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I'm genuinely curious, what would you do with the data?

Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing as improper. I am just curious.

Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes, wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to "disrupt" the jury research industry?

Pardon my ignorance.

(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a great deal.)

I agree with you entertainment is a cash cow. But FB is _free_ entertainment. As is your photo-album and the discussions you have with your friends.

You appear to be referring to future success. It's like Microsoft talking up "vaporware". It gets people's attention, maybe it convinces some to believe and some to invest, but it offers them nothing. Only a promise of some future of which no one can be certain.

We have almost two decades of web display ads and their effects on building brands. Advertisers are not too impressed. They have waited patiently for something that compares to a magazine ad. And no one has delivered. Maybe solving the context problem might not be so easy. Maybe a website is not a magazine.

Meanwhile people are looking for products and services via the web, with their credit cards in hand. And Google has been there to help advertisers reach them.

That's not some promise of the future, that's the here and now.

Facebook has real power for influence. And some of that can no doubt benefit corporations. But what Google offers is something much more direct and efficient. And it's not a pie-in-the-sky promise, it's proven to have worked year after year.

Facebook has no business model. They only have everyone's curiousity. And that's mainly because the "content" on FB is everyone's friends and family, not the type of packaged, commercialised "entertainment" you get from a magazine. FB is not a magazine. It's a photo-album. More specifically, it's a collection of personal photo albums.

It does have some added "features" to the traditional photo album. It comes with tacky, invasively personal display ads in the margin. And it comes with a team of "engineers" looking over your shoulder to log every photo you look at and every comment you make. And it's exposed to viewing by millions of strangers (this is totally unnecessary). I think we can have photo albums without all that cruft. And I think we will.

What is the product? Is it the hardware? Or the software? Are you saying they are one product, not two?

We've been through this countless times. Microsoft and the OEM's. Apple and their locked down hardware. Consumers are not fools. They know the difference between a software company and a hardware company.

Does your packaged food come with silverware?

Do your finished songs come with an mp3 player?

Does your premade clothing come with laundry detergent?

I find these type of comparsions (e.g. of computers and software to food, music, clothing) very strange. We are talking about cheap, programmable consumer electronics. And then we are having an argument over whether the consumer should have the ability to program them. It is absurd.

It's sort of like Facebook having a "Like" button but no button to signal caution. It's a distortion of reality.

If everything we ate smelled and tasted "good", we'd die. Because we would eat poisonous things. There is a reason why some things smell or taste "bad".

As another commenter points out, it's a shame because knowing what projects did not work, and when, would be helpful.

Trial and error is a proven way to reach success.

Kickstarter is hiding the errors.

Maybe the ecosystem just isn't big enough yet. Too much of the market is still not yet using Apple's products.

Maybe when Apple reaches Microsoft-level penetration, and of course that is their goal (Exhbit A: Apple pricing trends), you might get your druthers.

It really should not be necessary to "jailbreak" a device in the first instance. The user should be able to easily install their own choice of software on the hardware they have paid for: e.g., applications, OS, bootloader and BIOS. If you want to install Apple's software, you can. If you do not want to install their software, you can install something else. Simple.

Simons' supervisor commented that he was a model employee for AOL's Palo Alto Office.

"Eric was always on time, never late for work."

Maybe he should have brought the security guard on as a co-founder?

"you go to the fridge to get food"

Hungry. Get food. How much thinking is involved in that?

Do you know what has a very high clickthrough rate on FB, probably their highest CTR ever (but which is no longer allowed)?

Pop-up styled ads for "party poker".

Not much has changed since the 1990's in this regard. Web advertising is still much the same. And anyone who has been using the web since then, such as the author of the MIT article, sees and knows this.

But do the kids with advanced degrees being hired by FB at $100K/yr know it? Nope. They believe that watching your every move and analysing who your friends are is a path to riches.

I'm not sure what's worse. The knee-jerk response of web users to blinking poker ads, or the blind allegiance of otherwise intelligent young people to a sociopath who thinks destroying privacy is a "goal" worth pursuing.

News flash: Communication on and above the scale of FB is possible without destroying privacy.

OK, so if your wife says to you, e.g., "Swannie, we need [description of rarely purchased, high priced product]. The old one has stopped working." Do you check the front of the fridge, your kitchem notice board, the shoebox and then your photo album to find the contact information for who sells [product description]? Maybe you have the name of who to contact in one of those places? Or you need to call your friend to get a recommendation? Anything is possible, but what do you think is what people do _most of the time_?

FB is the next Pets.com

But it's going to be a slow, painful decline. They have raised billions to stay alive.

Solution for FB: Build a search engine and put it where the display ads are. Keep people inside the walled garden by removing any possible reason for them to leave. Like 1990's "framing" reborn. FAIL.

The whole notion of FB is utterly absurd. Tell us who all your friends are and we'll "enable" you to communicate with them (even though it's trivial to do yourself without us). We reserve the right to analyse all the information you give us and monitor everything you do on the FB site and elsewhere on the web to _try_ to make money, in various sneaky, deceptive (but really clever!) ways. FAIL.

