skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't this all going in the opposite direction of the rest of the industry? I see lots of people touting the "cloud" and other forms of centralized computing where scalability matters. Asking each person to carry around their own personal data as a diaspora node might be swinging the pendulum back a little too far from the other Facebook extreme.

I don't think people are upset that there is a single entity holding everyone's data (I mean look at Google and Yahoo, they certainly have a similar amount of information if not more) -- they're upset about the way the data is handled. Slowly eroding privacy standards, weirdly-automatic linking with external sites.

I bet 90% of Facebook's troubles would go away if they came up with an elegant way for a normal person to set privacy settings and then promise to not change them while at the same time offering opt-in on all future changes rather than opt-out. It's probably too late for Facebook, but maybe not for a clone.
I followed this link to the NYT article and the NYT article to the Diaspora website, where I a) can't sign up and b) can't even leave my email in the hopes that one day I'll be able to. This doesn't seem very smart to me: they ought to at least have a box that says, "leave us your e-mail!", especially if they have publicity from the NYT.
Is Your Website Usable by Everyone? Accessibility Analysis Lets You Know
Section 508 is an accessibility standard set down by the U.S. government with which all government websites and those of companies and agencies receiving government funding must comply.
I'm not going to comment on the subject matter, but this guy is pissed. You can tell by his nervousness -- shows that he is passionate about his tools. Good for him
I thought of this same feature yesterday and briefly considered submitting it to Ask HN. I decided against as I expected PG's response to be along the lines of "Why, less is more etc. etc." or "Why should the submitters comments be weighed more than others?"

Glad to see the positive response. I highly enjoy blogs and to a lesser extent Reddit where the authors comments are highlighted amongst the chatter of regular users.
Maybe. This is how backup services like Carbonite work. I can create a key that they don't have, and if I lose it, I'm locked out, bye bye data. Otherwise, where there's a key, there's a master key, and we're right back where we started.
What makes you think barrybe is an American?
Analytical Consulting: what languages to learn
Are the administrators of this program really so incompetent that they can't find a useful task for people to do? Or was the brick example just hyperbole?
So make it compatible with various cloud providers. Better yet, start a nonprofit that transparently hosts the nodes on various cloud providers for a fee. When a provider starts misbehaving, transparently move those nodes to the others.

This way, the FB-alternative becomes a voice in the free market for respecting privacy.
Sure you can ;) Just not the sleazy kind! haha.

Really thought, I think there is something to be said for branching out on your own without living with your parents. The experiences that come with dealing with day to day issues on your own are invaluable. Who knows maybe he is really making the most of it -- he is on nytimes.com after all.

I can tell you one thing. I'm not going to wake up when I'm 40 and think.. Man, I really wish I would have lived with my parents till I was 35 and saved every penny I had to buy this house.

I don't think he can say the same.
HN Commenters: what do you feel is the moral responsibility of a social site in an instance where someone has the ability to post something at large vs a group of 'friends'? Do you think the site should notify a person at a per post level/status entry (some type of warning... 'this will be posted to ALL site X users, etc') or just a one time warning at the personal configuration level?
And I will second that, Startup Weekend Detroit 2009 turned me off from the event quite a bit, but I still met some good people.
It could be related to this: http://searchengineland.com/facebooks-posts-by-everyone-feat...
What does this JS do?
Good call. It's pretty much a throw away account that I'm only using for api access and an advertising trial I did. Thanks, though. :)
PostgreSQL Android App Contest
That link is (a) obvious to the point of tautology; (b) included in the OP; (c) irrelevant to my question, which was addressed to any HNers who have personally worked with this material.
Posted URL is a redirect. Original link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...
Can anyone please explain to me what exactly a 'node' entails ... how is it any different from a 'profile'

you can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig

all the same, I wish them luck, why?, because it's not facebook...
For the first half of that (resetting the browser defaults) I use Yahoos reset.css (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/), which works a charm.
For It’s One, Two, Three Bids You’re Out (of Luck) at the Old Buying Game
It's public posts, you don't even need an app to make that query.
How does this differ from ActiveX controls in IE, aside from being cross platform?
"People giving out the same thing as you for free" describes not just piracy, but anyone who is giving away a substitute good. It's the same argument Microsoft can make against OpenOffice or Linux. The same argument the Post Office might have against email.

The fact that many software products do well on the market despite rampant piracy illustrates that there are plenty of customers who are willing to pay, and see the value in buying the product even when pirated copies are available.

So if your product isn't performing as well enough to be viable, and you don't know whether to attribute it to (a) pirates copying it for free, or (b) the possibility that your product isn't very good, what response is more likely to generate positive value? You can (a) fight the pirates, incurring additional expense and/or diminishing the value proposition for your paying customers; or (b) improve the quality of your product in ways that actual customers will appreciate anyway.

