skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We normally would wait to ... we believe we have the best possible chance ... We rallied together ... we wanted to let our supporters know ... We want to thank you all ... we were able to come together ... we can work to make it a reality.

Who is this "we"? Is it just you, Chris?
Growing to a billion users is harder than you think. There were many other social networks, including ones started at other top schools, but only one survived, and it was because they understood what makes a site like fb work.
Mobile apps in 2011 vs 2012
I define happiness in the very short term, kind of like Steve Jobs: do I want to get out of bed this morning and do the work on my plate?

Sometimes the answer is no, but most days it's yes. As long as I average more yeses than noes, I don't think about it much. It's when the noes pile up for more than a month that I think about making a change.
yes, except we're our own extraterrestrials.

(feedback loops in markets are nothing short of amazing - nowhere else can you make something a reality to such a degree by just pretending it's real)
MongoEngine Flask Extension
Can You Please Add A World IPv6 Launch Badge To Your Blog Or Website?
I found nginx more pleasant to set up.
Actually Godel's proof is important to CS, it's an analogue of Turing's Proof concerning undecidable problems.
… as the author observed:

> (Another principle that Objectivist-C software engineers have little use for is Don’t Repeat Yourself.)

(or perhaps you were merely adhering to the DDRY principle yourself?).
These are considered the core items, for better or for worse. I worked with ARC to pare it down into a manageable, realistic list. You'll notice that bottled water (ideally 1 gal/person/day) isn't on there either -- doesn't mean that you don't need it, but they don't consider it a quick "go-bag" item.
My image of you is now a cranky old man who never learned how to have fun.

I assume you're similarly annoyed by any Rube Goldberg machine?
I find it extraordinarily unlikely because of the Amish's lifestyle.

The Amish do not eschew technology because they think it is evil. They have, actually, adopted some modern technology in their communities with restricted access. They eschew technology because they rationally recognize that adopting it will significantly change their lifestyle.

The kind of population increases you're talking about would require them to have cities - they would need communities with greater density. Individuals would also have to start specializing in much the same way modern cities do. That's the sort of thing they do not want.

Something would have to give. If such an expansion of their population happened, they would not be recognizably "Amish" anymore.
If it is just him, you may call this an old habit of an enterprise past.
That's not an appeal to authority. It's a link to information. If you manage to find any contradicting studies, please do post them here. That said, his data seems pretty solid, unless he's flat out lying (unlikely). Keep an open mind!
$200k on a car and $7M on a house is all fine and dandy, but man, the $1.2k jeans is just way over the top. It's like you can get a perfectly serviceable equivalent for a quarter of the price.
Yes, but is it $100 billion's worth of hard work? I guess that's what the market gets to decide.

Edit: also half the problem is caused by assuming 1 billion users translates to anything meaningful. Apart from being an impressive number in its own right, what exactly does it mean? Facebook is free to use and helps satisfy basic human social desires in a digital way. Great but would they have 1 billion users if it wasn't free? No.

If I could distribute beer for free and and offered every male on the planet over the age of 18 a free keg, I'd probably have a billion takers.
Personally I don't wish Facebook any ill will. I think they've built a hell of a company.

That being said there seems to be quiet a bit of hubris around it as a company, much of which is likely not their fault and more based on the media attention which surrounds them. The 100B valuation (and all the previous funding round valuations) is a reflection on this. I think this is the first time where Facebook has to prove their value on an open market and all of us who have wondered what we're missing on those monster rounds get to see if we were right (or wrong) - and a lot of us like to be right....

Its a real interesting case study.
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I have fond memories of Mandrake, because that's the distribution that made me discover linux. But Ubuntu ate their lunch a long time ago. Not sure what went wrong for them, except that Ubuntu has much more traction.
Facebook was very dodgy from the start. And this IPO is the complete opposite of Google's. The unfairness and overhyping with every possible venue is ridiculous.

The outcome of this trend of "evil" IPOs will likely splatter the rest of our community for outsiders, like it happened in the dotcom bubble. Healthy and ethical startups will have trouble getting reasonably sized funds.

You should read about the Greenshoe trick, the tiny amount of shares on the market (~450m vs 2bn) and the trick Zuckerberg is placing on investors. No wonder it's back to 38 right now (and not lower because of underwriters holding the price there). You can only fool people for so long.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/caf4b0a4-a067-11e1-88e6-00144feabd... (registration walled article, but it's free)

The "evil" tech IPOs: Groupon, Zynga and Facebook. I hope they go away quickly so our industry can get past them.

Reckoning day:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN -8% today

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA -15% today

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB +0.1% today
That's in ActiveRecord 4.0 as well!

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/4775

Take a look at @tenderlove's comment down below about the actual implementation (as opposed to my crappy one in the issue body).
Wouldn't you think of this as slightly contrary to the purpose of backing a Kickstarter project?