"everyone is a rational actor"

And that's why the message to Harvard graduates[1] (purportedly America's brightest rational minds) makes deliberate reference to a man[2] who has consistently proven this to be false. The message also is centered around another pillar of rationality: the idea of "luck".

1. A link to this was recently posted here on HN.

2. One who was "lucky" enough to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

This is the trap. This is what FB employees keep telling themselves everyday. This has to work. It just makes sense.

You can keep saying the data is valuable. No one is going to question that it is. We all have imaginations. And advertisers will be curious. They will try advertising on FB.

But there's just a big difference in human behavior in the two examples I gave. They are different. Not because I can make argument based on reason for the difference. But because it's what the facts show. There is a long history to this that predates the web. You might say it's been thoroughly tested.

So, you can make all the arguments you want that people should behave a certain way, and maybe you draw on examples of your own behavior or that of others you know, but when it comes down to making money and growing like Google does, it matters more what people actually do in real life. As opposed to how we think they should behave.

Yellow pages and photo-albums are things that have been around for a very long time, long before the web. If people looking at photos (FB) are at the same time looking for products and services, then why didn't photo-albums before the web have heaps of advertising in them? The answer is because there was a different book where it was more appropriate to advertise.

Read the article on the MIT or Harvard blog again. What you are describing, especially a tactic like image analysis, is exactly the type of approach he is saying is just too invasive. This kind of approach to advertising removes anonymity and violates people's privacy when it's counterintuitive to do so, according to the article.

Can you give an example of some sample input and how you want the output to look? I'm stupid and this is the only way I can be sure I know what you're trying to do.

Imagine an apartment. Google is like the copy of the yellow pages by the telephone. FB is like the photo-album in the closet. People generally do not open these two books for similar reasons. They have very different usage. One is recreational, the other is not[1]. But FB believers do not want to accept this difference. And it's this difference that makes FB a dud compared to Google.

The question I have is what is going to come out of Bing's integration of FB?

1. The other is a directory where you look up businesses that offer products and services.

I don't think the issue is his personal financial planning.

I too write mostly throwaway stuff. Obviously, terse languages are better suited for that than others.

Java makes me cringe. But my understanding is Java programmers use IDE's with autocomplete. They don't do much typing.

As for your pipe comment, are you a whiz with passing file descriptors? What do you think about chaining programs together in this way? Would that solve your pipe needs?

Maybe you could accomplish what you want using lex? The general paradigm is pattern-action, just like awk. Lots of flexibility in what you can create. You could create your own interpreter.

I like writing simple filters. I guess I have succombed to the UNIX voodoo. I think of everything as a stream of text.

I'd be interested to take a crack at your "capture group" problem, if you can give me an example of what it looks like.

One might argue the eight years of waiting was simply to get to this point, when income had reached its peak ($1BB), and where FB could IPO and certain parties could extract maximum profit. The "rush" is cashing out just as the company opens its books to the public.

If FB revenues continue to go up, then I'm wrong. But unless Facebook "finds" a novel business model I do not see revenue continuing to climb; I believe we are at the peak, and now begins the descent. If he waited eight years, then why not wait a little longer? I believe there is a reason now was the time. Time will tell.

FB has bought itself some more time with this IPO. How much time does $15BB buy? Even if advertising executives and industry analysts give up on FB, FB stil has the cash to sit and wait for their muse to appear (like Google's discovery of ad feeds in search). Given that FB no matter what they do, no matter how much they fail to perform, is now subsidized with $15BB, will they drive the ad market down?

Original source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/40437/

I was tempted to say something similar. But this is a thread about Linus.

As for your use of find, I rarely ever use find for anything more than printing a recursive dir listing. I always gravitate toward different approaches for doing the other things it can do. Syntax is probably one of the reasons. I'm just not motivated to learn find's idiosyncratic syntax. Why not just make find use C-like syntax as does awk? If I was to redesign UNIX, every utility would, where possible, use a C-like syntax. Because then the user would naturally be learning a little bit about C right from the start.

Have you ever tried the k language?

If you like terse, it is a pleasure to use.

Generally, I like sed as an example of a terse, compact language (and sed seems a logical extension of ed, not something wildly and arbitrarily different), except when it's necessary to use -e to separate commands. Being able to use semicolons to separate commands allows more density.

I have always posited the verbosity (and the complexity) of the shell comes from the need for quoting and escaping. If you could avoid those two necessities, the command line could be more concise, and readable.

I find it best to just stick to reading people's code and their documentation (if any) as opposed to reading what comments they make about computers, software, or any other subject.

This is because the more I learn about them as people the more likely I am to be disappointed. They will say something stupid. Or, e.g., I find out they like some OS, application or language that I just cannot stand. And I'm like WTF? In short, they are just very different people. I may never meet them in person. It's probably better that I don't. The code I am using as a model might have actually been written a dog, posing as a person, like the one in the NewYorker cartoon. Who knows?

