Why is this even news? Facebook has been crawling links for ages every time you post on the site. The crawler is how the link you paste gets a title, description, and sometimes a thumbnail.
There was a period where Hacker News consisted primarily of people on the right-hand side of the spectrum. People who were working inside of startups or had lots of experience with the web and our industry. Pretty much everyone knew what sharding was, and MongoDB wan't very popular.
These days we've got a lot more people and they show up all across the board.
Clearly if this is on the homepage, it was voted there by your peers. This kind of knowledge is completely obvious to many of us, but not everyone is on your level. Cut 'em some slack.
i'm just not so sure if the direction this is heading to is good. and also the headline of that article is miserable (as omarchowdhury already pointed out).
Hmm, I thought people mainly knew about this. But I researched this a lot while making http://2fb.me and actually witnessed this myself with google docs but didn't think twice about it. I'm sure the same thought was going through the heads of everybody reading this that knew anything about how the Facebook sharer worked. For those that found this news, it's beneficial to put open graph meta tags on your pages to control the crawler and you can also invoke the crawler (http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) when your page changes before Facebook updates it automatically every 2 weeks or so.
Do note, and I'm not sure if this differs from what you're referring to, but that the link was never even posted to the site; rather, it was placed into a chat box but never sent. Small difference but I think it's an interesting point.
> To my bemusement, not only was the friend I was messaging away, I also hadn't even sent the link; I pasted it into the chat window but forgot to hit enter.
You're right, but it also happens when you paste in the status button before hitting "Post." Try this: go to Facebook, post a link in your status box. Wait a few seconds. Notice that it will populate the link information fields even before you submit the post. It has to get that info from somewhere. That's where the crawler comes in.
Yeah that's expected, but it's not expected (at least for me) to happen in a chat. But, I never use FB chat so I don't know -- does it also create thumbnails for links and such?
Hmm, I see what you're saying; no it doesn't appear to create the thumbnail in chat. It would be interesting if Facebook uses different crawlers depending on whether the link is posted in the status box or in a chat. That could lead to some interesting analytics such as "your website was chatted about x number of times and shared via a status update x times."
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."