skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually architected something for this on the last airplane ride I was on. Here's the gist.

First of all, there is a basic protocol that any social application can adopt to. It basically consists of a few URIs like /user/login/, /user/register/, etc.

Secondly, since "virality" is key in getting something like this implemented, I propose that there is a form of global identity database that is accessible by anyone. Only email, user_id (depends on provider), and provider_id information is stored (I'll get to the provider bit in a second). Any identifying information is hashed to protect private information. The issue is making this database publicly run (similarly to Bittorrent) and being able to publish the hashing algorithm used. It would obviously have to be more complex than MD5 or SHA1.

Thirdly, there are what I call "providers". Providers are basically apps like Facebook and Twitter. They are capable of deciding what information is public. There aren't any privacy "settings" for each provider. Each provider's privacy policy is static and will not change. I.e. provider A will display to the world your SS#, name, and phone number, whereas provider B will display just your name. This is done to eliminate any gray areas.

Thirdly, the idea of "notifications" and connections. Connections are one-way (like Twitter). So, you might be wondering, how do you connect between two "social networks"? You search for the person you're looking for by email and are given their user_id and provider_id. Your provider then has all it needs to connect with this person (it sends a message to the friend's provider to a notification endpoint, and the friend's provider then can do whatever it wants with that information).

Notifications consist of updates, connections made, and other things (possibilities are endless).

Rules:

1) Users can only use one provider at any given time.

2) Users can choose to delete their profiles on demand.

3) User data can be exported so that provider migration is quick and easy.

I should write a blog post about this. There's way more. I called it OpenConnection.
Beyond or beside Google: Week 3 - Duck Duck Go
Nope, I'm not leaving.

But what I have done is sanitize my profile info and remove all of my 'likes'. I joined FB to communicate with friends, not to be a cog in another marketing machine. I'll still use it to keep up with friends and share pics, but that's the limit of it.

Their recent announcement that they are going to be sharing their databases with 3rd parties is what pushed me to take these steps.
I was taking your larger first sentence. You don't even necessarily have to freak out an embedded programmer to get closer to secure, there are a variety of "safe" C dialects. (I don't know enough about them to even begin to judge them, but I don't deny that it ought to be possible.)

But I do think once you shook The Establishment free of C that they would not necessarily move to C+-; there would be a window to wedge some other things in there.
For my MacBook, yes. For my Mini, no.

My rationale is that laptops are more fragile than desktops so the extra protection is worth the expense. Its been 2 years now and I haven't needed it yet though :/
For me, its never been the initial coding of HTML that was the problem; there's always been plenty of text-editor solutions like auto-close and find-matching tags. Instead, the PITA of HTML is refactoring it and moving bits around, which is what Haml alleviates, but this does not.
I'm sure these things can help but they aren't cures for depression. I exercise every day and get a lot of sun but still deal with depression and anxiety. I think that more important than sun/exercise is being around other people.

Americans put such a high value on privacy to the point of isolation. I believe that that isolation allows psychological problems to come to the surface when they would otherwise not. Part of that is loneliness, part is the built in need to conform to a group's social dynamic which includes not acting crazy. Your behavior has a strong influence on your psychological state, so acting normal and happy can help regulate your moods.

Not to imply that this is a cure either. Including meds, these are all just treatments and they may work better for some than for others.
I took anti-depressants (and similar) after a suicide attempt and put into ward. The emotion they took me to is not what I would say "anti-depressed." I was still depressed. There was still anxiety. There was still the hunger for suicide. What was done instead is a kind of "loss of caring." There would still be that crushing darkness, but it would not drive me so much. There would still be that crippling terror, never leaving, but it would not deter my actions so much. Every night my friend would call to me again, but his voice more quiet. Then come the side-effects.

I would not recommend this life to one who can avoid it. This was my private hell and I would not return there willingly. It did not eliminate my despair. Just me more dull and numb to it.

But maybe you are not like me.
Not on FB, MySpace, or Twitter. Accounts on all three lasted no more than a week. Reason? Spectacularly mundane way to interact with other humans who live dull lives.
This makes me sick. There should be no room for human rights and comfort in a place for those who unabashedly trampled the rights and lives of others.

Also, I think prison should be ONLY for those who unabashedly trampled the rights and lives of others. There are a lot of people in prison these days whom I don't believe belong there.
Facebook's "Evil Interfaces"
Its more of a Software Engineering Masters rather than computer science.
well sometimes its your friends.. that will put pictures up of you without knowing, or will tag you in and can't remove it yourself
What about http://beyondthewhiteboard.com/ ? It's not perfect, but it's fairly good at tracking progress.
Off topic, but I thought this was the most appropriate thread. I just got a place in Somerville (lucky me ;-)). Are there any cool events around where you can meet people and make friends?
How about paying for subscriptions to web apps with your corporate CC?