Trying to view these authors as "models" (versus seeing only their _code_ as a model) is just setting yourself up for disappoinment.

That said, some of my all time favorite "coder prose" is the netcat source. Let's face it, programming can be very frustrating. And you need a sense of humor. I wish he was still actively writing and releasing software. And that program still compiles as smooth as any, 15 years later. Great stuff.

The T&C bit made me laugh.

I wonder if they'll fix it in the next 24hrs.

Poor Yahoo.

In effect, Zuckerberg just took an enormous salary in the form of exercising options. He has to pay tax on that income.

Let's say he exercised options that earned him $5BB. (I don't know what the exact amount was. It was in the billions, no doubt.) So let's say maybe he owes $2BB in taxes. As for the rest of his shares and what they are "worth", those are going to fluctuate in value, based on the company's performance.

Now, let's say you are a FB shareholder. Ask yourself as a shareholder if the FB CEO has earned a $5BB salary. What has he done for you? How is your FB stock doing? OK, so let's say you think he is a genius and certainly deserves $5BB. Then ask yourself why he would want $5BB in income in _one year_. He wants it all right now. That's an awful lot of income. And a lot of tax to pay.

Why the rush to cash out?

Whatever happens to Facebook, he is set for life. Good for him, but not necessarily good for Facebook shareholders. He has little incentive to deliver.

Wall St. is going to love him, I can already tell.

Version? Not sure what you mean. Some other way to interact with the kernel, besides a "shell"?

Quicker, shorter, terser sounds good to me, whatever it is.

Or maybe you mean if he wrote his own shell?

Well, something like "privileges" seems like a design that is a holdover from a time of shared computing. We've adpated it for other uses, and for some people it's become some sort of security religion. If we assume it exists for the purpose of protecting users of the same computer from each other, it has no need to exist in most cases. Computers are affordable enough that we can all have our own. There is rarely necessity to share computing time.

Plan 9 settled the issue.

But sometimes I think some people have come to love the mental challenge of UNIX permissions. It is like a game to them. I made a function that produces all possible permissions for a file, including the nonsensical ones, so I could display permissions as octal instead of the usual ls format. Have you ever thought about how many possibilities there are? Too many.

The setuid concept is interesting and must have seemed quite innovative at the time. Doesn't surprise me they filed a patent for it. But today, I could just as well do without the complexity.

And I will take that, if coupled with demonstrated competence and a solid, sensible vision, over being "nice", "accomodating" and "willing to answer questions", every time.

This attitude is not true of all OS developers, though. There are lots who are really even-tempered. But they are also very focused and not necessarily willing to accomodate everyone with a "bright idea".

While it might make the learning curve a bit steeper for mere mortals, I actually believe this is what makes a better OS.

I would be interested to see a "Linux" where Torvalds also controlled the userland. What would it be like?

But why do you think that?

Is it because it will deter future litigation?

If yes, does that imply that there is a business advantage to avoiding litigation?

What would Alsup say about this case? As a programmer who is also a judge did he think there were really legitimate issues here that needed to be resolved?

I guess some see issues, and lack of clarity, where others do not. I see extremely weak claims and a very large legal budget. That's just me.

You may be right. If this makes things clearer, then it has value.

So should we thank Oracle for bringing the suit?

While we're at it, I'd like to thank Burroughs Corp. for all the early precedent they gave us.

This seems like (yet another) suit that never should have been filed to begin with. Everyone lost time, and everyone except the lawyers and the court (court fees) lost money.

setuidgid is written in C. No bugs yet reported.

Plan 9 doesn't have the concept of superuser. "sudo" is moot. Plan 9 is written in C.

Just two examples that come to mind.

Maybe it's not the language. Maybe it's the person using it.

There is never going to be a perfectly "idiot-proof" language that shares the power of a language like C. But many still seem to believe this is possible.

Selling off significant amounts of stock, for tax purposes, in the company you work for is not something one typically does _before the company has even gone public_.

Insiders were dumping their stock in the days leading up to the IPO.

What does that say about their perceived value of the company over the long-term?

Nothing, of course. Yes, that makes perfect sense.

Right on, Elise.

What users demand is what programmers will deliver.

This is why it is so important for users to become educated about computers and networking. You cannot ask for what you do not know exists.

There are other ways to achieve "social networking" besides using only Zuckerberg's website and submitting to his warped ideas about human civilisation.

Collect the email addresses and contact info of all your Facebook friends now. You will need them in time when you will have your own "social network". A return to decentralisation is coming. It is inevitable. Everything goes in cycles. What's going to get us ethere is that centralisation has been abused to an unacceptable extent, by a sociopathic kid who is still maturing. Unfortunately he's maturing a little too slowly. I'm not sure users will have the patience to wait. They want an alternative.

FB's only value is your personal data.

They will likely end up having to give it back to you.

The web is going to get better. This is exciting.