How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button | Hacker News Reader

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

techcrunch.com

118 pointsrichoakley33 comments

+1 for the hack, but the other solution was to tell your lacky, ...err...I mean personal assistant, to push a button on Mark's phone at the same time as Mark rang the bell. We live in a age where we can execute all amazing technical solutions to non-problems. Now was that truly epic? Waiting for the pop to see...

That wouldn't get quite as much press coverage though, would it?

On the day of Facebook's IPO, I don't think that anyone was worried about getting press coverage.

It's cool because in a small but poignant way it represents how Zuck was able to build his company w/o kissing Wall street's ass. So many CEO's tactics are driven by quarterly earnings. By keeping his hoodie on and not flying out to New York to ring the bell, Zuck kinda saying fu off to all that.

If that blue Nasdaq button embodies short term, profit driven thinking, it's neat that the engineers were able to hack it and bend it toward their will. It's a poetic hack.

I really think you're reading too much into it.

It's not a 'poetic hack', it's just neat.

Poetry can be an emergent property.

IMO the beauty of a hack comes from two places:

1) Doing something that can't be done by hand, OR 2) Replacing repetitive manual work, this saving time in the long run

IMO there's nothing "cool" about a hack that will only be used once and could be replaced by Mark (or anyone standing nearby) pre-typing the message and then posting the status to Facebook seconds after he pushes the Nasdaq button.

You could also argue that it might have been an opportunity for the engineers to learn something, but IMO you could think of more worthwhile hacks to learn from.

> IMO the beauty of a hack comes from two places:

"In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation."

"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

So it has nothing to do with automation, perfecting your craft, saving time, making money, impressing Paul Graham, "hacking education" (?), putting in tremendous amounts of work, being irreverent, growing a neckbeard, or linking up a button to a cell phone.

It boils down to somebody else saying "are you fucking kidding me?" and you get to say: "no."

> It boils down to somebody else saying "are you fucking kidding me?" and you get to say: "no."

Yeah, the "are you fucking kidding me?" comes from the fact that you did something awesome, i.e. something can't be done trivially by some far simpler means. So I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me :)

The only "are you fucking kidding me?" that this hack evokes is "you spent all that time and talent to do /that/?".

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?

Well, we now have Facebook established precedent of letting physical actions trigger Open Graph events. That's kinda cool!

A question for some one who knows trading laws:

Would it be legal for facebook to spam everyone's time line with ads that essentially say: "Get an e-trade account today and buy a piece of facebook! For the first time ever you can own part of facebook! Click here"

I am not saying this would be a good thing (a bunch of uniformed investors speculating and boosting the price), however I am curious would it be legal?

I've never seen a legit advertisement for a stock, so that should tell you something. If it's legal, there'd be so much disclosure required it would not look like an ad.

No - Facebook is not a broker-dealer and do cannot market securities. Further, there are other disclosures that must be fulfilled before retail investors can be marketed to. This is only taking US residents into account.

I don't understand why most comments here are so jaded. This is just a fun simple hack pulled off by a creative engineer, nobody claims that it was groundbreaking or even necessary. Personally, I think it's good that they have a culture that encourages things like that.

Definitely agree. Some of the comments are positively ludicrous. This post would have hundreds of points if it were Kickstarter or a company that "hackers" like.

I would have found the reverse creative as well--something similar to the release of portal 2. Have some actions on facebook by many people lower a robotic arm to press the button.

The real story for me is that, when you go public, NASDAQ brings some kind of button to your offices? Or there's a button at their offices?

Why? Just ceremony, like a ribbon-cutting?

See also journalists wanting scientists at CERN to push a big red button.

Scientists, pleasingly, said "No".

(http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/Releases2007/PR...) etc etc.

Traditionally, with an IPO that's become as popular as this one, you have a representative from the company being listed ring the bell on the trading floor of the exchange they're listing on.

However, NASDAQ lacks a proper trading floor, as they're all electronic, so they have companies deliver a live feed of said representative ringing the opening bell from the company HQ.

NASDAQ allows any D-list dignitary type to "ring the bell". It's a total sham. See: http://www.nasdaq.com/marketsite/bell-event.html

I have to respect Zuckerberg for not wasting the flight to NYC to do this sort of thing.

It strikes me as incredibly post modern that a purely electronic trading platform has an "opening bell."

Personally, this seems like a waste of time. The problem has a number of obvious non-technical solutions.

I don't think any of them decided to do it for reasons of being practical. The entire reasoning behind it was that it was 'cool'. A pretty good reason, if you ask me...

Good to see the hacking culture alive and well!

"A couple of hours later, we had built our hack. The finished product wasn’t exactly the prettiest thing, but hacks aren’t supposed to be. They’re just supposed to work."

I can't say I agree 100%. Sometimes when you have time left over at the end of the hack, it doesn't hurt to go back and clean it up.

Am I the only one with massively messed up layouts on Facebook today? What's going on?

http://cl.ly/0N3L34461V1z130f2W1e

Oh wow, Facebook is so cool! These are real hackers. A button that posts to your Facebook timeline? I thought this technology was at least a decade out.

"So, like I said, it was just a normal day here at Facebook" -> I love this.

Hacking is such an overloaded term these days...

In fairness, this is actually fairly close to the original MIT tech model railroader's club sense: http://steel.lcc.gatech.edu/~mcordell/lcc6316/Hacker%20Group...

I'll go further, and say that this is a better example of the original meaning of hacking than most.

True, but always good to see it being overloaded with the positive meaning in the mainstream media. I don't think any other highly visible company has done more to reclaim that word in the minds of the general public than FB. Kudos to them for that.

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