indigoviolet

Thanks, that's useful to hear. It isn't on the wiki page: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode (which hasn't been touched since Sep 2009).

slnunicode hasn't changed or been updated, and has no forum posts or bugs since 2006 [http://luaforge.net/projects/sln/]

ICU4Lua hasn't been touched since April 2009, and is at 0.2B. [http://luaforge.net/projects/icu-lua/]

That sort of status just doesn't inspire confidence in a language. I understand you can use it for game programming, or that you can write your own libraries for it, but that sort of thing doesn't encourage adoption.

I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year.

I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker.

Am I just missing some information in this regard?

As a Facebook employee not involved with Platform, I'll say that I've seen (from afar) a lot of people realizing this needs lots of fixing and working to improve things.

340 thousand people is not that surprising of a following for a band that was notable in the 70's, one that pioneered a popular genre -- it's been nearly 30 years, and you can enjoy a band's music without subscribing to the band's "movement".

I think it's ridiculous to try to make such general and vague pronouncements as "Most Joy Division fans on Facebook must be faking it" with nothing to support or ground your statistic in.

I think I understand what he's trying to say, but perhaps he could've picked a better example than Joy Division and U2.

The Joy Division pages on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JoyDivisionOfficial?ref=ts [55k fans]

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Joy-Division/108018775886004?r... [260k fans]

The U2 page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/u2 [5M fans]

Didn't Calacanis leave Facebook?

Perhaps the conclusion is that Facebook is not intended to be a networking tool, or a replacement for a real life -- it is simply a place/way to share online experiences with your real-life friends. AFAIK, it doesn't pretend to be anything else.

Facebook doesn't have a 20%-time /program/. That doesn't mean people don't have side-projects on their own time, or even multiple things they're doing at work. Plus they have regular hackathons which sometimes develop into full projects.

Atleast at Facebook, the PHP code quality and abstractions are very very good, and getting better. Developing the compiler in-house has some advantages.

LyX. http://www.lyx.org/

Returned to the site in the last 30 days.

What are some other sites that lay people use and that do as many things as Facebook does?

Yeah, but on something like Facebook, people don't necessarily think of (or prioritize, given the other pressing issues in their lives) informing the site that someone has passed away.

The difficulty here is not in building software for a memorial page [although I'm sure there is a lot of room for experimentation and improvement], but in detecting that someone has passed away, and then handling all interactions relating to that user with extreme sensitivity.

Are you interested in actually working on it? If you are, send me a resume.

There's tons of metadata on top of this. Organization and patterns we haven't figured out yet. It's like saying a Linux distro is 700MB-- there's a lot of machinery in there.

This article is based on a false premise. Facebook doesn't need you to make your data public to serve you ads -- it already has access to this data. Advertisers tell Facebook which demographics they'd like to target, and /Facebook/ does the targeting and ad serving.

Here is Facebook's explanation: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php#basicinfo

Basically, if your profile picture were private, it would be hard for someone (who is your friend/acquaintance in real life) who isn't friends with you (on Facebook) already to find you on the site.

Of course the things you're suggesting will allow Facebook to add features to the product, and indirectly perhaps add revenue.

That is very different from this: "The only way they can do it is by selling users data one way or another.". People often claim that Facebook wants to "sell" your data to advertisers, and I'm simply saying that claim is wrong.

(I've never been secretive about the fact that I worked at Facebook, it's on my profile. )

Here you go: http://gigaom.com/2010/05/26/facebooks-new-privacy-settings-...

Which part of "Facebook doesn't require you to make your data public to target ads to you." are you disagreeing with?

Mark mentioned that they're going to put links to this in messaging on the home page, which is about as in-your-face as possible. Nonsavvy users aren't reading blog posts either.

Facebook doesn't require you to make your data public to target ads to you. Advertisers don't ever see your actual data -- they target to demographics, and Facebook acts as the intermediary, displaying those ads to the appropriate users. Here's a related FAQ: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=privacyupdate

That's a big if.

Here's where I'd guess you're wrong: "my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users". CNN visitors are likely to be highly grouped, plus you can share these stories back to Facebook and with your friends, increasing this clusteredness.

Here's a suggestion: figure out the 'topic' words in the subject (shouldn't be too hard to do a moderately good job by looking at word frequencies in the titles submitted so far and whitelisting/blacklisting some); start attaching a penalty to each topic word based on how many stories were submitted recently, how many votes/comments they got, and a time decay. The goal is to make it so that a story about a very frequently seen topic will need more upvotes to climb higher in the rankings.

The spin people are putting on this is just unbelievably sensation-mongering. ReadWriteWeb of all places is calling them on it - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/unbelievable_wsj_calls_....

It's so disappointing to see Hacker News be a part of this mob mentality.

David Recordon, who wrote the big post on that page actually works at Facebook. As does Luke Shepard.

Aren't you also imposing your "morality" about sharing on users who use this? Would you be comfortable if Facebook were to do something like this, with [good] pointing to "sharing something with everyone"?