skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I .. have a hard time taking that serious.

Let us stick with the site in question, G+. You can block persons very, very easily. It's just 2(?) clicks away. Someone posts in your (extended) circles using a pseudonym and you don't like it? You can _easily_ make sure you'll never be disturbed in that perfect world of 'valid' names.

I see no freedom issues here?

The _real_ issue is, that you want your personal believe, which in this case might align with what Google arbitrary enforces or not, forced upon everyone. To save you those 2 clicks. And maybe (I'm not trying to make this a personal attack, but this is more or less the only reason I can actually imagine as being 'pro real names' among users) you just don't want to end up in the dilemma that your mum is listed as KnittingGoddess and your girlfriend as PinkUnicorn, because that would mean that you'd either have to block them or - cope with other people's choice of a name.

Again, your argument is really, really backwards. I was suspended on G+ because of a name that didn't conform to the rule (intentionally, I set it to "short-version-of-firstname .", as a protest. It was my real name before) Now - did you see me somewhere? To help you out: I'd be "Ben .". Have you seen me in your circles? In your incoming stream? No? So... Why do you bother?

YOU are in charge of your personal network. Here, like in any other social network. Over at FB you'd just not befriend me. Here you'd just not put me in a circle. If I'd do that though you'd notice that a creepy person with no real name is in your incoming stream and you'd block me easily. Done.

You _have_ your environment. You still fail to understand the difference between rules about one's own profile ("I'd like to be darklajid") and some weird filtering that is going to happen anyway, names or not ("I'd like to see nothing but realnames").

Listen - you can choose what you see on the network. I want to choose what represents me. You have to use the controls I talked about (i.e. blocking users) _anyway_, because you'll encounter people that you don't care about/that annoy you. I cannot imagine a reason for not being able to use these same mechanisms to build yourself the illusion of a world without pseudonyms. What stops you? Where's the danger for your use case?
Interesting; thank you for providing your perspective.
Both books indeed share most of the topics, although from glancing at both TOCs HR seems to add Polynomials and Corecursion.
I'll gladly keep this in mind should I get stuck with HR.
very austin powers ish
While I suspect you're right that the network path is more likely to error, udp does have a checksum that covers the entire payload so the DNS server would ignore the packet.

Also, the dns client is waiting for an address for the host that it requested. If it asks "where is alice?" and the dns server replies "bob is at x.x.x.x" it won't go there because the names don't match. So the error pretty much has to have happened on the client, but it could be a disk error, dma glitch, bug, malware or maybe a bad proxy/firewall.
Why would they spend money tearing it down if they.. ran out of money? Surely if they default on their loans the buildings would be sold to a new owner...?
Modern HTML5 UI framework
...or it has a great deal to do with "nerds" acting like what you posited has any real basis in reality.

Even 'dumb' people can smell a douche from a mile away. Probably better than the socially ill-equipped "nerds".
Here's an article from last year with some numbers:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-an...
Sure. It's common for server or client side scripts to overwrite cookies, or cookie expirations. When you embed something that depends on cookies in a third party site, you have very little you can do to keep the site owner from nuking it unintentionally.

Browsers frequently eat cookies for no good reason. Safari has been the biggest offender in my experience, but I've seen it in several.

These are two really common issues I've personally dealt with, I know there are more but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

EDIT: No, I'm not aware of any way to detect how/why a cookie has been deleted. It just vanishes.
Depending on your definition of legacy, your argument is either incorrect or invalid.

Case 0: Legacy means "unscalable".
Argument cannot be used to evaluate the scalability of client-server models.

Case 1: Legacy means "old or crufty".
Successfully scaled legacy client-server software includes SMTP, IRC, NTP, NNTP, HTTP, MySQL, Oracle, etc, and to some extent, IP itself. Not to mention in-house systems like credit-card processing.

Client-server architectures are immensely popular, perfectly capable of scaling to high volumes, and used widely because they are easy to reason about and secure.

Indeed, if you've spent any time working on distributed systems, you might realize that scaling fully connected or peer-to-peer systems tends be harder than client-server. Take a look, for example, at the horrifying complexity of distributed agreement protocols like Paxos.

I'm guessing your statement is due not to horrifying stupidity, but some sort of confusion over what constitutes "client server software". Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client%E2%80%93server_model would be helpful.
The reaction was pure hate for my posting because it was
defending pedophiles (it wasn't).

What do you except? It's sad to see that even usually decent and intelligent people devolve into frothing mobsters when you oppose something that's 'for the children', however ridiculous it may be. It becomes especially despicable when you see the content industry essentially stating that child pornography is a fabulous excuse to justify domain seizures, censorship and other completely outrageous measures to protect their failing business model[1].