If the answer is (a), and the target market for your product is composed mostly of freeloading jerks, you're probably focusing on the wrong market.
I've been citing relevant information on my "Wall" -- trying not to overwhelm friends, but to bring notice to each new, substantial development. At most 1 in 10 of my friends has expressed any interest. (Even given a fairly small set of friends I actually know, as opposed to some semi-random monkey pile (people just piling on to a group, e.g. teammates after a goal in soccer)).

I think that, in part, this is due to people turning to Facebook for fun and socialization. They aren't going there for news and problems, and they have little or no desire to look at these when they appear in that context.

On the other hand, any ongoing or potential decrease in participation will likely be as silent. I don't think the current silence means FB is off the hook. Already, a significant fraction of my friends have become substantially less active on FB, whatever their reasons.
Cute Linux powered humanoid robot, speaks, listens and knows your face
Templates for solutions of linear systems
NaCl is sandboxed; ActiveX is not.
Apple does allow Flash to be installed on Mac OS X, and actually includes it with the OS.

Right now there is not a way to "install" something on iPhone OS that would then become available to Safari and other apps. To do that, they'd have to build a plug-in architecture for iPhone OS.
it's spam - gets submitted here regularly (under different URL's).

It should die soon.
Good point. I guess it does depend on context and the purpose of the app.
English people have the same stereotype (only English tourists do drugs in the Netherlands).
Group Health Insurance Plans NC
Since we only specialize in healthcare services, our staff has a firm understanding of the complex issues in today’s health insurance environment. We are large enough to serve you, but small enough to care.
Clarification: their primary motivation is so that they could ensure that at least some part of the mobile market could run their ads, they realizing that mobile is the future, and that ads are currently their only real source of income.
This article is absurd. (In what follows, I assume a United States context)...

1. No citation of the "insurmountable mountain of evidence"

2. Women are still paid less that men (just look at Bureau of Labor Statistics stats)

3. Women getting unhappier (assuming the study is correct) is not evidence that feminism is the problem. Many of the gains of the women's liberation movement have been rolled back (e.g., abortion rights). Women's rights have been under sustained assault for decades.

4. Women are still expected to shoulder the bulk of the work for raising the next generation. But if they do it as single women, they are vilified by mainstream media. (Cuts in daycare and welfare are unlikely to have a beneficial effect on women's happiness)

I am going to stop there rather than construct a comprehensive rebuttal of a POS article.

I have criticisms of feminism, but in the basic which-side-are-you-on question, I stand with feminists.
I thought the core of feminism was that men and women are treated differently and thus we should try to treat them the same?

Am I missing something here? Because this article reads like a simple torching of a straw man. I'm tempted to flag it altogether.

The section railing about women's happiness doesn't even make logical sense: We shouldn't be trying to tear down gender barriers, because these efforts have exposed women to unhappiness?

Isn't that akin to arguing womens' sports are evil, because now all those poor women are exposed to struggle and loss?

I appreciate the desire, when it comes to equality efforts, to try to keep them from going overboard. But this article is equal parts "missing the point" and "clearly demonstrating conscious effort is still needed".
I agree with opt-in rather than opt-out. default into a safe/secure state is a basic principle of computer security. This is why Google Buzz's automatically adding followers was an awful idea, no matter how convenient it seems for users.
This is cool, thanks! I wish it supported Amazon's S3 -- the tool I'm currently using is terrible. :-)
The first two, yes. And then things are really going to kick off for him when he brings back a lady to his room with a twin bed and toys.
I thought this was a rather humorous thing to search on: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=facebook%20privacy

Mainly people warning about the privacy changes, yet have public status updates.
It's pretty interesting to marketers. Ill bet u could make some highly targeted direct mail campaigns on the cheap now.
Intro video could use a pause or mute button.
bets 1 million dollars on policy "transfer 2 million dollars to me" and causes that policy to be enacted, they lose money on their bets but still make out like a bandit.

This glosses over the difference between prediction markets (markets for bets on outcomes) and futarchy (voting on results we want and automatically enacting the policies prediction markets endorse to achieve those results).

Also, wouldn't a market thin enough to be gamed by interested parties attract investors like a stock trading at less than 1x earnings?
No, polyvore seems more about: a) creating a wishlist or b) finding some stock photo that already exists of a product you might own.

When I was really young cardomain was big (to view and to post if you had a cool car). People loved showing off what they owned+had customized and people loved seeing the cool things others had. It has to be a real photo, not some stock image from the product site. Some verticals where this would be pretty big:

- Cars (people love showing customizations off here)

- Clothing (tons of people make their own clothing or have rare items. for example, i collect/wear designer comic book tshirts).

