skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You assume that being racist, bigoted and cowardly has no use - but it does. The web can have a therapeutic use as well as people need to let the bad and the ugly stuff out somewhere, not just the good stuff.

What you're preaching is - unless you've got something nice to say, don't say it at all. Fine. That's only ONE use, but you cannot ignore the less than noble motives of everyone.

E.g. you're a complainer. You just complained about how the web should be used. That's a legit complaint. It's not ugly or bad, but it is a complaint. You're telling people what they should do vs shouldn't. Did you not feel good after you wrote that? And do I necessarily need to know who is behind the moniker 'patrickaljord' for you to get your effect from your complaint? Not really...

If Eric Schmidt wants us to stop using nicknames, maybe he should invite us over for a coffee to his house and build a relationship with each of the users he asks to be known rather than anonymous... That might help toward his goal.

He's building an impersonal service and asking for people to be personal... it doesn't work like that. Technology isn't the end... it's a means to an end and Eric's treatment isn't such. He treats it as the end....
I'm pretty sure Google won't ask for a scan of your ID card.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong, based on the work of Gary Walker:

http://gewalker.blogspot.com/2011/08/firsthand-examination-o...

as reported by Charlie Stross:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/why-im-n...

"Send a poison pen email and you can get an account suspended until the owner verifies their identity by sending a scan of some ID."
There are two aspects I see. One, Google may be enforcing more aggressively and less consistently.

Two, the differing initial demographics. Facebook initially launched to college students and they established its initial environment. G+ started with the technorati, many of whom care deeply about this. Some of whom have handles going back longer than Google has existed.
That isn't a bad thing. Consider person A, who says, "Light is a particle, as demonstrated by phenomena B, C, and D." It's perfectly cogent for person E to raise his hand and ask, "But what about phenomena such as interference, refraction, and so on?" E's argument isn't an experimental result, but that's ok, because A's conjecture is required to explain all existing observations before devising falsifiable experiments to conduct.
Why don't you ask someone who bought their house in 2006 about price stability? And then look at how far about historical norm prices still are.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/04/case-shiller-100-year-c...
Perhaps the value of information to people at large (rather than specific individuals or groups of individuals) is not increased by its scarcity.

Certainly, I agree that it isn't. Humans didn't evolve with 'information' in the sense that we're using it now. What information we did have (e.g. where the enemy is, how to cut stone and build bridges) was guarded either by force or by complexity of replication. In the modern world, we've created the Intellectual Property construct in an effort to apply what we think of as 'natural' rules to intangible things.

I'd argue that if you can't copy and reuse information, it's even more worthless than a piece of garbage.

I have to disagree with that, or maybe I'm not getting your point. Take the example of the games I have for my XBox 360. I cannot duplicate them (or will not expend the effort required, which is ultimately the same), yet they have provided me with far more entertainment than any piece of garbage I've ever come across. ;-)

You don't own information. It just happens to be passing through your head on its way to someone else's (if it's worth anything - if it stops at you, it's worthless).

That's an interesting concept, but I create information. The application I'm writing right now would not ever exist without me. Others may be in the same market, doing similar things, but the fact is still that I am creating a unique, intangible object out of nothing. So, it's not merely passing through my head, but rather, it's originating in my head.

By the way, I agree with the parenthetical end of that sentence. If I don't distribute my software, it's never of any use to anyone (other than me). But I don't think that says anything about the difference between controlled release in exchange for money versus free replication.

I don't think you should be downvoted for your opinion

I appreciate that, and have enjoyed this discussion.
For an interesting look at the defense measures, see
"Physical Security Devices for Computer Subsystems: A Survey of Attacks and Defences" http://www.atsec.com/downloads/pdf/phy_sec_dev.pdf

IIRC there's a chapter on it in "Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson, too: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html (whole 1st edition is at the bottom of the page)

Edit: The story of Chris Tarnovsky and his work in satellite TV smartcards is also a pretty good read -
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/05/tarnovsk...
The thing I hate about Arch: the AUR. It's horrible. There is no official tool to handle it, the package stability or coverage is spotty at best, and the unofficial tools (yaourt, etc.) suck.

But you have to use AUR, because that's where the breadth of the packages are. Arch's team is relatively small (compared to Debian's anyway) and they can't maintain that many packages. I agree with their choice of letting the community handle the rest — from their perspective it makes sense.