It's pretty difficult (if not to say dangerous) to hold a position that's in opposition to such measures. Especially, as in my case, when one is of the opinion that it's not child pornography we should be fighting, but child abuse. The former is, for the most parts, a victimless crime (just look at what's consider child pornography today, it's absolutely ridiculous). I would even say that the holy crusade against child pornography obfuscates and hinders the fight against child abuse severely.

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-loves...
You might want to take a look at some of the available online computer science courses (iTunes U, MIT OpenCourseware, Khan Academy, Udemy). Tons of really, really good introductory courses are available that can help with picking up the basics (Stanford's "Programming Methodology" [http://goo.gl/Tbejg] and "Programming Abstractions" [http://goo.gl/RdwLt] come to mind).

As others have pointed out, Meetups are a great way to learn, particularly specialized and cutting-edge stuff, not to mention the networking-with-others potential. Same for joining an open source project and contributing as you learn.

Finally, if there's the equivalent of a Hacker Dojo (http://goo.gl/B2ats) local to you, drop in. People love to help and mentor others.

Good luck to you!
> Having a strong online presence means putting up pictures of what's important to you. That means that pictures of your kids are out there and traceable to you.

It does? I have a blog, a well-used Facebook profile, an active twitter account, and I comment on Reddit and HN all the time—but the last picture of me that exists on the public internet is from 2005. All the photos I actually want to share with my family are in a shared folder in my Dropbox account.

I guess I have a strong mental separation of my public and private lives; I would never talk about my family on my blog, nor would I talk about my job on Facebook.
There was a comment earlier in this thread:

> Nerds are unpopular in forced social settings like secondary schools because they're huge assholes, the kind of people that even 25 years later write essays about how really it was everybody else's fault that nobody got along with them.

Get over your grudges, seriously. I bet the people who used to make fun of you don't even remember why. They'll run into you someday in the grocery store and go "Hey man, what's up? How's life?" Now you can either make a new friend, or stay in middle school where you still get picked on for your terrible social skills.
Don't forget the cascading error introduced by the news cycle:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
I've been recently doing this using GoDaddy's Bulk domain checker. Checks up to 500 at a time.
Hackers break into Subaru Outback via text message
Yes, in the sense that your ISP will still know your IP address (how could they not?) but won't know what you're doing. And the servers that know what you're doing won't know your IP address.
All articles pointing to this event seem to indicate they actually were able to start the engine. I'm having a hard time believing any car manufacturer would build this into the car. Any ideas how this was pulled off?

What actually happened? (perhaps they unlocked the doors with a text and then hotwired the car?)
Good lawyers have surprised me before, but that's so clearly false, as one glance at Facebook will show, that I have to think it would get laughed out of any courtroom.
Completely agree. One of the main things I learned in my 20 or so years of classical piano playing was to focus on basics.
In my haste I think I missed that thrust of the OP and also neglected to mention it in my response.
Your example, Apple is suing many more companies than MS is.

>What are you doing on Hacker news? This is all about disrupting industries trough a better product. Android is free so this is obviously an improvement to something you have to pay for, or do you call Linux unfair?

Erm... HN has LEGIONS of Apple fans who believe Android illegally ripped off Apple's IP and that it is a plain copy. Gruber gets a LOT of traction on HN on this topic. Are we even reading the same HN?
To a second-order approximation, you're describing an actual mechanism by which some eukaryotes fight viruses via RNAi. (I say second order because you're talking DNA while RNAi of course operates on the RNA level.) A few years earlier and you might have been in line for a Nobel ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_interference#Biological_fun...
Why would kissmetrics want to provide a way for their customers to link users by the means of that cookie id?

To me this seems like an oversight rather than malicious intent.
I'm pretty sure the immune system already does basically that.

I tried to find some specifics on wikipedia, but apparently the system is incredibly complicated!
Actually, you wouldn't want to do that. A lot of human cells actually rearrange their genome as part of their normal function. This is how lymphocytes come up with antibodies, for example.

By selecting and rearranging several different coding sequences from three different chromosomes, each lymphocyte develops its own antibody "design", permanently changing its own genome in the process. This is what allows us to develop immunity to a broad range of foreign antigens with a relatively small amount of genetic code. Think of it as an "immune alphabet", if you will. You certainly don't want to interfere with that!

Other rearrangements also occur, some harmful, others not so much. Even if you wanted to target just the bad ones, though, a virus really isn't the tool for it. Your cytoxic T lymphocytes already do that. In fact, what you're really describing isn't all that far off from what we already have. I think we even have mechanisms for genetic error correction and repair, but I'll have to hit the books again to double-check that.
So is there evidence that children are at a higher risk of being kidnapped (or some other bad thing) if their info is public? There was some tabloid scaremongering to this effect in the early days of the Internet, but there are now enough kids online that there should be enough data to confirm or refute this myth.
But Google's products aren't artificially free the way IE was, they just have different revenue sources. Android turns a profit for Google, so it's not really subsidized by its other revenues.