As an employee at a corporation, would you have an easier time charging $400/month to subscribe to a web-app or charging $4,800 up-front for a yearly subscription?
FWIW, I have a friend whose life improved on Lexapro. It did not impact him creatively nor did it make him less funny (which is important, he's comedy writer). I'm not inclined to believe it was the placebo effect as he was very skeptical of being medicated.
In my mind the question should also be how much can your manager approve via credit card without anyone expecting a business case to support the purchase.

In my case I regularly approve hundreds of thousands dollars for other people, but I generally have everything of mine approved credit card or not. What's important is that if I can justify if to my manager and if it's under 5k then it requires only a conversation, but over 5k I'm writing business cases and having all kinds of scrutiny and less chances to compete for budget $.

May seem strange, but using the 5k amount has always seemed like a loop hole. I've seen data vendors sell data for just under 5k every month otherwise the annual wouldn't even be considered. I generally find them and end up shutting them down or using the monthly costs as a business case to make data purchases in full just to save money.
We're working on fixing this issue. Fortunately, I think our system works better.

http://www.facecash.com
It sounds like a miracle that no one was hurt!
tl;dr. This didn't need to go on beyond, "I'm not interested in jobs where a CS masters is useful." This was just a primer on being a decent software engineer.
Great response. Thank you.

I was thinking of doing exactly that -- charging just under $5k/month for a data service.

It seems, however, like that might be a poor decision.
Meetup.com is great for this. I'd also recommend being active on twitter; plenty of events spread through there. Use http://search.twitter.com if you need a starting point. Check out http://greenhornconnect.com/ 's events section for startup-related stuff.
Computer Virus TV News Report 1988
Middlesex Philosophy Department Faces Closure
Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services
Most cashiers hand my card back to me with the receipt to sign, and can't verify my signature. But many stores are now switching to using a PIN with chip cards, at least here in Canada. And Europe's had chip cards forever now. In fact, some places there no longer even have machines to read a magnetic stripe.
Well, it sets the 'tone' of the site. Just like the conversation will be different with the same group of people depending on whether they're all dressed in tshirts or if they're all dressed in formalwear... in each case, they're the same people 'underneath', but the image each sees of others and each's self-image will differ.

There's an additional layer of mapping added when using shortnames - the user has to remember a whole list of "@donkey2001,Joe Smith" tuples; most people (and especially non-geeks) like and operate better with fewer layers of abstraction.

The usage of a full name on Facebook makes explicit the roughly one-to-one correspondence between accounts and actual-people that is expected by users and required by the service; Twitter users openly create multiple profiles with different names and even identities, and the service and tools encourage that. In that sense, Twitter has more of a sense of a masquerade or Halloween party and less like a business meeting or high-school reunion.

Each has its strengths and its place, and the longer I use both, the less I feel like there's direct competition between the two.
Python and ruby are both great languages. You should try each out for a week before deciding. Check out the libraries, although I think they both cover all bases more or less.

You might want to do an app with Rails and Django (or some other framework -- many to chose from) and see how you like it.
The motherboard on my MacBook just fried. I don't have AppleCare, but Apple fixed it for free, well outside of any warranty.
+1 It would definitely be; the grass-roots self-organizing meet up here in San Diego has been gaining real traction (market's pulling for this! at least a small niche community). Our most recent 4th meet up saw 16-17 people, with about 40% of new faces who heard about it on HN the very same day - and I suspect we would have a higher turnout if the SD HN meet up announcement wasn't only on the front page for a few seconds. If the regulars showed up this previous time, we would have easily had ~25 people.

Knowing that there is a meet up in your location is the #1 problem; so it's a problem of discovery. If you can help with discoverability, then everything else becomes less of an issue. Adding each other on Facebook/Twitter, using a Google groups email list, setting up a basic page for the meet up etc. is a non-issue.

At least, "physical" issues HN can't solve ;) Like, our group now hangs out from 7+pm all the way until midnight, and many business owners prefer we don't hog their space on a Friday since it's a busy time for them.

Maybe we could try to bum some free space from big businesses. Some of us who have corporate day jobs may try to get HR depts to approve the using of one of the business meeting rooms, etc. Corporations do this all the time for non-profits and techie events.

For SD HN, aside from the obvious, like somewhere not too noisy and can fit the size of the crowd, we prefer somewhere that at least provides wireless, electricity is a plus (so that people can show off their work, demo stuff and get feedback)
There is one actually, it's called spokt.com.
"Although we didn't specifically mention Facebook in our question, by far the most popular suggestions were variations on this one from @heisenthought on Twitter:

"How about 'zuck'? As in: 'That user-interface totally zuckered me into sharing 50 wedding photos. That kinda zucks'"
Them as a company or them as the individual engineers?
When i want to code HTML i use HTML.vim (for vim of course). Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy.