From my perspective, I'm never returning to the nightmare of AUR again. a) if I want to wait for stuff to compile for ages and then fail, I can just use Gentoo. b) Gentoo is at least more or less stable and has good coverage/stability. c) Portage is at least a good package manager (the second-best in Linux-land, imho, with dpkg/apt-get leading the pack.) Not to say pacman is bad, but yaourt just isn't good.
Out of curiosity, how did the duplicate URL detector not catch that this was submitted four hours earlier?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2931770
Google needs to stop allowing Eric Schmidt to speak for the company in any public capacity: It's just bad for the company and the shareholders because he's always off message and the worst guy to deliver any news. Yesterday I was reading how he was dissing the English education system and today it's this. I really wish that Larry Page would learn a lesson from Steve Jobs and step front and center in terms of Google getting the word out there: There's just too much at stake right now.
It's their product, why not let them decide what they do and do not allow?
The "now it's ready for prime-time" view is to me more indicative of the maturity of the user than the Linux desktop environment. It looked the same way to many of us, on the surface, when we were at that stage.
Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, Richard Bachman and Nicolas Bourbaki, among others, would like a word with this theory.
Who should pay for creation? And when should they pay?
As a software developer, my work is worth somewhere in the magnitude of about 30 euro per hour. If I write an "app" over the weekend, investing perhaps 20 hours in it, that makes 600 euro investment. Imagine that I would want to make as much profit as that investment; I would need to get 1200 euro from "sales". At 1 euro per download, that means 1200 people paying for a download. If only 1200 people have downloaded that from you, what do you imagine would be easier: paying 1 euro to download from your known and central website, or investing some time to search for it on some peer-to-peer network? Keep in mind that only a small percentage of those 1200 would invest the time to seed it on peer-to-peer networks. Here is a way to get paid: make it as easy as possible to pay for a download of your fully functional "product".

Wouldn't it be much easier to know beforehand that you will get the money? That's the way contract work works: someone has a problem, and he would like to get someone to solve it. You set your hours, haggle for a price, then go to work, deliver the solution, get paid. This is another way to get paid: find someone to make a contract with. I believe that it is the most important way for professional work.

This actually also works for "apps" and other self-initiated projects, through crowdfunding (e.g. through Indiegogo or Kickstarter).

However, even completely unfunded work needs not be financial waste, as you build a portfolio with which to gain contracts.
Machine Learning as Art
No, he said that if you're looking to do something that you shouldn't, i.e something illegal, you shouldn't type that on Google, as they can be sued and forced to reveal what you searched.
From China with Love: The Chairman Meow Collection
Show HN: My first Windows Phone 7 app: Colorify
Looks so much like OpenRasta framework.
Actually, I just did some Googling and apparently there are a couple of ISPs in my country that do naked DSL.

It costs more than twice than a landline and a 20Mbps connection.
That is what I meant when I said that Oracle is mostly creating a nuisance for the server market. It forces sys admins and developers to jump through more hoops to get the software running on their servers (as well as to keep it updated in large deployments!). That is, those that really need it, because I'm sure some people will just switch to the OpenJDK instead, because it isn't unsuitable for production use either.
Well, I was thinking more of a more deliberate, calculated method of instilling values into young people. Social engineering in the sociology sense. But you're right, it was a bit dumb to use the phrase here, as it's probably thought of in the Kevin Mitnick sense.
Probably in large part because Google wants to be the alternative to FaceBook. They put the burden on themselves.
When I want to say something anonymously, it's usually because there are people who disagree with my opinion who I'd rather not reveal my identity to.

For instance, I argue regularly against violent racists on certain football forums. I've been threatened by them and had them asking people what my real name is. Thankfully, I use a pseudonym on there (a different one to the one I use on here) and have so far been able to express those opinions without being physically attacked by thugs.
In this case there is another service, but that argument is quite weak in general. Here is a fantastic video with lots of legitimate criticism of that stand: http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084.

At a certain point your choice is give up privacy or give up participation in society. Right now giving up G+ is not giving up email, or giving up having a cell phone, or giving up driving, but at a certain point it will be exactly like that.
Facebook is just facebook

Google+ is that and all other services
> I’m less likely to use G+ when I can’t use it to talk to people who aren’t using the form of their name that’s on their birth certificate.

Google+ doesn't force you to use the name that is on your birth certificate. They say you can use what most people call you so you aren't force to use your full second names for example. For example, if your name on your bc is Patrick John David Smith, G+ says it's ok to just use Patrick Smith if that is what most people call you.
If that were correct, wouldn't we already see that effect in the world of free software? It's not quite copyright-free, but it should be close enough.
Think of the garbage truck: it's dull and smelly work, and you have to get up in the middle of the night.

And yet, we don't offer garbage men royalties on the garbage they've collected for 70 years after their death.
He should have replaced "dog" by "bot". Think about spam. CAPTCHAs are a poor substitute to an identity provider saying "this person already passed a Turing test". (However, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to adopt the trivial trust network with Google as the root node.)
Should you talk to VC's if you don't need money?  YES
Agreed. I spent some time updating the jpackage project's nosrc RPMs to work with newer versions of the JRE. There is a lot of complexity involved in making what Oracle's JRE installer delivers integrate nicely with the rest of the system.
Ah so that is why the hardware is so much more aesthetically pleasing than the software.
It's probably a reference to this famous comic:

http://bit.ly/jb485V (Wikipedia, shortened because HN breaks the real URL by stripping out the apostrophe).
Question: Are you doing the programming (and thus doing the task of learn programming) or will the work be given to someone else?

If you're not doing the work yourself create wireframe and/or spec of the project and talk to a few programmers. If you are doing the work yourself and getting started maybe how easy the language is to learn might be a factor.

