skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I haven't seen much correlation between real names and quality; more seems to be between the forum type and quality. I'd be interested in a study of that, though.

Two random examples: HN is mostly pseudonyms and has pretty good quality discussion; my local newspaper now uses Facebook Connect to have users post under their real names, and its readers dutifully post a bunch of ignorant trash under their real names.

I do like having semi-stable identities, whether pseudonymous or real. It makes more of a sense of community if you actually recognize people and ascribe viewpoints/personality/etc. to them, rather than every post in effect being written by RandomUser92736 with no continuity between discussions, or any ability to form within-community reputation.
Facebook will delete you if you have fake names, too. Mark said at e-g8 too when asked why isn't he allowing people to be anonymous on their network, and he said he knows anonymity can be a useful thing, too, but he's trying to make a social network where people use real names.

I fail to see how Google+ is any different. Use your own name and you'll be fine.
Fairly cool, but noticed it doesn't seem to be supporting @font-face CSS directives.
I agree that people should be able to see photos tagged with their name, though it's not a certainty that they were there. People often tag (e.g.) pictures of their kids with the names of the grandparents, so the grandparents will be sure to see them. On the dark side, there are also users who tag people maliciously (tagging a picture of Hitler with their boss's name, say).

I don't agree with letting them see the whole album by default. Albums aren't necessarily associated with an event. If you have an album called "Family", you might want to let your buddy see the pictures of the family barbecue he attended, without necessarily sharing the picture of your wife breastfeeding.
Jekyll (Ruby) is better.
Every Book Is a Startup (A book about the business of publishing)
That would be cool, but I guess there would be cheaper ways to do it - a TRS-80 CoCo is more or less as complex as a C64 and that requires just an FPGA. You could build the whole TRS-80 line inside one chip.
Some users are getting locked out of their entire google accounts, not just G+. That's the difference.
I thought it was by design, to illustrate what Unicode train wrecks look like ;-)
> “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default documents

I have to say, something like this wouldn't be very useful to me. I want more control over how my mass storage is used: I frequently run systems with mostly-full partitions, and something like that sounds like a very quick way to push my system over the edge into constant failure mode.
Old as hell. Why did you put it up?
Let's wheel out the old Doug Bowman quotes on "Google design by committee"
Science evolved directly out of philosophy. Before science was called science, it was referred to as "natural philosophy."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy

Principia Mathematica's full title is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Pretty cool, I submitted a message for my future self.

I would add a privacy note, stating what you said here about dropping the emails/message after sending - I couldn't find anything on there that resembled a privacy policy.

Other thing that would make it slightly more useful, is to add the ability to schedule it versus just random (I would keep the random choice as well, make it the default option even.) But for it to actually be a useful tool, I think the ability to schedule is important.
Sounds like a cool idea... but seems to have some immediate problems to me:

1) you'll never be able to learn the complete syntax to the "language".

2) all statements are ambiguous without knowledge of supporting code. Like what some say about operator overloading, but even worse.

3) what syntax do you write your own code in, if it's closely involved with two different libraries that use different syntaxes?

4) what if two different libraries use the same syntax to do different things?

Does anyone know what the philosophy on these points is for meta-languages?
Android lets me do this OOTB.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers." -- Ayn Rand
It doesn't make the syntax obscure, it makes the syntax standard. Your syntax, being ad hoc, is obscure.
I just want a windows or mac or linux binary, compiled, that runs in the background, and converts text files with markdown in them into full html pages, cms / blog index, archives etc. accoring to a template file, and sticks them in a subdirectory. I can then have them auto uploaded with dropbox. is there such a thing. I want a page generator, but not something that needs db or scripting modules attached to an http server.
I loved ready the examples in this article. They put a smile on my face.
I don't share that "binary view of sharing on the internet".

I store photos "on the internet". I also store emails in Gmail. I face-tag photos with whoever is in them, for the same reasons I tag emails with whoever they relate to.

This is as if Gmail were to automatically share my Gmail conversations whenever I mention someone in an email.
I agree that the public/private/partially-shared features aren't terribly effective and as such am careful about what I post. I do however find them useful. I don't allows re-sharing of my photos and I've told everyone I share photos with that I don't want them re-shared, specifically on facebook. Anyone that goes to the effort to download and share my photos clearly doesn't respect my intent or concerns and is removed from the list of people I share with.
Not being on any social network is starting to get inconvenient, even for (I'm old) me. But if this no fake name thing stays with G+ then I'll be joining the Anon+ network.
It's a _very_ old command, predating many of the command conventions. As the OpenBSD man page puts it:

HISTORY
A find command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
Mobile Affiliate Profits Review
Mobile Affiliate Profits Review
Not to mention the wonderfully inconsistent count() and sort(). Pah.
IANAL but it's bad for citizens because it gives federal courts wider purview on what they'll prosecute for and how they punish for it; needless to say, if your case is getting pushed to federal courts you're fucked, especially when you're being charged under statutes you've never heard of rather than state laws which you may or may not know.
Adobe's BrowserLab does this (https://browserlab.adobe.com/) for mainstream Mac/Windows browsers. You need an AdobeID (registration is free). I've found it much faster than browsershots.org (though you have fewer options). No mobile support, I'm hoping they add that soon.