What I mean is, say the project had been set at 300k and python was one of the base supported languages. That would actually be no different than it is now, except that now the software itself is already guaranteed(1).

Also, the python inclusion is certainly on the roadmap if it's mentioned before the project has been funded, right? So if you back it, then you're still probably backing a(n eventually) python-speaking platform.

1 - [Edit]: Well, "guaranteed", no. Funded, yes.
Well, except that unlike using Flickr for photos, AIM for chat, and MySpace to connect, using Facebook puts all your eggs in a single basket. As others have pointed out, that is likely the source of much of the disdain for FB 'round these parts.
These kinds of details are important though. I've been in a few work environments that were pleasant if you looked at the big picture, but unpleasant once you started adding up all the little details.
Insufficient sustainable power output.
You're welcome.

Thank you for the nice words.
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Knuth - Structured  Programming  with  go  to  Statements
Google was just an iteration over other search engines.
Much like classic 'porn' reinforced a view of women as sexual objects, tech porn reinforces the myth that "just try harder and you'll be a billionaire!".

Damnit, Kimsal, quit dashing my dreams!!! Take your cold, hard reality and pitch it somebody who wants it... I prefer living in a world where I can be a billionaire someday.

As I've said numerous times.. I'd make a great billionaire playboy; if only I had a billion dollars. :-)
Tell them the truth about chip production and that meeting could become a hysterical stampede. There is no transistor or chip or motherboard in the world that was not in touch with gelatin made of pig meat. And they are exclusively produced in countries where pigs are a symbol of luck and wealth.
Sending Universities Down the Path of the Newspaper Industry
composed_of is the "other half" of what I want. I don't want to use custom ruby classes, I want to use custom Postgresql types.

Turns out support for that's in 4.0 too!

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/4775
Facebook IPO is not the endgame
I know that I just can't compete. So I focus on working.

$1B? I can't even fathom that much money.
Is Now the Time to Hire MBAs?
Proportional to the sight-line distance to the closest mountains ;)
Do you think that maybe, just maybe, Zuckerberg might have contributed in some way? I don't know, maybe he took a good concept at a good time and executed it so well that it's now worth $100B?

FFS, give the man (and the rest of his now giant team) some credit. $100B doesn't just happen.
I know how that feels. Last year when I was a single founder, I went to a startup-founder "health" event at 500 Startups, and one of the speakers (ex-Zynga corp dev guy, Bret) gave a talk. Since he's the one acquiring companies, he mentioned how sometimes founders made money still found a way to be unhappy. Going from $0 to $10M is huuuuuge, but after a short while they're depressed that it isn't $100M.

It sounded like he has went through a lot himself, and he recommended the audience a book, which I bought, read, re-read, and still read a few pages a day today - and it really helps. Don't let the cover fool you, this has nothing to do with preaching about religion (I remain agnostic). I can't recommend it enough: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062512943?ie=UTF8&tag=...
"cynicism"

Because it's a boatload of money. Over twice the value of HP and almost half the value of Walmart. Slightly higher market cap than Amazon. It's absurd.

I think there is plenty of reason for cynicism. And I didn't know that HN readers were supposed to all be cut from the same bolt of cloth.
So your basic issue is that in your judgement the founders and employees don't deserve their level of success?

Which internet company does, in your judgement?
I find it amusing that you assume those are the only two options. I joined HN 1701 days ago, but I already had a dim view of FB's management due to several actions taken by the company as well as some of their internal policies.
It's just a popular sweet-nothing people have grown fond of parroting whenever memristors come up. It is impossible to really refute, because it speculates about the possibility of an architecture we haven't yet imagined. That plus how cool "brand new architectures, completely new ways of computing!" sounds to the layman, means you hear it every time the word "memristor" hits the headlines.

The joke, of course, is that (if memory serves) modern computers actually use the Harvard architecture- not Von Neumann.
Hooking Windows printer activity using the Deviare Interception Engine
Presumably the pilot must be pedalling pretty hard to get this thing in the air, so they're not going to be able to keep that up forever.
DOH! My mistake! Thanks for the catch.
I'd love to share the quote that I see, but don't know how. It'd be great if the quotes had associated permalinks.
I think ryancarson.com is down or incorrectly configured.

In case, you want to read it.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aryanl...
Chris Granger (@ibdknox) will be doing a talk in September at the Strange Loop conference - https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/behind-the-mirror.
The problem is that custom pg types are represented as strings in ActiveRecord < 4.0.