- Computer gear ie- people who have overclocked, have custom cases, cooling systems,etc.

- "home improvement"- people would love to show off the cool things they've done to their house/own

- sneakers- ive never gotten into this, but people are obsessed with sneakers.

-diy crowd- if you attend maker faire, you probably have something to post.

There are probably tons of other verticals that would attract people.

To make it work, it would have to be really simple. 1) take picture of item via webcam (or upload) 2) <140 character description 3) share it. Also make it an endless clickstream of viewing random content from the consumption side. I would spend all day on this site.
You can also search an individual user's News Feed, restricted to that user's friends, by adding a q argument to the home connection URL:

News Feed: https://graph.facebook.com/me/home?q=facebook
Lock a folder with password without software
Social Gold is very ubiquitous -- I would even argue more than Facebook Credits. Developers use Social Gold even outside of the Facebook platform -- where FB credits have zero value.

Social Gold enables single click across games -- and a huge number of users already have stored credit cards. And of course it comes with a much better conversion and much lower fee for the developer.

Facebook is ubiquitous, but even on their own platform, Social Gold is far more widely used than FB credits. FB can force credits to be ubiquitous on their own platform, but the world is a much bigger place.
And what happens when I want to remove one of my 200 friends? Conversely, what happens when I want to add a new friend and give them access to my 200 photos? The only answer I can imagine involves a (#friends X #resources) duplication of storage, processing, etc.
I am guessing the hosted option is going to be the only plausible option for the vast majority of users.
>>They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men.

coughbullshitcough

I don't even know where to go from that statement other than flippant dismissal.
Criticizing "feminism" is pretty meaningless. Ask a dozen feminists what feminism is, and you'll get a dozen (+/- a few) answers.

Yes, the idea that men and women are entirely equal except for social conditioning is ridiculous, but who says that's the only definition of feminism?

I consider myself a feminist (as well as for gay rights, animal rights, and more). My take on feminism is that women deserve the same opportunities for choice as men (indeed, all humans and animals deserve the freedom to pursue their individual desires).

If, given a choice, women and men tend to go down different paths (statistically), that's fine.
...To make the system more theatrical, each MP could be given a certain number of cards that was less than the number of votes to be held...

I'm sure this is a good article, but I couldn't help but think of fizzbin
OKCupid stole FriendlyRank.com creator's idea with their "MyBestFace" release
Yeah, I have used that before too. It does a great job of removing the browser defaults.

What I dislike, is that it forces me to have to start from scratch (reset.css scratch) in order to make a project at all readable/usable.
> Women are still paid less that men

Women have different goals than men and their salaries reflect that. If you look at the numbers for young, urban professionals, women make more than the men.

> Women are still expected to shoulder the bulk of the work for raising the next generation.

What do you mean?

> But if they do it as single women, they are vilified by mainstream media.

Where do you see this?
Will it work in non-chromium browsers?
Another article that sees only the high-level side of software development and comes to wrong conclusions.

C is going to be there universally until the cpu hardware changes dramatically, such that it maps one to one to some other language. That's where the universality is coming from. C maps directly to what cpu understands.
Human mind creation of universe Most Beautiful lady
To what degree does "Embrace and Extend" apply to what Google is doing?
There is that one guy whose name escapes me. I think he's Indian, he's a really good looking guy, he came from a relatively poor immigrant family, started something at 16, he's around 26 now and worth $500m. I just can't think of his name, but he qualifies.
Perhaps that's why you didn't land in prison in the first place? Or it works the other way round, and your views change when you are in prison?
I'm in (developer)
And farming was made possible by the feudal system of government. Because otherwise, the farms would have been pillaged by wandering viking hordes.
In practice, is there really a difference? Facebook has hundreds of millions of users and it's fast and free to sign up, so I'm not sure I see the distinction, other than maybe search engines...
I don't know about the old Google home page but the current one I see only has one <table> and it's wrapping what I would consider to be tabular data.
Surely if you write on someones wall, then all of their friends can see it. Trying to keep any sort of privacy there seems problematic.

It's called a wall for a reason :/
Most english speakers in the world learnt it as a second language, and it only becomes a problem to me when they're not good at it and they're trying to sell me a service predicated on their language skills.
No they are creating accounts to try and teach Americans irony!

Hardworking mexicans coming to America and working for lower wages under terrible conditions shocks people who demand a wall of minefields, electrified fences and tanks - whatever it costs to keep these people out.

Well educated Americans decide to take advantage of the good nature of some Hawaiians, who volunteer to help and feed the needy, for a free holiday in the sun. This is perfectly OK because they are the same nationality as us, I assume the programmer is white - obviously if they had darker skin it wouldn't be acceptable.