Edit: 'no mobile support' = 'doesn't emulate mobile browsers'
Yeah, no Frys where I live. :(

We recently got an apple store though, I would never have thought to look there for cables. For some reason assumed they'd be overpriced... :)
All octopus jokes aside, thanks for pointing out The Changelog podcast. I had not heard of this one before and it looks like they cover a lot of great topics.
It's a stylistic flourish and is likely not representative of how he behaves in person. The same can be said for many journalists.
Still strikes me as a useless bit of syntactic sugar. Is it really that much work to write array('foo' => 'bar')? As far as I can tell, writing ['foo' => 'bar'] isn't that much shorter in the first place.

sigh Can the PHP devs focus on the real problems now? cough Unicode anyone? Ridiculously inconsistent naming of string and array functions? The woefully incomplete and useless STL? The lack of OO in arrays and strings?
Then And Now: The Most Visited Domains Of 1996 And Today
For me that's the acid test: whatever it says on your passport is your real name.

Today I learned that I don't have a real name.

More seriously, though, most people I know IRL insist on not going by the name on their passport. If I had one, my name would be "Christopher", but I insist on "Chris" enough that I will not make my name "Christopher" on Google.

For a less silly example, though, most people I know whose names are not derived from their full legal names are some form of non-cisgendered people who simply don't identify with their given names. And, in the US at least, for most purposes it is simply not necessary to go the court-decreed route (we don't have a strict equivalence of a deed poll form for name changes as far as I know) and bringing court and public record into things can be unnecessary trouble until they fall out of those "most purposes".

Of course, these are only a couple of reasons why one might wish not to use their passport names online, but the main point is: it's rarely as simple as you think.
Ushaidi and Nexmo SMS API for nonprofits and charities
We are announcing today Ushahidi Nexmo SMS plugin. Coupled with our 10% discount for non-profits, the new plugin will enable NGOs to better utilise SMS for social activism and public accountability.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/cyberspace/jan-june06/google_...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june10/google_01...
Addictive Personality? You Might be a Leader
So is there no good reason one may wish to remain anonymous or pseudonymous? Because I can think of many.

-- Chris Sauro, masterzora.net
4chan is an example of an "anonymous" system, not a "pseudonymous" one: the difference is whether you have stable identities over time, and therefore can build up reputation (positive or negative) for a particular "pseudo-name".

As long as you have mechanisms, whether social or political, to "default distrust" new users that don't have much "cred" yet (mechanisms like the "green" user rendering that Hacker News uses for this purpose), you are not going to lose the benefits of "anonymous" vs "real names".

In fact, one might even argue that claiming otherwise misses the point of names: even when I am going by just the name "saurik" (seldom, but it happens: like here on this site), I care deeply about what I say as it affects my identity.

As an example near and dear to many people on this site, no one had known who "why the lucky stiff" was (maybe they do now? not keeping up with that much); but, if he had started being an idiot on forums and started "proliferating senseless hacking and child pornography", you can be certain that that would have been quite bad for him.

(In fact, if your real name is not known by anyone, and everyone knows the entity that actually has all of the reputation capital you draw on on a daily basis, then arguably there is no risk in doing something stupid with your real name, and total risk in doing so with your pseudonym.)
So should in your view Wikipedia and GitHub enforce real usernames?

You make it sound like there is no responsibility and accountability in pseudo-anonymous cooperation.

How about real names on license plates? X-Box live accounts?

Enforcing real names is _not_ always a good thing. They already have my IP and the police can demand my ISP for my personal data; not just a stalker, impersonator, or any fraud.

Enforcing real names on 4chan will solve nothing, and likely make matters worse (in your view): It would create a more vibrant Freenet or Darknet where people are a lot more anonymous and 4chan seems civil by comparison.
The industry still thinks music can be split into units of content. If they had their way they'd probably charge for "Youtube view" as well.

Rick Falkvinge is right that people don't put any value on "copies" anymore because they know a digital copy costs almost nothing, and it's very easy to share and it costs you nothing. It still had some kind of value when it was on CD's and DVD's because it was tied to the value of the CD itself. But now we're moving away from that model.