In AR 4.0, you can have ActiveRecord automatically cast them to a different type.
With memristors it is not even remotely "far out". First, we can substantially modify the von neumann architecture by dramatically improving the capabilities of reconfigurable FPGA type devices, allowing them to run at the speeds of custom ASICs and reconfigure with a delay of only a few clock ticks. That alone is pretty astounding. Second, memristors could be used directly as logic and memory, making it possible to programatically transform blocks of memory into circuitry and back to memory, which would have implications beyond our current reckoning. And all of this is possible in the near-term within the next few decades.
On the day of Facebook's IPO, I don't think that anyone was worried about getting press coverage.
LOL, I honestly don't know whether to say this is radically cool, or amazingly disturbing, or both. It's, erm, interesting to say the least.

I really hope pg comments on this, I'd like to know how he feels about being deified or whatever, like this.
Functionality is a bit lacking, but this site is certainly not lacking in its strangeness.
Show HN: HTML5 Piano - with its own data URI synth
Show HN: Brainly. App I hacked while you watched the Facebook IPO
This is a little tool I made for myself. Had been meaning to write it for a while, but never had the chance.<p>Decided to do it while I followed the Facebook IPO.
It was way more fun than seeing people make millions...<p>About it:<p>PHP
Bootstrap<p>It is quite slow, because it goes over a 150,000+ word dictionary three times before the html is generated.<p>But, in my defense, I just run it on my XAMPP install and is pretty snappy.<p>So hey, check it out. I have my flame suit on already.

clicky: http://brainly.innovafy.com
Excellent point. Any pop after an IPO is money the company should have raised if it had priced better (or in many cases, if it had been able to price better). The child comment about Facebook having MS by the short hairs is also valid - I wonder if Facebook did the price engineering here so the institutional investors didn't take their money?
At first glance, my reaction was also, "No way, not happening."

But, I know some Amish and former-Amish personally and can attest that they think it is part of their Christian duty to "be fruitful and multiply." I also know that they are busy establishing new colonies in unconventional locations like Alaska. Additionally, they are branching into non-agrarian businesses like construction and furniture in order to support their large families.

With the population of the USA mostly moving to urban areas, the prices of farmland and rural real estate has been dropping. In some regions, the Amish are already scooping that up.

What I wonder is if the Amish will continue to let us "English" develop whatever technologies that we want or if they will impose restrictive regulations.

It could be very strange if Kurzweil's Singularity comes in 2050, but a large chunk of the population is living as if it were 1850 and just ignores the Singularity.
This is a question I have about SpaceX. How much of their low development and launch costs depend on having large numbers of people willing to sacrifice compensation to work for such a transformative company?

I don't know anything solid about this, but I would very much like to know.
There's a magnitude improvement from Altavista to Google. Not so with Facebook over an alternative.
Beautiful bondage
"this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee."

Non sequitur.
Antique Coin Jewelry — 3 Reasons Why You Need to Buy Some
Most of the jewelry out there is pretty, but it’s typically not a conversation piece. But when you’re wearing antique coin jewelry, you’ve got an instant conversation-starter! That’s because these pieces are all historical artifacts.
Awesome. Although I don't understand why you load each data URI thrice?
You're right and I should have said that. Of course I give him some credit. However, I wouldn't necessarily give him as much credit as he gets (and to be fair to him, I doubt he seeks the crazy accolades either).

Frankly, it almost goes without saying that if you and your team put together a system that handles a billion users, you deserve some credit. The question is simply: how much?
app developers looking for social proof/reviews
Can anyone comment on what happened to this link?
I'm sorry for the disappointment! Though, now I too would like to read a blog post on Bootstrapping (statistics) related somehow to tech startups...
I would concur. I've found it easier to write an nginx config than an Apache one.

It's not ideal for basic PHP dev, what with the lack of .htaccess equivalent, but other than that, I definitely prefer it.
Subpixel anti-aliasing, both cleartype on windows and the implementation on linux, have always looked very rainbow-ish to me. It might look smoother to some, but the colours are way too distracting and the first thing I do on a new OS is set fonts to NOT use rainbow-style anti-aliasing.
I'm curious to see how it works for types with multiple elements (composite types).
You might try touching base with Steve Kondik (@cyanogen; of Cyanogenmod fame) who now works for Samsung. You might briefly explain your project and see if he can get you in touch with the right person at Samsung/Google.
using less compact data structures often leads to less complex code

Well, there's also plenty of times where a more compact data structure can lead to less complex code.
Amazing.. Are there other examples of where on IPO, especially as hyped as this, companies went flat, less than 0.1% change.

NOTE: IPO had 480 million or so stocks, and the net Volume was 486 million.
Facebook underwriters to split about $176 million in IPO fees
From the article:

> He currently has Java and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) versions and is planning a JavaScript version.

Does the author have any (basic) knowledge on the field he is writing about?
Bootstrapping isn't a new idea. Or way out there.

It's how small businesses around the world have, and continue to start their businesses.

