chip on my shoulder to succeed this summer. If I can prove a viable minimum product by mid-summer I’ll be allowed to join and I was hoping the intelligent people on HN could throw me their two cents.

I was playing around with the idea of creating a “Netflix for purses” startup. Basically buying mass quantities of designer bags and having a subscription service for women who couldn’t originally afford these bags. It turns out this idea has already been implemented, which isn’t a huge issue but I couldn’t determine how to differentiate myself from the competition (thus me not being accepted into the program).

Then last week I was in NYC in the East Village and I went into a store called Buffalo Exchange. It’s a consignment shop with “mildly used” designer clothing brands for extremely cheap prices. Basically people sell clothing to Buffalo Exchange they bought from retail stores and never really wore. The company filters what they buy on what they believe are fashionable and reputable brands (you won’t find vintage clothing like in a typical consignment shop). Then Buffalo Exchange marks it up and puts it on the rack. The store was absolutely packed and I went home and found that they had zero online presence. I found that at one point they had an ebay account that’s no longer active.

I feel like taking a similar business model and putting it online would be a successful startup. The majority of online consignment shops are vintage which is the opposite of direction I would be going in. My largest setback is automation. I would have to handle all of the buying/packaging/selling in the beginning. And if this were to scale it would rely heavily on human resources which is sometimes risky for a startup. Furthermore, I’m not trying to create an ebay store selling used clothing which I really hope this doesn’t become. I’m trying to build a brand as the online Buffalo Exchange.

I realize this idea has little to do with programming other than setting up an online store presence. But I find the people at HN to be some of the most intelligent entrepreneurs I’ve conversed with online and this is the place I’d like to get some advice from.
What do you think?
Domain Verificaton for the Amazon Simple Email Service
I don't think Facebook or Wikipedia engineers would choose PHP right now if they could choose. Maybe the same with MySQL but less sure.
wtf guys obviously if you didn't drink a lot of this stuff before then losing it will have a correspondingly small effect.

Calories in calories out.
I didn't notice it before I saw your comment; I then tried it, and as a result, gave the "kudo" by accident too. This is a great example of beauty/fanciness != good user experience. There's no way to "unkudo" either, sigh..
“I’m just like a little kid. I get bored easily and computers excite me..."
白俄罗斯明斯克
CSS-Only Clickjacking
Disregarding the incredible business opportunities that are available to Facebook (Credits, taxing Connect more broadly, targeted offers based on very detailed demographic profiles), the fact of the matter is that Facebook may be able to one day identify purchasing intent not only before Google, but before the user themselves identifies that intent.

If Facebook knows that you recently got married, and that you just surfed over to a baby website (equipped with the "Like" button), you might be intending to have a child, even if you're not yet pregnant. They can start selling you a daily-deal on diapers before a kid exists to soil them.
Really short version: I worked on correcting the extreme acidity my genetic disorder promotes and I consumed a combo of high brine sea salt, coconut oil, glyconutrients and organic yogurt. I did a lot more than that but that is a good place to start, assuming you are hoping to act on the info. Organic yogurt has more varieties of flora than other yogurts and coconut oil does good things for gut flora.
I think the real answer is it doesn't really matter. Especially for those of us with adblock.
this is amazing! I m all of a sudden craving cocoa puffs.
That's fine in theory, but you have to find a reasonable deal, find a shop to purchase it in, familiarize yourself with how to charge it up, and all in the time you spend in that country. I've found it burns at least half a day - usually not worth it. Most of my leisure travelling is motorbike touring, and I may spend each night in a different country, or cross borders several times a day (mountains with interesting roads are frequently on borders).

If my travel was simpler, sure, it's somewhat workable, and I do have e.g. a German SIM. But it's usually better to just rely on hotel wifi, cached maps on phones, offline GPS on bikes, etc.
New social networking website to help people communicate better
Myspills is a place where users can share their opinion with each other freely without having to fear about their privacy. All they need is an account to login and they are set to share comments and opinion with their friends.

Let me know what you think about the site.
Can you give us a realistic game plan that starts with the iPhone launch & WinMo6 and ends better? After iPhone excellent execution gets you failure, that's just the current state of the market.

They've made awesome deals with companies like HTC, even convincing HTC to pay them $15 for every Android phone they sell, etc.