You could also take it as a message that the Hawaiians should rise up and overthrow their foreign imperialist oppressors.
From memory all that is required is to throw some tea into the harbor (Starbucks would probably do) and look noble standing in the front of a boat crossing a river for your portrait - something Hawaiians should be able to manage.
Shouldn't that be "HI-Combinator"?
Much like politicians work a fringe issue and then gradually move to the center, I think this group will need to focus on building a (brand-) friendly and usable alternative to Facebook in order to have any chance of competing.

Then privacy can be a feature and not their raison d'être.

It also isn't too late to change the name.
ANSI C code is perfectly legal Objective-C code.
Thanks for making it open source! I'm learning iPhone dev and this small app will be great to me to jump on OS X dev later on.
> Which reminds me - the US financial institution bailout is close to break even [...]

At least if you are only looking at the costs that have been accounted for.
Well this was two years ago, so by now he's doing well. Feel free to get at him @waltz though, I'll update the post. Thanks!
Microsoft did write their an OS in C# though, and who knows, it might rear it's head again someday.
I believe one of the most important ways for this to fit into people's lives is by seeing others (especially non-tech people) using it. So yeah, it'll take a while. I get the same kind of feeling as when the white headphones were starting to appear, though.
it --> 11
It's very true that irrational bettors actually attract speculators (who are able to take their money). So it might be the case that interested parties can't push decision markets too far. I.e., the cost of influencing "policy give me 2 million bucks" might be 3 million dollars.

Robin Hanson certainly believes this is true, but Mencius Moldbug believes he has found a real world case where it isn't. I don't understand the issue well enough to offer an informed opinion.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-sh...
Clearly only the government is capable of scientific research. This is why we cannot tell the difference between different computer hardware, because there is no regulating government agency to do their magic for us.
Why do we have to "kill" anything? Use whatever works for you and stop trying to convince everyone else you're king of the mountain.
Mozilla CEO John Lilly Steps Down: "What’s Next for Me (But Not Yet)"
ActiveX can be sandboxed pretty strongly, but plugins can opt out of it. NaCl seems to leave no way to get out of the sandbox. I think Microsoft could easily add something very similar to NaCl to ActiveX, and then create a distinction in the UI between these sandboxed plugins and the current kind.

Edit: To clarify, ActiveX plugins cannot really "opt out" of IE's sandbox. There are some things they can do to reduce some of the default restrictions, but the most important ones always remain in place.
The whole store strategy makes sense based on what your saying. They got the traffic and a good setup for demoing.

//my Dad bought 1 for himself. It is the first "computer" my Mom has used (MLB app)
Maybe FriendlyRank shouldn't have been so easily reproducible.
> Women have different goals than men and their salaries reflect that.

Cite please that definitively links the pay gap between men and women to "different goals".

> > Women are still expected to shoulder the bulk of the work for raising the next generation.

> What do you mean?

That society is organised in such a fashion as to burden women with the majority of the cost/effort of childcare.
On the other hand, the proportion of sociopathic personalities in a prison is probably much higher than in an HN thread...

And sociopaths are less likely to be burdened with empathy/loyalty/etc.
Interesting how the TechCrunch article cites the "qualitative research" of simpsoncarpenter.com -- whose site my grandmother would never navigate to find whatever article Mr. Carpenter wrote about the iPad. I guess he knows about what "won't go mass market anytime soon" from his own example.

For HNers purposes, quantitative research might be more significant. Me, for example. I don't care whether an iPad has no place in my work/personal life.

I do care whether enough (quantitatively) people are purchasing/using iPads to influence my business decisions about how I target my app development work. (I know, I'm a mercenary SOB, right?)
I believe you meant to say "These people must have had their privacy set to 'Everyone'.
Thanks. I had to adjust the brightness on my screen to see it; it says: touch, grep, unzip, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount.

Clearly someone's worried about the integrity of their filesystem.
This article isn't quite as trollish as its title, but it fails to mention the most important point: it's only because the major forms of feminism succeeded that we live in a society where women can get educated, vote, etc. I don't know anyone who wouldn't be horrified to see that rolled back. So, on the important points, we are all feminists.

It's true that feminist ideology has led to misconceptions and excesses that society is now having to correct. But it's hard to imagine that a social change of this magnitude -- has there ever been a bigger one? -- could take place with enough precision not to go too far. You can't launch a rocket that stops on a dime. The solution is simply to refine and correct. This is happening.

That a single generation fell for the fallacy that women and men are the same was entirely to be expected given the importance and magnitude of the shift, and is little more than a historical blip along the way. The overwhelming majority of younger women don't think like that.
http://jsbeautifier.org/, which usually can solve problems like this, wasn't able to help.