As I understand it, that's their ISP cutting off the tidal wave of traffic at the network edge to prevent it disrupting the core, like they do in the event of a DDOS.
I think we can all agree that Zuckerburg is indeed a Hacker (in the HN context). He's been hacking since he was a kid, and he built facebook (duh). When he was at StartUp School a few years back - he was clearly in his element.
If we are bashing fb for using personal info to sell ads - the same principal basically applies to any major social site in the world.
Hate him or love him - fb has been a huge boon for the everyday people, tech startups, and hackers; and along the way has made Zuck and many others massively wealthy. Don't hate.
For me, P vs NP is a very clever bit of theory, and proofs of NP-completeness are actually kind of fun, but the more interesting question that it skirts is this: How do we talk about the speed of different algorithms? That's a much bigger topic, but usually a lot more relevant. If you're someone with code who's in a hurry, you benchmark as realistically as you can manage and hope you didn't flub the implementation. If you're Donald Knuth, you define a simplified but somewhat realistic processor model and derive expressions for how much time your algorithm takes, and there's your answer. This is nice, but a lot of work, and it becomes positively nightmarish if you want accuracy on modern processors. If you're an Intro to Algorithms class, you look at the asymptotic complexity -- mergesort is O(n lg n), the (NP-complete) 3SAT problem is O(2^(n^k)) for some constant k, and so on. This gives good intuition a lot of the time, but not always. Insertion sort typically beats mergesort for small n, there are a lot of 3SAT problems that can be solved very easily, caches are all the time doing crazy stuff, and in general the world is complicated. We're interested in getting computers to solve problems in a reasonable amount of time; what are we to do?
I know this isn't exactly an answer to your question, but I really wish that people had said more about this in college, and I wanted to talk about it.
This is happening. I personally know of 3 Kickstarter -> VC-backed startups, and I'm sure it's more widespread than that.
Kickstarter serves projects that are on a continuum from "pure" art (uncommercializable) to pre-sales (already commercial), so a transition to a full-fledged commercial endeavor makes a lot of sense for many many projects.
There will still be a lot of amazing Olympic amateur projects, I hope/expect!
Did you go to a university with a business school? There's no crossover. One's an undergraduate college and the other's a postgraduate college. Absolutely nothing in common.
>"So a lot of Zynga shareholders were merely holding Zynga as a proxy for Facebook. Once Facebook was offered all those people decided to sell Zynga to buy Facebook. And Zynga tanked accordingly"
If people were holding ZNGA as a proxy for FB, with the intention to dump the shares for FB when it went public, then these people should have known that others would be doing the same. Thus, they should have started earlier. I think this theory explains the flash crash, but not the bigger picture.
>" The reason Facebook went down is the usual immediate post IPO sell-off when a bunch of people that got into the IPO sell their shares immediately to make some quick profit."
A stock transaction is a two-way street. There is a buyer on the other end of the deal, you don't sell shares into a vacuum. So, selling the shares doesn't drive down price, lack of demand does.
Trading "glitch", or engineered opportunity? Any smart person can make a small fortune off of a delta. As I always say, if there is a way to make money, somebody, somewhere, is going to figure out how to do it.
Lucene is the one-stop solution for what you want, but it does require some setup on your end. If that's overblown, what you should compare would be either Levenshtein distance or something like Metaphone or a stemming algorithm. All have implementations in many languages, and are easily integrated into whatever you're doing.
To further support my theory, I note that LinkedIn also fell today by 5.6%. This was not a fall as steep as that of Zynga, but of LinkedIn is not as closely intertwined with facebook as Zynga.
You mean like Austin, Seattle, Boulder, Huntsville, D.C., and so forth, just to rattle a few off the tip of my finger? The Bay Area is already not the center of the tech universe, contrary to what the HN Opinion Amplifier might lead you to think.
It'd have to be a very strong shell to actually give you buoyancy above simply not having anything. Carbon fibre is strong in tension, while a material which can support a vacuum must be strong in compression. The weight of any shell is going to be much greater than the buoyancy you'd gain.
It does change things when you know the people personally in terms of what you might say about the company they work for.
But what the "HN mob" is evaluating is what Facebook is actually doing, not each and every employee of the company as a person.
Ultimately, it's more important what Facebook's users think of the company, and what hackers who understand the technology that Facebook uses think of what they are doing, not what Facebook's business partners think of Facebook's employees and managment.
"While it is possible to hide or obfuscate calls to APIs that are not included in the SDK, this is still a violation of customer expectations and Store policy."
Wait, does the platform not include a sandbox to make sure this doesn't happen? What "security" can you expect to get out of such a platform?
Markets usually sell off on the last day of the week before heading into the weekend; i.e. traders don't (usually) like holding positions for two days more than they have to.
I think it's important to factor this into any discussion of Facebook's trading debut.
I personally would be waiting to see who things fair next week/monday.
[addendum] I'm quite surprised the IPO was set for a Friday because of this.
I don't know why Gruber switched networks any more than the rest of you guys.
But for crying out loud, this is ridiculous. The Kremlinology going on here is batshit insane! It's like reading the National Enquirer, only with less real information!
Hell, it could be nothing more than Dan & John's schedules no longer syncing up.
Alias does not change the root dir, according to Nginx documentation. This was what made us believe that through eventual exploit, it could be possible to reach the active root dir through a completely different path as set per alias. In addition to that, having an erroneous document root communicated to CGI components such as PHP or mod_perl can lead to problems. We're still following Nginx development, in case things evolve.
Yes sorry, realised just before you posted that this was HPP, not the TSP subset I'm familiar with where all cities are connected by their Euclidean distance. [I deleted my original post which asked why the TSP problem was described as _a_ path, rather than the shortest.]
I think it depends on the project. With any sufficient amount of talent behind something this ambitious, the $200k they raised on Kickstarter will go quite fast...on one hand, they should take the VC money while they are "hot" - but on the other, if they could ride out their funds they would probably have more leverage with a stable-ish product in place.
