I've seen a lot of coverage of Zuck as a "genius computer hacker", reinforced by the Hackers-style montage in the film which makes it look like what he did was really hard (oh no, he busted out emacs! He must be a genius!).

Actually, Facebook's core functionality, at least at small scale, is trivial. It's a database of people, with CRUD on top. All the really hard technical problems Facebook has solved -- and there were many, don't get me wrong -- have to do with scaling that system, and those problems were solved long after Zuck was no longer hands-on with the code every day.

That's not to say I don't think Zuck is really smart. What I think he's really smart at, though, is interface design and user experience. The film touches on this, noting that Facebook's exclusivity was key to its early popularity. However, the reason Facebook really trounced Friendster and MySpace was that it was a much, much better experience. Everything worked perfectly and each screen was carefully thought-out in terms of information density and placement.

Of course, Sorkin's narrative for the film is that Zuck is an aspie geek who built a website because he doesn't understand people, so the counter-evidence -- that Facebook's design is clearly built by somebody who understands people very well indeed -- has to be downplayed.

From the comments: "He's just a guy who knows a bit of PHP and wanted to get rich, along with the creators of 1000 other social networking sites, and just got lucky that his went viral."

It's amazing how easy it is to dismiss other people's accomplishments. Notice how "Knew a little bit of PHP and got lucky" is used to represent years of hard work, business and development wise.

You must have never run a business if you think that Zuckerberg's success came easy and was due to sheer luck.

Think of what great software activation schemes they will make!

To be fair to the music labels, they at least have copyright law on their side. This is more like how professional journalists whine about bloggers.

And the updates! The glorious, unending stream of modal software-update dialogs!

Every once in a while a discussion of poverty comes up on HN and provokes typically two kinds of responses: The poor are deserving of their lot, lacking the necessary wherewithal to get up off their asses and take responsibility for their lives; or, the poor are trapped by circumstances in a life not of their choosing and deserve whatever assistance we can give them to help them cope with their lot. This article tells the kind of unexpected story that, when you think about it, should have been expected all along. The poor, like the rich, and everyone in between, are not a homogeneous bunch of people that fit neatly into any predetermined category. This is a story of how a smart person learned how to be a smart poor person, learned, in effect, how to hack the life of poverty, and in a way that demands from me a certain amount of respect for the sheer skill and will involved, if not for the ethical character of all the actions such "hacking" entails; but it is also the story of a person who became disillusioned with his way of life. At that point, reading the story, considering how eloquently written, if how poorly edited, it was, I expected a tale of redemption, a tale of a man finding a new job as a writer, lifting himself up by his bootstraps, returning to the American dream, a tale that would end with a predictable heartfelt plea for understanding and compassion. Instead, the story ends with his being still depressed, but in a situation all the more unsure just for his proud refusal to play the system. I don't know that I have a point here, except to say that the story brings home more clearly than any other I have read on this matter that the poor are a many-colored, heterogeneous group, and stock responses, of whatever stamp, and of a type all too common on HN, are almost sure to fail to be answerable to the complexities of poverty.

Posts like this seem like the designer equivalent of the music labels spending years complaining about how sharing music is wrong and trying to put the "evil" back in Pandora's box, while millions of people merrily continue to download music off bittorrent anyway. The reality of the internet is that people can easily solicit work on spec from thousands of designers, and they will get good stuff in return. Will it be great? Rarely. But it'll be good enough for most, and if it's not, they're out nothing. See 99designs.com.

This seems like classic game theory. While it's in the design industry's collective best interest to never work on spec like this, it might be in an individual designer's best interest to design Gap's logo for free. And even if it's not, if most of them think it is, you've still lost. Believe me, I understand that Gap's move here is a slap in the face, but many designers out there will do it anyway, just for the chance to say they designed Gap's logo.

I respect this guy a lot. There's been enough times I wanted to get an obscure out of print book and I can only find copies that cost $60 or even $200+. Taking a book off the shelf, paying the used bookseller and freeing up their cash/space, and stocking the inventory in his home for the whole world to be able to buy the book online - man, the guy's almost a saint in my book.

Some people are upset he's making a profit. This is crazy to me - the guy's making by his own numbers $4000 per month for 80 hour workweeks and amazing customer service, and he's making 10,000+ titles available online that might otherwise not be. If I ever see someone with the book scanner thing, I'm going to thank them and tell them I think they're doing a great thing for the world.