from the comments: http://i40.tinypic.com/ddp8qc.jpg

From a performance standpoint, it was perfectly smooth. I was surprised. Then again, when I told a sibling to get her facebook username, she had no idea what I was talking about.

For some odd reason it wouldn't let me register my real name (Felix) even though I entered only a few (<10) seconds after the giveaway started.. the minimum lenght is supposed to be five characters, and Felix is still not taken as I type this - kinda annoying, since now I had to take something else when apparently Felix would've been available, but wasn't due to some bug. And the giveaway was at 6 in the morning in my timezone...

I successfully registered a 5-character name within 10 seconds of the launch, so if there were a bug it wasn't simply refusing strings of 5 characters.

They reserved a LOT of keywords. Even things like while, foreach, break, invisible, google, and presumably myspace.

The lack of a downvote button will soon cause me -- and probably people who share similar sentiments -- to simply flag everything that has the words "twitter", "facebook", "new media", "techcrunch" etc. without thinking or reading the said article.

pg out to find a way around non-news items making it to the HN front page.

Please people, please! This is not a place to post Facebook, Twitter and MySpace news.

When sensationalism and hype comes in, intellectully satisfying discussion dies out.

The first video explains their approaches to overcoming an unknown challenge to an unknown load, and also why they decided to not charge for the usernames.

Honestly, that video provided some really interesting concepts. The "nuclear" approach seemed really effective to cutting down page loads, too.

Except I cannot hear a word the guy is saying. It just comes out as ... ... ... ...... .... ....