They've pretty much got Nokia on lockdown almost exclusively WinPhone7.
They executed well on the XBox and didn't need to reboot.

They misstepped with WinMo. Then they rebooted. Start your count over again.
You should avoid the whole gender/sex angle and just make some comment about extreme nerdiness.

"I'm a total a nerd and have been all my life I've been on HN for over 2yrs and I can honestly say there's nowhere else on the entire internet where people make comments that even come close to how nerdy yours does!"

That being said it still isn't that funny and it doesn't really add anything to the conversation, but likely wouldn't have offended anyone either.

EDIT: forget to mention kudos for apologizing and not whining about downvotes like most people seem to now.
I think the more relevant data point is that they spend $30 million on their Facebook presence. Facebook appears to have reinvented the AOL keyword.
I use Python at work because I have to, I would really rather not.
Apple patches Siri, no longer says Lumia 900 is 'best smartphone ever'
Target already beat them to that model:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

More seriously, what you say may be true, but that's a stretched definition of "purchasing intent". Google wins here not because they happen to get eyeballs of surfers interested in diapers, but because people actually use Google to find places to buy diapers. That's a tough nut to crack, and the point of the linked article. More generally: facebook has "eyeballs" and page views, but search providers have the people with their wallets already out.
Everyone is referring to WP7, since they effectively 're-entered'.
Thanks. I saw that button after scaling the page down a couple of steps. Really amazing stuff.
If you consider the Windows Phone line to be merely the next iteration of Windows Mobile, then, yes, thus far it has been a complete failure.

But I don't think that's a very holistic viewpoint. Despite how terrible Windows Mobile was, it had a good hold of the market until the iPhone came along. It wasn't really a "failure" until it started declining in 2008. Microsoft's response, Windows Phone 7, was a complete reboot of their mobile line, and we have yet to see how it will perform in the long run.
Maybe the problem is with GM and their cars and not Facebook
European Parliament member brings 8 year old daughter to work
Redis-faina: a query analysis tool for Redis
It's definitely cool and if it makes employees happy then it's definitely worth the investment.

I have a personal bias to get over which is that I only believe in investing in energy solutions that can solve large percentages of the energy gap for everyone and not just the ones able to spend the money or work the incentives system.
Good points, but I think this one is inaccurate:

"Microsoft makes a ton of money, no one will deny that, but they make less money than they used to."

Actually they make a lot more money now than since Ballmer took over as CEO.
In the typical case most radio stations acquire the music they play for no cost.

What now?
Yup, the fault lies entirely with the carriers. Also in Australia, bought my GNex from Optus in December, shipped with 4.0.1, bumped to 4.0.2 a month or two later, nothing since.
I endorse the subheading on the linked article, if not the entire thing.
Here's my take: C is a precise language, in a certain sense, whereas English is not. If I can successfully communicate information to another person using C, that person can put a lot of trust in their understanding of my idea. Precise languages are very useful, and everyone should learn that they exist, if nothing else.
You should probably include benefits then as salary doesn't mean much when you have tons of stock options.
Is the big sticking point about using the word "stealing" is that piracy does not involve a physical item being removed from the owner? If so then maybe we're talking more along the lines of "theft of services"[1]. Theft and stealing are often used interchangeably but I believe they do have subtle differences in their definitions. However, we do not have as many different forms of the word "theft" as we do for "stealing". It does become a bit more awkward to work the word theft into some sentences. Rather than saying "I committed theft of three albums", it is easier and (in this context) nearly as accurate to say "I stole three albums".

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services
Wow, sweet design... simple and no-fluff, but not too bare
> Quite a bit of malware runs with user "consent", and purports to provide some value to the user.

You're right, but merely injecting ads on a page doesn't malware make. Period.
I don't remember anybody panning it. I'm probably an outlier[1], but do remember a friend of mine going from broke to making a good living off it through affiliate marketing within 3 months.

[1]Early on he quickly became one of Google's biggest customers, even working alone. He was invited to the first Google Zeitgest. These days he spends in the multiple tens of millions per year on Google.
If something new comes along that is worthy of competing with Facebook, I would imagine that it would be fairly trivial for them to have an "Import Your Photos from Facebook!" button that you'd click to simply move all of that data over.