pherk's comments

This is so cool. It lets Facebook amass a massive amount of data about customer whereabouts and whatabouts. The incentive for merchants is quite compelling. However, Facebook needs to do a damn good job to convince the customers to use it.

Very informative. We are a payments company (http://www.juspay.in) based out of India. We came to similar conclusion just after the inception of the company. Instead of building a payment gateway, we built a solution that acts as a wrapper on top of payment processors and positioned our product as a specialization in cards processing. And today, some of the biggest companies in India are using our product (1-click checkout).

Our positioning gives us better margins than processors and the icing on the cake is that we are also not exposed to fraud related risks. Settlement process in India is cumbersome and mostly manual. Being a completely engineering team, we are happy that we aren't dragged into settlements and related issues as well.

One of the big downsides for us is that we don't get to have a big float like the processors.

A vague generalization. Can you conclusively say that all the YCombinator (or any other similar incubator) startups are groundbreaking innovations?

Given the transformation that technology is undergoing, there are too many low hanging fruits to be ignored. And if you try to define "startup", then you are already on a slippery slope.

This is very good! I work for a payments service provider in India. And at our company, we have something similar but not so detailed as this. Ours is built on top of Pingdom - http://status.juspay.in/.

The bottomline here is that transparency is a virtue. And this is something that is all the more important for a company operating in the payments industry.

Why such a great support to Apple even when it is so evident that the mini iPad is a first generation product? I think it has become fashionable to praise Apple even when it falls short and bash others even when they exceed expectations. This is analogous to transforming from fanboyism to fanaticism.

I hail from a place where the worth of 200$ or 300$ for a tablet cannot be justified, where we demand true value for money. So I guess I can look at these without any bias.

I am quite confident that Apple's iPad mini will have better resolution (more pixels, to be clear) in its next version. And you will find yourself saying "yes, more pixels is better".

Perhaps, Amazon is not the greatest competitor that Apple will face. Perhaps, it would be Samsung or Google. Amazon's products will not match Apple's perceived quality. Yet, these things do not change the fact that Amazon's price point would drive down the profitability of Apple products. And that, Amazon's price point will look attractive to certain segment of people (at least those like me, who believe in value for money).

Ideas are indeed worthless today. But to believe that completely is stupidity.

Internet, as of today, is a gold rush. Anyone worth his programming skill can work on an idea and get funded. But then, with the passing of time, all the low hanging fruits will be gone. Once we reach that point, good ideas will become scarce. Great ideas may not even emerge. VC funding will be gone too. Perhaps, in a decade or so.

Internet based companies are extremely easy to replace today. A chilling fact but true. Compare this with firms like Citibank, British Petroleum, etc. They have been here for decades and will be here. The same cannot be said for companies like Facebook and to a large extent Apple.

Could it be that he got fired from Facebook for the same reason as well? For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.

Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes. It is easy to disillusion ourselves or justify ourselves, that others were right. In this occasion, it is probably easy for Noah to relate to few things that didn't go well and assume them as reasons for getting fired.

If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.

If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.

I very much agree with the last point. Objective evaluation of a developer is much more than burned down points.

I worked at Amazon and could see evidently that Scrum was turning good developers into mediocre ones. But not many raised a finger against it as Scrum was seen as the norm. And there was no scientific way to establish this fact.

> What if someone else has an important piece of information that the dev and the architect don't?

That isn't good enough justification. You are too much erring on the side of caution.

At last some sanity sets in. That button really made no sense at all. In a typical scenario, I will decide whether I like or not only after visiting the page. And to visit the page, I have to leave the Google search results page.

All that is really no excuse for not developing a foolproof system. And if you know that you don't have a great system to catch fraud, then you should simply leave some money on the table.

See, the essence here is not to come up with a great algorithm. This is not a programming contest. But to create a system where everyone (publisher, advertiser, ad-network and customer) wins.

In this very early stage, the success of Facebook's Ad network should be measured only by one metric - ROI of Advertisers. And that number has to be consistently better than Google's.

Seems like a very tough business to be in. Guess, how do upcoming bands manage to make it through given that most people on the band are pretty much committed to it full time.

While Hacker News is a great place for finding great links/articles, it cannot be subscribed to (unlike a blog). This makes it difficult to read this through devices like Kindle. So last weekend turned to be pretty productive for me trying to put the two together:

http://hnkindle.blogspot.com/

The application uses a specialized library (boilerpipe - http://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/) for extracting just article contents from links. Also, HN has a lot of links showing up in the Top 30 moving up and down every single day. I have put in place a simple heuristic (which is explained in the app) to chose only the prominent. At the moment, the heuristic is quite arbitrary.

Your feedback is most welcome!