And another important part of the MS antitrust lawsuits were that they were bundled with the OS, which they had a monopoly on in the market. Google's closest thing to a monopoly is in search, and you can use search without using Android.

The two cases are only superficially similar.

I notice, though, that you don't seem to actually advocate any position; you merely attribute accusations of unfairness to "people." If these positions aren't yours or you don't agree with them, why bring them up? If they are your positions, why not state that clearly? Your slippery lack of position just makes me trust your arguments less.
Australia (and particularly NSW) has a long running and very successful needle exchange program. The anti exchange (largely conservative christian) lobby has been basically silenced by its undoubted effectiveness.
I thought it was just me. At least they didn't use FukiU.
> Would it be possible to devise some sort of virus which could somehow 'checksum' a given cell's DNA, and trigger cell-death if it doesn't match?

The problem is

a) there's a LOT of DNA in a cell, and a lot of a cells, so checksumming would logistically be pretty much impossible. This is assuming there is some mechanism by which you can "scan" the DNA, which in itself has a whole host of steric/timing issues (different chromatin states, how do you deal with cell division? histone methylation and DNA accessibility, DNA binding proteins inhibiting interaction with certain regions at different times)

b) the more conceptual issue is that DNA in cells have natural variation anyway. My DNA is different to yours, but DNA in some of my cells is going to be subtly different to DNA in other parts of me.
Is it pronounced "fuk eye me" or "fuk eee me"???
5 keys to make the most of your holidays
Even worse than Android and turn-by-turn navigation is the example of the Google search pages pushing people towards Google Maps, Finance, Local and other services.

I am sure products like MapQuest etc. have been hurt by the leveraging of monopoly in the same way that Netscape was, but techies seem to believe it's ok since they Google's services. But IE was better than Netscape in those days anyway. It's just that many techies are heavily biased against MS and towards Google and Apple, regardless of the merits of the arguments.
Parse is definitely more versatile and targeted to power-users that don't have time to implement server side ORM, user management, pushes & such. Very high-tech.

Fukime might be more like candy machine for prototyping and developers who want to make things happen quickly and just focus on client development.
Second Life Making $100M a Year
I think that word 'learn' may mean 2 entirely different thing, and that's why the op may be confusing for some people. We can think of learning as improving your skills in one area, or we can think of it as exploring possibilities. For example you could learn some programming language (as your first) like C++ and then stop doing stupid shit and become expert at it, or you could do stupid shit like ingesting news about every new shine technology that comes out and settle for something else later, like ror. Succesful learning is for me a bit about balancing between 'breadth search' and 'depth search'.

However this is not exactly what the OP is about - I think author's point is to cut off things that doesn't work, and stick to those who do; it's about optimizing your learning methodology.

Also you can do really stupid shit, like browsing reddit all day long (which was my first thought when I looked at the title), but that's different thing, and it's quite obvious that it won't lead you to success.
Certain critical or unstable regions are kept in check, so if you get mutation there cell undergoes apoptosis. This is for cancer avoidance though.

There are also a host of proteins that check for DNA breaks, damage from UV or other carcinogens and just generally keep an eye on things.
Works for me! Very slick.

Core 2, Chrome 13, Ubuntu.
Peter Thiel Knows Bubbles, And This Is ‘Not A Bubble’
10+ Inspiring Masters of Light and Darkness 
To introduce today’s inspirational pick of buildings demonstrating inventive use of natural light I found no better option but to quote one of the outstanding architects who felt compelled – throughout their work – to let the sunshine in and were never afraid to give inspiring shape to the darkness.
You're right. I never liked when Apple started waging war on Android over IP, especially in light of their wholesale copying of Android's notification system, for example, but it didn't seem particularly out of character, and it seemed in line with Steve Jobs being offended by Android.

But Apple teaming up with Microsoft is what made the issue cross some threshold for me. Individual corporations acting in independent self-interest is one thing, but industry incumbents forming a cartel to shut out competition, even if it still counts as self-interest, for me crosses a line.
That's a completely separate issue from anonymity.

Let me ask you this: should frivolous whims of minority dictate product decisions at Google? Or your own startup, should you have one?

The serious pro-anonymity arguments revolve around people who have to keep their identity secret or something bad will happen to them (they will be stalked, harassed etc.).

That is very different from saying "I want to be called spud because that's what I want and that's my Live Journal handle". A different standard applies to evaluating this vs. evaluating "anonymity to remain safe" arguments.