I'd be interested in knowing if this is available for some OS X editor (pref a free one) and whether they have vim support. (Cant recall if TextWrangler is free)
Define easily. We have no idea what the Adobe Flash codebase looks like, but given its age and complexity, it's probably pretty hairy. And it was never designed to be open sourced, so there probably weren't any efforts made to keep proprietary and non-proprietary code separate. Going back through and doing the necessary surgery is probably possible but not easy.
What I mean is they are selling your personal information __in addition__ to regular ads (which are selected by datamining your personal information).

As opposed to just regular ads.
You just have to base64 encode the username/password and add it in as the value of an HTTP header. Tedious compared to most other HTTP libraries though, I agree.
View -> Text Encoding -> Autodetect.

This seems to resolve the issue well enough.
Not having a Facebook account will not prevent people from posting pictures of you on their own, and even including your name in the picture description (thereby "tagging" you in every way except the notification.)
That is a great point. In my research I found that having friends that you share time with and eat with improves happiness. Also, having less stuff actually makes me happier too.
A classic piece which contains one of the best things ever written about design:

Take the hardest and most profound thing you need to do, make it great, and then build every easier thing out of it.

It's interesting to me that the idea that inspired Kay to this insight was FEXPRs: letting functions control the evaluation of their arguments. FEXPRs have long been banished from the Lisp world, which makes a sharp distinction between functions and macros (only the latter get to control evaluation). I still don't quite understand the reasons for this, and it seems like Kay doesn't either -- or at least didn't when he was inventing Smalltalk.
Except the video format needs to stay the same, because no one wants to keep encoding their videos to the latest format so they will work. In the case of the migration from IE to Firefox, they were both HTML browsers so it's not really a good analogy.
hmmm.. what distro is this ?

Because AFAIK, ubuntu distros (and maybe redhat/fedora even) suffer from multisecond delays due to ipv6 lookups - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/eglibc/+bug/...

I thought this article had some solution to that (other than disabling ipv6, right now) - but dont think so
Does "too big to fail" apply for something like h264 once the entire internet relies on it?
Marco: Dear Adobe, flash should be HTML5 creation tools.
Psych-ERs are some of the most dehumanizing places I've ever been, and given the start of social services in North Central Texas. shudder Unfortunately, without insurance, any prescription usually necessitates a trip.

Luckily, I have my anxiety in check now that it has a name, but, I've seen too many discarded people laying on hospitals floors with sheets over their faces.

My current girlfriend is a third year in med school, I've begged her to ask the other med students to be especially kind to the patients during their psych rotations.
Interesting article. Although I think it is an overreaction. Obviously MPEG-LA could be trying to enforce their patents against everyone, but they aren't. Given the level of adoption of H.264 if they started to do so they would quickly kill their potential income stream.

The answer isn't for everyone to go back to the dark ages of mjpeg, it is to convince MPEG-LA to be reasonable.
Why do you object to highly processed substances?
The powers that be are working hard to take the net away from us. It came in under the radar. We peasants were never supposed to have our own media.
I've found that hot tea is wonderful in warm weather. It's like you just stop pretending that a cold glass of water is going to make you any less hot & instead choose to enjoy the heat.
You've mentioned several restrictions without any enforcement mechanism.
Wow. OSM really is not even close to any of its competitors.
I had a fraternity brother in college who was gay. At some point in time, he realized that he was gay, but didn't want to come out.

An incriminating picture was posted on facebook and he was forced to reveal his sexual orientation to all of us (well we kinda suspected anyway) before he was ready in a pretty awkward way. He had to do the same not that long after with his family and it didn't go well at all.

All because someone posted a picture on facebook that was up for less than 30 minutes. I put the blame mainly on the person who put up the picture, but still, he should have had control over this kind of thing.
For very small values of change
Didn't know about this, thanks. Further reading: Two viewpoints:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law

http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002518.html
I think it's a smart move to provide both options: a monthly under 5k and a discounted annual.

Good business decisions are up to the company doing the buying - it's your job to be flexible, supportive and upfront about what the options are.

