I cannot comment on the content at all because I can't access the submission.
Pages submitted to HN should simply not be behind login walls, which is why I flagged this.
This thread already has multiple references to the fact that you have to log in to see the submitted post. There are many HN users without a FB account. For them, the headline of the submission cannot be verified by clicking on the link.
Although there is a large intersection between the two groups of HN and FB users, you don't have to be signed up with any other webservice in order to use HN. This is not only about FB. As a matter of principle posts to HN should be accessible for all HN users without requiring them to sign up with any other webservice.
However, this is up to PG and the HN community. It would be good if PG provided a guideline whether submissions behind login walls are accepted or not.
Is the difference you're implying the fact it's Mark Zuckerberg, the person whose company just went public and is a relatively famous Internet entrepreneur? I'm not trying to take a side, but I'm not sure which difference you're implying and which comments are an embarrassment. Could you expand?
do you feel smart about your comment? if you're not interested in a topic, don't click on it. why are you spending time and effort to comment on something you're not interested in?
Not really. So did he get married or did someone hack Zuckerberg's account to change status to married, or is it a joke, or is it something entirely different?
The title tells me nothing, and I should probably use a search engine to check what's actually going on.
And if it turns out Zuckerberg simply got married, I just wasted my time researching celebrity gossip.
However, it looks like Asimov's three laws could use an addendum: Be a good sport and a gentleman when significant things happen to people in your community. Apply soft-skill known as "heart".
(On a similar note, I've done some online math contests that gave the problems in Word .doc format. Once, on a collaborative contest, OpenOffice was not sufficient; there were images that got misaligned or didn't even display. I took the documents, sent them to an online Word -> PDF converter, and posted the results to the shared email account "for great justice". Things like not having Word should not be barriers to doing math contests.)
Dis-allowing links like this seems extreme. I think appending something like "[requires facebook]" to the title as a matter of etiquette would work.
As a kind of loose analogy, no one really has problems with links to pdfs, but you don't need to have a pdf reader to sign up for HN (and I often see the "[pdf]" notice appended to such links).
That's not an analogy. Anybody with a computer can get a PDF reader without giving your information to a third party. There many PDF readers, not just one.
I vote for disallowing links that require login for the reasons explained in grand parent's comment.
Chrome has gone a long way to alleviate my issues with PDFs, but a lot of people still absolutely do have problems with links to those - to the point that Scribd was successfully launched. As for FB, it has much worse penetration than PDFs, which are still near the pain threshold for general news.
I'd say disallowing them is may be too harsh, but posting them is simply impolite and users should avoid doing that. I'm not a FB user and these kind of links just waste my time.
I don't have Facebook, but the title says it all (shouldn't it be 'got married?' btw). I guess congratulations are in order for going public (with their commitment I mean)
Additional fun (and ambiguity): The verb "to marry" also means to perform the marriage ceremony. "Mark Zuckerberg married" could, in theory, mean Zuckerberg married two other people. "Got married" doesn't suffer from ambiguity and for that reason i think preferred.
Rules don't exist to for their own sake, they are an imperfect way of formalizing what would otherwise have to left to common sense. But sometimes, common sense obviously trumps the rules.
Incidentally, I suspect most bureaucracies emerge from a cargo-cultist/priest of a lost religion mentality where rules are enforced for their own sake without any insight or thought into what the rules were trying to achieve in the first place.
When you see the URL is facebook.com just assume it is behind a login wall and don't click it. The other 99.5% of people wont care because they have FB accounts. Whats the problem?
Pages submitted to HN should simply not be behind login walls, which is why I flagged this.
This thread already has multiple references to the fact that you have to log in to see the submitted post. There are many HN users without a FB account. For them, the headline of the submission cannot be verified by clicking on the link.
Although there is a large intersection between the two groups of HN and FB users, you don't have to be signed up with any other webservice in order to use HN. This is not only about FB. As a matter of principle posts to HN should be accessible for all HN users without requiring them to sign up with any other webservice.
However, this is up to PG and the HN community. It would be good if PG provided a guideline whether submissions behind login walls are accepted or not.