Web startups, ironically are one of the fields that enable bootstrapping a lot more with the low overheads, and how much one or two people, or a small team can get done.
More stupidity in the world is the price we will pay for a billion people watching each other...
Facebook's Hacker Heaven: What the company's office looks like
Codecademy horror? 40 years of research into computer learning ignored
I dunno, I think he deserves a massive amount of credit. The guy was 18 when this thing started, and he was competing against 800lb gorillas (myspace etc).

The other thing to note is that everything has gone right for Facebook. I don't believe that would have happened if their execution wasn't so fantastic. Major major props are due to Zuckerberg and the entire early team (and I find this hard to disagree with, regardless of whether one thinks it's worth $100B or not)
5 Reasons Why Apple’s CSR Strategy Doesn’t Work
Frankly, I struggle to see how virtually any internet company warrants a valuation north of $100 billion dollars. Especially those with a P/E ratio approaching or beyond 100.

$100,000,000,000 is a VERY big number. It feels almost absurd (to me at least) that a single company can create that much "value" in less than 8 years. But maybe I'm the one with the problem and I just can't get my head around "web scale" economics.
I'm sure they're suing Facebook because that's where the cash is, but shouldn't they be suing every other website that's doing something similar as well, world wide...?
Facebook - yes, but calling Google "dumb luck"?

I mean - the only difference between FB and many other social networks is that everybody happened to be on FB. Of course it takes enormous amount of skill to operate on this scale, but if all those people weren't on FB, they would be on one of those other social networks doing more or less the same thing.

But Google is different. I mean - do you even remember how people used internet before Google? Google was not just "marginally better, more popular AltaVista", it dramatically changed the way we do things online. And then it did it again with GMail. Not to forget Android (though it's not in the same league as search & email). Anyway, Google had a good deal of luck and good timing, but it was by no way "dumb".
If you want to establish that women are being treated with kid gloves in our industry, the burden of proof is on you. If you want me to dig up the four or five high-profile examples of sexism in technology from the last couple months I can certainly supply that, but your ugly claims are the ones which require proof, not mine.
This is the perfect language for the libertarian operating system I am developing. Well, it's not really a traditional operating system since it eschews coercive central controls in favor of giving each rational actor the maximum amount of freedom.

For instance, there will be no virtual memory since that would be akin to fiat money. Ever wonder why the memory footprint of your programs gets larger every year? It's because we abandoned the freedom of direct memory access in favor of fiat systems of paging and garbage collection.

Programs would be much faster and more capable if they weren't constantly being oppressed by centrally imposed costs associated with asking the kernel to do everything for you. Who decided that ivory tower fatcats like Linus Torvalds should make all my decision for me?

The CI system will also require that everyone read all the source code before they can make any commits. That way new code will introduce fewer unintended consequences.

Yeah, it's hard to sustain these metaphors for too long...
Co founder of face book // Current TV
An iteration with huge improvement. Would you say if Google wouldn't have happened, we would be fine searching on Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos? And webmail would be fine and dandy with Yahoo Mail and Hotmail if there was no Gmail?
Iran meteorological organization is hacked down
all the iran meteorological organization is down!
read here
http://hackmageddon.com/2012/05/17/a-new-beginning-for-the-middle-east-cyberwar/

or check it yourself ...1500 compuers and emails accounts were deleted !
the irimo.ir -and his sub servers is dead!!
yourikan
This is like asking if it's time to start taking heroin. Not a perfect analogy since that is reported to feel good the first time around.
Samsung Focus 2, LTE powered Windows Phone
Circular logic at its finest.
So you can hit a note again when it's already playing. I cycle through which copy gets played each time you hit a specific key. Otherwise terrible stuff happens :'(
You can search for automatically created analog curcuits here: http://www.genetic-programming.com/humancompetitive.html

There are also examples and explanations in John Koza's "Genetic Programming" series of books.
> The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished.

The top voted comment actually is an excerpt from a book by a man that I respect a whole lot more than I respect Mark Zuckerberg. For one he seemed a genuinely nice and modest human being. He also influenced the lives of countless people by being creative rather than by selling off their private details to the highest bidder. I really like that top voted comment, instead of gushing admiration for a pile of virtual money it causes you to reflect and think.

Making a lot of money does not automatically equate accomplishment.

Contrast this with the SpaceX announcement on the homepage at the moment. If Elon Musk succeeds, which I certainly hope for then that will be an accomplishment. Even if SpaceX fails it will still be a huge and daring move. Compared to giving humanity a new window on access to space photo sharing seems a little underwhelming.

If you can't understand anyone who actually wishes them ill then please consider that we do not all have the same goals and we do not all have the same vision of what the internet could be like. As a creator, as an business person and a hacker I would happily see facebook replaced by a company or an entity that gave us 80% of the functionality with our joint privacy in tact. That would be progress.

Facebook is just AOL re-invented for the new millenium.
DDG now searches HN for stories and comments
Why Plastic Logic failed — despite the e-book boom