IMHO
Also, the point of HAML isn't just to make writing code faster, but to make it more maintainable as well. You lose that with Zen Coding.
Didn't it seem odd that they also predicted moving to LCD's and away from CRTs? I'm calling shenanigans on this video.
forget credit cards, my name has been misspelled on my driver's license since i can remember, spanning 2 states and 1 decade. I've never been asked about it. Not when i bought my house or started a business or opened credit... no one cares.
Absolutely — AppleCare has paid for itself multiple times over every time I've purchased it.
for me reimbursing applecare is easier than every problem it will have down the line, even if the later problems are cheaper. - YES
14 mins to start your own XAMPP server on Windows 2008 server R2
Dear god, a post about Facebook's privacy change that's logical, non-extremist and generally makes sense. Thank you.
Twitter Speed in Real Time
Writing a College Research Paper Outline
A college research paper outline would always remain as an integral part of the completed term paper, as students plan their presentation, based on research findings about their chosen topic.
Ask HN: Do good front-end designers like HAML too, or is it just programmers?
I do not mean any offense. HAML (and its variants) seems to have advantages.<p>But until general web designers adopt it, HAML is more a tool for programmers to write UI.<p>What is the uptake for those of you who live in UI/CSS/HTML land vs back-end code land?
"well sometimes its your friends.. that will put pictures up of you without knowing, or will tag you in and can't remove it yourself"

As many have pointed out, this happens already in blogs and email, on twitter, in various forums, etc., and not joining facebook will do nothing to prevent it from happening on facebook.

But more importantly, if you don't want your friends doing X or Y to you on facebook, you have a very powerful method of ensuring that at your disposal: make it clear that you find this unacceptable when it happens. Over time, people get the message before making the mistake, and these expectations harden into social norms. Ultimately, relying on these social norms is much more robust than relying on technological solutions, in my opinion.
Videocon V1306 Dual SIM Mobile Review
Yes. My macbook is the single most important device that I need to do my job. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and I will use it every day until its untimely demise / upgrade.

It's worth paying a little extra to help ensure my source of income doesn't go up in smoke (literally?).
I think sigzero means "different" as in "not contradictory or in conflict"
Where I work, everything.... EVERYTHING.... has to go through purchasing. Even a box of staples.
This is a great benefit of being a software developer. With a decent amount of motivation it's possible to increase our knowledge and skills by a huge amount.

The internet puts so much information at our fingertips. Especially in recent years there are so many new languages, databases, libraries, etc. that if you want to learn something you can just do it. You don't need to go through a masters program, or even through a training course for that matter.
> However, the only information that I've ever put on Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know

Congratulations, you already demonstrated your agreement with the author and effectively stopped using Facebook then.

The whole point of Facebook is to enable a you to form a private community of friends that share things. If you've degraded that to "only what I will share with everyone in the universe" then you've essentially withdrawn from Facebook already.
It sounds pretty extremist to me. This person is apparently so paranoid they will not use any form of hosted service, email, etc, or if they do, they only put things in there that they trust the entire universe to see. I would say that puts them in a tiny minority of people - ie. quite extreme.
So in your view, people should just have "one or two" friends on Facebook? How many people do you know who actually use Facebook like that? Do you really think that is the intended purpose of Facebook?
Arctic explorers get nasty surprise: rain
I agree with the first two paragraphs, I think you went a little nuts after that though.
Your site looks gorgeous, but I think your tagline and copy could use some serious work. After I read "The future of payments has arrived" I had no idea what your product does, and you failed my 5 second filter. Since I wanted to maybe suggest an alternative, though, I spent some more time to figure out what you product does by reading the bottom. I still couldn't figure out what your product does. Does this thing link my face with my credit card somehow? Why on earth would I share banking details with you if I have no idea what the benefit will be. Why no about page, at least?
Can you provide an example of facebook "selling private data"? I work there, and it would be a great surprise to me if you could.
This advice is correct, but you can still learn good programming technique via php by using http://kohanaphp.com

OOP, strict php 5, mvc, with a some nice ORM inspired by active record. If you are looking for super easy docs to get you started, checkout the http://codeigniter.com to get you started (kohana is/was forked from CI)

p.s. kohana 3 is the newest version which you can get from github, it's a lot different from 2.x and contains a database mapper called "sprig" i believe. It's supposed to be django-esque but I'm not familiar with django to say anything about that ... only check it out!

Also if you want to go the ruby route, of course there's ROR but do take a second to look into sinatra, it's SUPER easy. it's simplicity is thus - beautiful.
This is decidedly not the same as the internal guide. 2-space indents are the norm, and functions_like_this are supposed to be spelled FunctionsLikeThis (yes, with the leading capital). Those are the two big differences from PEP8 that I can think of.
I find this odd. It's been awhile since I have done dedicated front-end work, maybe 5 years or so, but it was never writing this kind of code that was the real time suck, it was always making sure it worked in every browser that was the real problem.
If you really look at it, this is true for just about any field. For example, most of my mathematics education has come from the Internet or sources that were pointed out/purchased using the Internet. Other than giving you access to smart people face-to-face and a stupid piece of paper, the Internet can give you everything valuable about a college education and more.

(I know you can earn degrees online, but they are usually extremely poor quality and often inconsistent.)