Also if you are building a Twitter clone I'm assuming that you'd also need a database -- so there might be more things to think about as well.
btrfs also has a deduplication feature in the works: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg0...
What, exactly, is the moral issue associated with letting the vast majority of nicks though?

I can understand banning obscenities for usernames; I can understand banning fraudsters.

But if I show up as LispNerd3K on G+ and only G+... who gives a rip? I mean, seriously.

I was going to put some serious effort into G+, kinda use it as a mini-blogging platform, but I don't really care for the anti-hacker mindset that appears to be driving policy there.
Do you honestly believe that?
The two URLs were not identical, as the earlier submitted had additional characters at the end (which appear to be a no-op in this case).
> Now that I had a completely innocuous, completely non-infringing account created, it was necessary to have that account reported. On August 4, 2011, we did just that.

Simple steps to get a Google+ account, using a fake name:

1) Choose a name that doesn't have multiple Wikipedia entries. [1]

2) Do not report your own account as fake.

Following those 2 simple rules, I was able to maintain multiple Facebook profiles for years. I doubt Google+ is any harder to game than Facebook.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Walker_(musician), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Walker
Re: "What should I do?"

Read Henry Ford's autobiography: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213
What information does the US government require Google to store?

Google stores information because they think it's a useful service. That is, of course, subject to search by the government. But it is possible to make a search engine that didn't store anything; there is no law that requires maintaining HTTP access logs or anything like that.
I really don't get this "don't say it online unless you'd be prepared to say it to their face".

Does this mean that I shouldn't be prepared to express opinions unless I'm prepared to defend myself physically for holding those opinions?

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I argue regularly (using a pseudonym) on one of my local football team's forums against a group of racists. Those racists are people who I'm pretty certain have used violence in the past, and I'm pretty certain would be more than happy to use violence in the future. I'm personally not a violent person, so should I simply keep quiet and let the voices of those prepared to use violence be the only ones that are heard?
I got a laugh out of that. I honestly don't think it was meant to be taken as a solid example, but rather an exaggeration.
That wasn't the message I read from that.

It was that they can't provide you with real privacy (against, say, governments), so they're not going to pretend like they do. If you want real privacy, this isn't the social network for you (and personally, I don't think there is one, but there's likely a market for it -- a tor-esque anonymizing social network would be pretty awesome).

On top of that, that it's useful to know that everyone on G+ has passed some minimum bar that they're who they say they are. A low minimum, but a minimum.

For the first part, there are some distinctions ignored, specifically pseudonyms. I suspect the answer is "we don't really care about pseudonyms." For the second, I can see it making sense the same way a financial exchange does. You know there are crooks and ways to cheat, but you also know that even the low degree of securities law enforcement is substantial enough to make your transactions pretty safe.
Once again I repeat: Google+ is dead.

It's over.
> Try to buy a house ... where you'll be relatively high on the social ladder

This is depressing advice, no matter how many empirical studies back it up. I don't think I'd want to live around people that were wealthier than I'd ever be, but I would certainly want to live around people that were more energetic, socially outgoing, ambitious, and involved in the community than me.

Whatever you value -- you should hang around people that are better at it than you are. If you are a hacker, work with people that are smarter than you. If you want to exercise more, spend time with people who exercise twice as much as you'd like to. Et cetera.
Surely it would immediately fail the test because which is more likely: the guy is a nutter, or there exists another universe with another turing machine which includes its states and all the states required for ours and all the states required for the 3^^^3 people.
Presumably the utility of anti-manipulation features is higher than that of exact computation of the payoff of events with sufficiently small probabilities. So there's some sort of filtering effect that drops all sufficiently low probabilities down to zero.

And yet a theist can use some variant of that argument to say that belief in their god is above this threshold while all others are below it, zeroing out the infinity of deities that no one can even name.
I wouldn't go TOO crazy badmouthing competitors, as you may end up joining forces later on (through acquisition or partnerships).
Yeah, the problem is that it's connected to a bunch of Google services that I already use. So if I started using any of those under a pseudonym, I can't add Google+ to that account.
This won't happen because the license for future Oracle Java releases won't allow redistribution.

http://robilad.livejournal.com/90792.html
My 'buntu desktop environment is the most solid I've ever used, with the caveat that once a year I can expect to spend a few hours in driver hell. I think this balances out with the once-a-year BSOD hell I encounter on Windows.

I agree with you that WINE is terrible, but I have Win7 running brilliantly right now on VirtualBox. Other than that, linux has all the specialized tools I need for coding and web development, I switched over to console gaming a few years back because I was tired of the hardware upgrade treadmill, and the Microsoft productivity stack, while better than Libre Office, isn't compelling enough to tie me to that platform. Also, I'm not sure what problems you had with video players. VLC has served me well on Windows and linux.

I guess the real killer app for me is sudo apt-get install [some incredibly useful open source library I really need right now, dammit]. The open source infrastructure on Windows is so anemic it drives me nuts.
Stackoverflow.com and its kin. Not only are the people on it very knowledgable, but the site itself rewards civility and good communication skills. