skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One possible justification would be it distorts the reality of what actually happened in the past. It alters conversations by removing a speaker, creating a hole.

I'm not judging you one bit. I don't know which sites you were referring to, and you're clearly taking the nice-guy approach. But there are arguable reasons to not remove content just because someone is embarrassed of their past self.
Sexual Assault Case Against WikiLeaks Founder Reopened
Emo Rant
There is a big difference between acting accordingly to the social group you're into and eventually see the different segments collide, and exposing a publicly available book of all your diverse personalities in the various stages of your life.

What I foresee isn't a clamp down on privacy policies, rather a general people's flattening of behavioral characteristics, in order to keep the acceptable boundaries between all the different, inevitably public, social situations.
>>The prosecutors seem to be playing a PR game very publicly.

I'm not going to argue that Swedish prosecutors won't play a PR game -- but I do think a good argument could be made that if Hanlon's razor was ever apt, it would be for Swedish police/prosecution... :-(

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
TweeShot launches TwitPic-for-screenshots
Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" is pretty good too (I found the chemistry in it quite fascinating).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Mars-Robert-Zubrin/dp/068483550...

However, these days if I ever did end up on Mars (unlikely, I know) I'd probably me a Red rather than a Green.
Science’s dead end?
"Who wants a future in which several (not just one) profitable companies can access your e-mail and analysing it blazing fast?"

It's all about choice. If I want to grant some organisation access to all, or a subset of my email, then that's fine. It's up to the individual what they want to share and with whom.
Here is one guys, early, take on Iron. Pretty much just comments stuff out.

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam
Thinking about making my table-top RPG an iPad app. Looking for advice.
I wrote a fantasy role-playing game called Wayfarers a couple of years ago, and have been selling PDFs and hardcopies of it and supplements since. It’s more of a hobby than a business, but one that I plan to continue for some time.

After playing with the iPad, I think it would be awesome to rewrite the book as an app. Tables in the book could randomly generate results, and characters could be built. Also, I could update for errata and new features and material.

I don’t think I could make much money, but I am really excited about the idea, and I think it would be a lot of fun.

I have all of the art and text ready to go, but my programming experience is limited to some FORTRAN and Matlab for physics research years ago.

How difficult of a task am I looking at here to teach myself how to build the app and do it? I’m considering teaching myself, but I have other projects in the works. If I were to pay someone to do it, what kind of time frame could I expect?

Any advice at the moment would be appreciated, as I am trying to figure out the best way to make this happen. I’m convinced that this is going to be the future of tabletop RPG material, and it would be so cool.

Thanks,

-Jimmy
* In the current Facebook and Google Indexing style of amassing information, there is no way for me to do this.*

This isn't really true. If you want to be known as a different person, be that different person. Whether your online 'persona' catches up is not the same thing. Your online persona is not you. People who mistake one for the other were probably not worth knowing to begin with.
Or even theft. I lost more than a week's work last year becuase a team member had his laptop, external harddrive, and desktop stolen from his house while he was visiting his parents for Thanksgiving. Whoops. Triple backups don't count if they're all in one apartment.
Obviously. You can also backup your files to a folder on the same disk, but you wont will you.
If there is anything viaweb has taught me, nothing beats performance like static html pages.

Can you publish static html files and simply have an ajax component for the commenting and any other dynamic stuff handled by node.js?

Just throwing that idea out there. Criticisms?

Yeah, I know he is just looking to get his existing setup stable, and he shouldn't change it.
Extending HTML5 — Microformats
I wrote this little shellscript to backup all my Git repositories on GitHub: http://github.com/avar/github-backup

It runs in cron and backs up all my data daily.
It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants
(that’s “bewraying its kecks” for you medieval time-travelers).

Euyagh, he's doing another Baroque Cycle? I just re-read that, and while it's not awful, he really is at his best when he's writing about tech.

Snow Crash was good. Interface was good. Diamond Age was okay. The Baroque Cycle was a slog, and Anathem was a blight, a cinderblock of a book full of made-up words and pointless obfuscation.

I am not optimistic about this latest venture, especially considering the buzzword-density on the front page of their site.
Can New CEO Save Digg?
If I were you, I would just spend some money and get a professional template like http://templatic.com/cms-themes/iphone-app which is specially for you to sell apps. (It's a wordpress theme)

This particular theme may not suite your genre of app, but I'm sure on the internet there are many. Also as for promotion, maybe you would like to contact freeappaday.com which does promotion - but you would have to offer your app free for a few days.
Oy. This comes the day after I moved all of my sites to Rackspace Cloud.
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The instructions for adding a public key to the authorized_keys file are a bit reckless, as they will wipe out any others that exist. Although not universal (not included with Mac OS X, for example) the ssh-copy-id command is much preferable. At its most basic:

ssh-copy-id example.com

Or, to specify a specific key & remote user:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub bob@example.com

This will properly append the key, with the bonus of securing the permissions of the remote user's home, ~/.ssh, and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
A real world example of a diffrent topology is is a dress whose straps intercect with one wrapping around the other so they from an X on someones back.
What if I'm on a two-hour flight, though? A one-hour response time is ridiculous.
Can You Rank Higher Getting Listed on DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Such?
The traditional model of paying for content may not hold up when the content “be canned and sent around to your friends for free,”

How laughably ridiculous. It's probably still easier to give someone an actual book you bought than it is to share even a DRM-free e-book.
What should (hopefully) happen is that after a period of adjustment, people will respect your right to be different in different walks of life. They'll understand that it's possible, and indeed desirable, to be reliable and professional at work while still being immature with your kids and occasionally irresponsible with your friends.

What really needs to change is the need to maintain the appearance of being different people (because you're always you, unless you have severe psychological issues you aren't really different people). People need to understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap.

It's just an extension of the adjustment that started with dress down - an understanding that wearing jeans didn't make me any less smart than wearing a suit. People will understand that playing Mario Kart while drunk with my friends doesn't make me less able than if I spent that time reading Dickens.
You typically want to enable the post-update hook on the server by mv '${GITDIR}/hooks/post-update.sample' '${GITDIR}/hooks/post-update'.

This makes sure that the repository works with dumb servers which is required for things like http/cgit.
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Startup Accelerator TechStars Is Coming To NYC
Sure, Github can lose data. And you can lose data. But the advantage is that you and Github are much less correlated; the odds that both of you will lose the data at the same time are fairly low. [1]

Data safety is all about fighting correlation. You don't back up one partition to another on the same spindle, because when the drive dies the whole spindle is lost. Paranoid people back up to two different drives, two different disk controllers, two different machines, two different datacenters, two different continents...

---

[1] But nonzero. It is worth thinking about the scenarios.
Making computer memory work like the human brain
You should already have those things in place for your server. I don't think that the marginal cost of managing git is much if you're already managing a database, web server, application, mail server, and so on.
It's going to take a long time, though, before it really sinks in to the general population that you cannot reliably remove access to data. In the interim, we'll continue to have lots of hand-wringing and legal flailing about, which makes this whole space uncertain for companies too large to move offshore and too small to throw lobbyists at the problem.
Your earnest tone and a surprising number of up votes prompted me to write this response,

Based on my own experiences in India and your remarks (quoted below), you strike me as a dejected young man.

"This is precisely why I don't want to stay in India beyond a certain point."

"the state has promised food and ration for school going children with uniforms. So, what happens on the ground is that a few officials come together and sell the provisions on the open market and buy substandard food instead"

"What will emerge out of this chaos is something that no one can predict..."

Now what is not right and in fact dangerous about these opinions is that some may believe them and take them for the complete facts.

Have you ever thought about the guy who promised and then implemented the food and uniform scheme for school going children? What was his motivation? Is he oblivious to the corruption around him? I think not, I think he is working within the constraints to make sure that the next generation is literate, healthy and has a better future.

For nearly 20 years I have been betting against India (I grew up there and now live in the US) and I have been proven wrong.

When you sympathize with Kashmiri separatists did you also think about what happens if there was indeed a separate Kashmir? Will that be a more peaceful prosperous nation or a neighbor at war ? We already have examples of such states in the Indian sub-continent.

"What is far more disturbing is that few are willing to even look at the problem let alone start developing solutions for it."

I disagree. People do recognize these problems and are addressing it,

From the same wikipedia article you quoted,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite-Maoist_insurgency

"In 2006 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Naxalites "The single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country."

India has a billion problems and pray tell me which nation does not ?

Here are some questions that I found interesting :

Why has this nation not disintegrated in the last 60 years ?
What binds it together?

The answers to these questions amaze me. Try as an exercise finding answers to these questions.

If I were you I will not let these issues depress you and sway you one way or the other. Like Mahatma Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world".

I am not a nationalist and I am not the first to say this but there are only a few nations/civilizations that at its core firmly believes in an "Universal Well Being".

And remember the motto of India is "Truth alone Triumphs".
Dreamspark - free development software for students
Yellow Page Advertising Fails Again
I don't know the answer, but I think I know the general direction. And unless I'm mistaken, you're wrong about the "2 prisoners".

Semi-Spoiler alert

As I interepreted the parent post, he hasn't found a way, with 2 prisoners, to do better than the strategy of every prisoner picking a random box. Under that strategy, your chance of success is 0.25 - 0.5 * 0.5 (each has a 0.5 chance of being right).

So if, as you say, you can get the probability to 0.5 for 2 prisoners, you are doing better than chance. (And this I already know how to do, I'm assuming for more prisoners it's the same idea, but generalized).

Am I making sense at all?
While I think the project itself seems interesting, I can't help but wish he'd done something SciFi instead.
Here is where you see that open-source doesn't really attract ux experts or designers. I also miss the final touch on my linux that would make it truly enjoyable experience.
Do you realize that most of those "made-up words" in Anathem were just lightly mangled Latin?

I'm due for a reread of the Baroque Cycle before too long, so I won't pass judgement on it here, but I'd happily welcome another Anathem.
I don't know, I turned it on and it said an update was ready (it gives you the option to install it later though). You can check by going to Settings > About phone > System Updates. Only noticed a few new things so far, including some new retroactively pre-installed apps like Amazon MP3 and other stuff.

Hmm, I just tried starting a mobile hotspot and it seemed to work, despite several warnings that I needed the feature enabled via Verizon. I hope it didn't somehow automatically enable something to be billed to Verizon because that would be sketchy!
A savvy network admin with Ethereal could find out...
You should have seen it at the beginning.

To be fair, at the beginning it didn't claim to be a website -- it just said "there will be a website here later, meanwhile go read these blog posts about tarsnap".
Again, completely useless unless you are using Gmail. Wake me when they come out with a Firefox plugin that doesn't require Gmail.

Really cool, though (I'm referring to Rapportive).
New Breed of Patent Claim Bedevils Product Makers
Another good solution is installing gitorious. Especially if you have a big team and a few projects.
"wikileaks \> Julian Assange."

Well that remains to be seen. Sure they have some sysadmins and lawyers in the background, but how many people are there going to be willing to live the lifestyle mr. Assange lives, traveling around the world from city to city, relying on a wide support network to provide him with places to stay, secure contacts, means of communication? Not much is known about him, but the journalists who have been digging into his past mostly come up with a highly unusual individual, not someone who can easily be replaced by an ad in the Economist like so many international aid organizations traditionally do when they lose a high-level employee for one reason or another.
>>I've been known to spend hours in there due to good books.

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1281257293.html
Ex-Googlers At Facebook Working Hard To Avoid Google's Fate
Method to Grade Teachers Provokes Battles
> I don’t think I could make much money, but I am really excited about the idea, and I think it would be a lot of fun.

It's not fun. There are some parts that are fun. The Cocoa framework is a joy to work with, compared with some other languages/frameworks. You can definitely see the 20+ yrs of NextStep lineage. Like deploying your app to the iPad for the first time. And most especially when you get the finished product in the App Store.

> I have all of the art and text ready to go

+10. The fact you have the artwork is huge. Even better if you did it yourself. Programmers are commodities. Programmers who can do some design are not.

> I’m considering teaching myself, but I have other projects in the works.

You have to choose whether to drop everything else and put them on the backburner. There is not one single competent iPhone programmer I've met who learned without going after their first iPhone project with near-maniacal focus.

> How difficult of a task am I looking at here to teach myself how to build the app and do it?

How dedicated are you to the task? From personal experience and that of others, I conservatively estimate it will take about 150-200 hours of hands-on work before Objective C/Cocoa stops being the problem and starts becoming the solution. That is about 2 months.
Yes, I am not judging you either, but it could very well be too expensive, technically difficult or perhaps even damaging to your business (for example by reducing the other users' benefit) to remove data. I was just curious.

Also I wonder if in the future lawmakers will put mechanisms into place that regulate information and give individuals the right to have their records deleted.
I like Tarsnap's design. It's easy to tell what's going on and there's no eye-candy to get in the way. The lack of design is old-school in a pleasing way.
I think Apple did something similar where schools can sign up students as iOS developers too. I think the idea is great, I would have loved if something similar was available when I was in High School and starting College.
10 Mistakes That Start-Up Entrepreneurs Make
yeah, I bloggged about it last year, but thought of sharing on this community since I only joined recently. Even last year it seemed like it existed for a while. Did you find other interesting use cases of exploring their location data? I'd like to see some way of doing some sort of location analytics based on all the places they already have on there.
The "someone" is the person running the website. So no, of course I don't mind. What is the danger?

I already leave a log of my IP address, the web browser I'm using, the links I click, the time/date of my visit and any data that I submit through forms. If they want to monitor my mouse position as well, then fine.
Sure (i just googled my favourite username, and found indeed some pretty old stuff that i'd rather keep forgotten). But listing all the appearances of your online persona is one thing, being able to search for your real-life name and retrieve all the embarrassing info attached to it is another. I'm not saying privacy-conscious persons should obfuscate absolutely everything they publish, but considering how things work, the least anyone should do is to make the retrieval of such information a bit more difficult.
I know of at least one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rop_Gonggrijp

He's already involved in wikileaks.
This is true. Not being able to completely "unshare" data is not something people generally consider before sharing.
I think most of what is good/unique about clojure doesn't come from being lisp though. For example - its concurrency constructs, seq/lazy-seq abstraction, persistent data structures that work with seq, java interop, etc.

Being a lisp doesn't hurt it, especially in the context of DSLs mentioned, but I don't think it defines it either.
Ask HN: Frameworks to write cross-browser plugins and/or GMail extensions?
After reading about the Rapportive browser plugin/addon/extension that inserts itself into GMail, it got me to thinking if anyone has any recommendations on how to build browser extensions for various browsers from (hopefully) a mostly-shared codebase.

Rapportive was here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652362

edit - changed "plugin" to "extension", after reading this: http://colonelpanic.net/2010/08/browser-plugins-vs-extensions-the-difference/
Most likely it will not be up to the individual.

First, the individual will chose the default 80% of the time just because it's the default. Second, granting access to your data is irreversible: once a company has read it, you can't make it forget. It's no longer your choice.

But you didn't answer the real question: would you willingly grant access to your e-mail to a profitable company? Do you know anyone who would?
BBC Makes Money From Online Advertising
Glad to hear more tech is coming to NY. Now I may not have to move to the Bay Area after all. :)
Controversial Research Topics Instantly Capture Attention
The first task that one desires to do when he is asked to write a research paper is to come up with an attention-grabbing topic. Undeniably, writing about something that is truly motivating has numbers of perquisites. When exploring on controversial research topics, it is also imperative that you keep an open mind and write about issues in an unbiased manner.
And the TOS forbids anything else (I just signed up):

You agree not to do any of the following while using the Site, Content, Files or Services:

* Attempt to access or search the Site, Content, Files or Services with any engine,
software, tool, agent, device or mechanism other than the software and/or search
agents provided by Dropbox or other generally available third-party web browsers
(such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), including but not limited
to browser automation tools
The Art of Engineering By David Kirkham
Because there are people who consider themselves technical writers. Either they do it or someone from the core postgresql team who has the credibility.
Or his model is wrong. So many folks assume, since they succeeded, they are responsible for that success. Market conditions, accidental sales, and Brownian motion may in fact be more important.

Even considering YC companies, who's to say how many would have succeeded anyway? There's no control, so no experiment.
Oursql - a better mysql binding for python
The world is running out of helium -- because the U.S. is selling it, wholesale
Thinking Clearly About Performance, Part 1
What if a boxing promoter said "I know this guy, you fight him and we'll share the money?" Pay squat for an idea, and you've paid too much.
Textbook Rentals Go Into Hypergrowth
If someone asks for their account to be removed from a website there are places where you are obliged by law to comply. I live in such a place. But I don't remove their data because I'm obliged by law, but simply because I think that people should own their own creations, and should have the ultimate say over what happens to them, unless they explicitly created something as work for hire and got compensated.

Let's take two different examples: facebook vs HN.

If we're looking at facebook then someone would have a really good case to have their account and all data associated with it removed if they asked for it. In some places that would be legally enforceable.

In the case of HN I think the contributions are woven in to the site so strongly that other peoples stuff would be negatively affected. In such a case I would propose to anonymize the writer.

This avoids the embarrassment but leaves the fabric largely in tact.
Daily, weekly and snapshot backups with Linode are $5 on top of what I'm paying them anyway (and just a few clicks to set up). That's less than the cost of GitHub's micro plan and I can have as many private repos as I want.

I love GitHub and I'm sure they'll continue to do well, but running your own Git server is only going to get easier. If you don't need the social side of what they offer, hosting yourself makes sense.
> Also I wonder if in the future lawmakers will put mechanisms into place that regulate information and give individuals the right to have their records deleted.

That's already happened in some places.

http://www.jurofoon.nl/nieuws/weblog.asp?id=3039

(Dutch).