Insistance on using real names is Google's product decision. It's also an important product decision which will have a profound effect on how G+ will play out long term. Maintaining the culture of a large community is pretty much the biggest problem in that space and insisting on using real names (and not, say, adolescent or whimsical nicknames) is an important part of steering the culture towards civility.

Why do you feel that random people on the internet should dictate product decision to Google team?

Would you feel the same if you were running an on-line community, doing your best to shape it in a way you feel is good, and then random people on the internet demanded that you change your product in a way that they think is good but you don't?
The final paragraph seems like a huge leap from your (very convincing) earlier paragraphs.

Reducing/removing notability guidelines does not necessarily open the flood gates to some kind of social network with a wiki page for every individual on earth :P

That said, I really hope a wikipedia fork gains popularity and is merged back later.
Fat anything. Classes should have limited, well-defined behavior, and call out to other objects or use composition when needed.
foo-kai-me.
You are suffering from a false sense of security.

Google doesn't make people use their real names, they cannot.

Google just forces people to have to try a tinsy bit harder to use fake names,

The more google tightens up its grip, the greater will be your false sense of security and the more devastating will be the consequences when someone takes advantage of you.
The point he seems to make is that one failing is worse than many successes, and, sadly, he's probably right. It reminds me of college football. The team that schedules a third of its games against patsies and goes undefeated will go to the championship game. The team that plays 12 equals, but has one loss, will usually not be in the top 5.
>But Google's products aren't artificially free the way IE was, they just different revenue sources. Android turns a profit for Google, so it's not really subsidized by its other revenues.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

>And another important part of the MS antitrust lawsuits were that they were bundled with the OS, which they had a monopoly on in the market. Google's closest thing to a monopoly is in search, and you can use search without using Android.
>The two cases are only superficially similar.

What about this then?
http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2008/01/mapquest-vs-google-...

Or Google finance and other Google services?
But it's a huge oversight and the kind of thing the designers would have come across when designing the system. They decided to use the shared id, either with the assumption that no clients will ever collaborate and share data or they just don't take privacy seriously enough. Not necessarily malicious, but way too careless in privacy related matters.
Franken calls on FCC to enforce merger conditions on Comcast
a very quick glance makes this look cleaner and more browser-native than other stuff I've also quickly glanced at lately. I've been looking for a framework like this but things I've tried or looked at (extjs, dojo, sproutcore) don't feel as nice as this.
Interesting. I don't even try to differentiate my work and family stuff. A good story is a good story, so I share family stories at work and work stories with my Facebook friends. Flickr photos are for everyone (I even had an ad agency contact me and buy the rights to use one of my kids' pictures in an ad campaign).

Part of what the original article was talking about is that having a "real names only" policy makes it harder to keep that strong separation of public and private lives.
The possibility of making game-ending blunders is one of the main reasons I don't play competitive chess any more.

Of course, it's very frustrating to make a "simple" error in a game of chess that might have already taken up a couple of hours of time and which may lose the match for your team, which represents a large geographic region.

But after a lot of reflection it became apparent to me that this kind of frustration is very much an inherent property of the game of chess.

It turns out (once you play enough games and get pretty damn good at it) that it's actually quite a limited and simple game. Once you're down half a pawn or so there aren't many possibilities to generate a counterattack on another part of the board to make it possible to win without relying on your opponent making a subsequent simple mistake.

I did play quite a bit of Go at university and for a while I was confident that I could get good. If I'd stuck at it I would certainly be a low-ranking amateur dan by now but I decided to spend the majority of my spare time learning more about IT.

One reason for my early enthusiasm in the game of Go was because it's such a complex game it's not really clear when a "simple" strategic error has been made. Perhaps more importantly, because both players experience much more difficulty choosing moves than in chess, there's usually a reason to play on when you've made a mistake even when playing a highly competent player.

This has been a long reply. I'm trying to illustrate that the secret to seeming good at everything is to participate in activities which are intrinsically difficult and where your intelligence will have the chance to shine through rather than to participate in activities where one foolish blunder can allow a person of much lesser ability to beat you.
> If? Those patents I shown are part of actual lawsuits against Samsung/Motorola in court now

Apple would use the patents regardless of the OS the phones were running. It's not Google's job to defend Motorola from any kind of patent problem - and Motorola owns quite a lot of patents in the mobile segment they can use to get cross-licensing from Apple. I doubt HTC and Samsung have the same luck.

> They're using HW and SW patents and trade dress, and trademark to go after Android

The only reason Apple is not going against WP7 phones is because WP7 doesn't represent a threat. If it ever does, Apple will use their prodigious legal to provide an excuse to phone makers to stop wasting money making the WP7 phones they have to make in order to reduce the Microsoft tax on Android phones.