Netflix works so well, and will even pass torrent sharing soon because they don't charge people per unit of content anymore. And I think over the next 5-10 years we'll see music move from the iTunes model to the Spotify (Grooveshark, Rdio, etc) model, where people can freely share a song not having to worry that their ISP's are monitoring their traffic and telling on them to the copyright holders.

The copyright holders simply fail to understand there's a different world right now, and they're fighting against the wind trying to keep it the way it has always been - and they're failing.
Angry Birds maker Rovio sued by Lodsys
I have browsed thru /b/ many times, and the behavior of people there truly is the worst I've seen ever.

This has little to do with anonymity. Millions of people act equally stupidly on Facebook or Youtube as well, where there isn't such anonymity. The quality of posts is determined by the quality of the community and its members, not whether or not they have names.

/b/ is hardly representative of anonymity on the internet, and if there wasn't any anonymity, /b/ would be just as bad as it is today. Even on 4chan, the vast majority of the boards have a vastly higher quality of posting than /b/.
Intellectual Ventures v. The World
doesn't pull and display css
Where Google Really Makes Its Money
I literally laughed out loud at this particular example of journalistic cluelessness. Haven't done that since, well, the Louise Boat.
SIBME2
Good job. Truly wasn't expecting to feel as apprehensive about G+ as I do about FB.
I believe that a point that patio11 is arguing that all names are made up. Some names are given certain legal uses over others, but this is not universal. Google is an international organization, that is attempting to form a social network application, so it cannot assume, well, anything about its users cultures and how those users use names. This is a huge problem, because the first thing that a social networking application has to do is: "Make people feel welcome". Telling them that the name that everyone uses to identify them isn't a 'real name' doesn't help to do that.

Also, I know a fair number of people, who, for a variety of reasons, have their names in transition. These new names are not yet their official names, and they may change what they ultimately decide on. It's _really_ not the place of Google to effectively say "Make up your damn mind".
Just so everyone knows, this specific attack is rather old. Modern versions of the RSA algorithm use blinding to specifically prevent this, which causes the RSA calculations to effectively be performed on random data.

There has also recently been a published timing attack regarding elliptic curve signatures, and there are some older papers about AES's vulnerability to timing attacks due to cache misses when using S-boxes. So while this paper specifically isn't a viable attack today, it is still relevant.
That's interesting. Could you elaborate on why you think analytic philosophy better prepared you for a career as an Erlang programmer than a computer science degree?
Aren't there a lot of patterns on how we interact with an interface?

For example, most people on facebook move their pointers to check their notifications/new messages/friend requests. Wouldn't that produce a lot of "not so random" random numbers?

(I am not looking to start a conversation on how random random numbers are, just curious on why they used this specific technique)
I'm solving this with my new iPhone app called Crowd (still in private beta), here's a sample of the web viewing portal http://thecrowdapp.com/5Qp6CHy if anyone wants to get a beta invite just email. jmm.seasons@gmail.com
Currently on my Facebook friends list:

* A MTF transsexual who prefers going by a feminine spelling of her name
* A Vietnamese girl who prefers to go by an adopted American name
* A Jewish woman who prefers to spell her name in Hebrew, and whose legal name contains six names

For all the things Facebook gets wrong, the name input is really not one of them, compared to Google+.

People have known me as MAD for over a decade now, and although I sometimes wish I could just go by Corbin, it's something that I'm stuck with, better or worse. Nomenclature is hard, and any attempt to shoehorn names into a single culture's rules is going to fail.
3D Printing has a lot of potential as a profitable niche for RadioShack to get into. It would certainly get me in the door.
I read the entire article... they speculate that the concern of pharma is PR, but really, their guess is as good as mine as to why someone won't manufacture it.
I found this particular article vague and lacking of any necessary supporting facts. I read through a few other posts by the author and found them along the same lines [1,2]. I see no reason to value anything written by Mr Lindzon on the serious subject of whether we are in a bubble.

[1] http://howardlindzon.com/apple-and-bank-of-america-i-love-wh...

[2] http://howardlindzon.com/the-cotton-crash-the-q-tip-bear-mar...
Hey, I've been complaining about PHP's lack of Unicode support forever. Every time I do, though, an apologist comes out of the woodwork to tell me about the mb_*() functions. Apparently the PHP community is quite comfortable not caring about non-ASCII characters.
It depends how serious you are about this venture.

I think it's pretty important to at least have a technical co-founder if you want to start a startup. Otherwise, you're starting a business in a field where you have no domain knowledge.

If technology won't be your competitive advantage, what will it be?
Regarding (1), this is a good suggestion and I think it should be on the front page where users can have a quick look before proceeding.
Sorry if it seemed like I took it personally or anything- I just kind of like debating and arguing :)
I was kicked off Quora yesterday because they didn't like my 'Real Name' (which is actually my completely innofensive real name)
That's good idea. But it still wouldn't solve the issue of people downloading the photos and making them public.
I'm not sure how you expect anyone here to answer that question... We know nothing about you or your idea but you want us to tell you how likely it is you'll have the next big thing???

I will say that if you don't know anything about the technology behind your product (providing technology is your main product and not in a supporting role) you're at a HUGE disadvantage.
So, you're going to charge addicts (who have likely bottomed out) several thousands of dollars?
Yeah, you really have to read the posix specs carefully to catch all these bizarre inconsistencies (or, if you're like me, wait until you find a system something breaks on and then fix it). It's a shame.

Thanks :)

I'd have sent you a merge request but I don't have a gitorious account.
>It sounds to me like the problem is the number of obscure laws, the vagueness of the offenses, and the lack of mens rea requirement.

You're right. There is another issue, though, relating to the massive power of the central government.
---
Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
---

The US was designed to be a Federal system, with all non-delegated powers belonging to the states, not the central government.

Besides the fact that our nation is meant to have a small Federal government, it is easier to manipulate and fight unjust laws at lower levels of government than the behemoth that is Washington, DC.
Erlang Doesn't Compile From Source on Lion + XCode4
I agree with you on two points. Firstly, you are right to make the distinction between anonymous and pseudonymous, they're two different things and you can build a reputation system and healthy community on a pseudonymous system (see HN). However, I think they both exhibit the same underlying problem that comes with lack of accountability. HN has been lucky, because it's for the most part an elite community full of smart people. Digg or reddit have not been so lucky, and the quality of comments there is quite low. HN is the exception, not the rule.

Secondly, I also agree that there's definitely some edge cases where it make sense for people to be anonymous, or pseudonymous. If you need to shield yourself from your employer for legal reasons, I think it makes sense for you to do so. What I'm arguing is that in most cases, though, it's good for the overall community to enforce true names.
How to Resist Temptations
The voting results on the RFC page is from 2008 when it was rejected. The recent vote that decided its inclusion was here: https://wiki.php.net/todo/php54/vote. I think it had pretty solid support from core developers as well as userland people this time around.
Can someone point to an article/essay on "do one thing"?
I personally can't stand when a founder tries to tell people that "We will offer many services, this this and this" when they don't even have one product in progress yet. You can't be a master of the universe yet, you have to specialize!

I'm looking for an article like this:
http://timberry.bplans.com/2010/06/strategy-fundamental-do-one-thing-really-well.html

But by Paul Graham or someone like that. I know it's common sense but I want to have some ammo to deliver to a friend of mine.
Whoa, easy there - many of 'us, as a culture' have been fighting this tooth and nail.
But can we not conjure an omniscient observer as our frame of reference?

Yes. We can not. In fact, that is precisely what the theory of relativity states: There is no privileged reference frame.

There is literally, actually no such thing as "what exists in the space of the water vapor cloud as Earth time is still July 24, 2011". As I look at my clock at noon on July 24, I see water. Someone at the reservoir will not see my clock strike noon for twelve billion years, my time, and they'll look around and maybe see no water. We disagree, but we're both right in our own frame of reference. Both perspectives are true.

Which makes sense if you think about it; your omniscient observer would have to agree with one or the other (or some other) disagreeing perspective. What criteria could you possibly use to choose between them?
I don't know if it were cheap enough. I could see using them as a rush order place, a little more markup over mail order but much faster.
What is the store in Denver? I would love to know another place I could go locally for parts. (other than RS obviously)
Thank you for the detailed feedback! Very actionable.

1. We'll add the flowchart. This is a very good idea :-)

2. I'll do a sample picture example for form-16

3. Its constantly evolving - but that's no excuse. We'll put up a clear page.

5. Good idea. Feedback noted.

On Questions

1. Digital signatures are coming very soon.

2. We are also going to support buying digital signatures via the website. I still need to figure out how to do it in the least confusing manner :)

3. We plan to sell CA review services of your tax return. Still figuring out whether to charge for each filing.

We'll work hard to get to that 5 out of 5 rating :-)
I believe that a point that patio11 is arguing that all names are made up.

Well, there's a continuum of "made up", going all the way from Darkbane Bloodlovin' to our idealized gold standard of "Whatever two inexpert people who have known you for less than a few hours decided would be the best thing for the entire world to know you as for the rest of your life."

P.S. Got to love that I'm referred to as "patio11" in that comment. (I don't know where "My friend in middle school was from Puerto Rico and he just couldn't manage -ck most days so 'Patio' it was" fits on the continuum, but it stuck so hard that even my siblings routinely use it now, so I won't complain about it.)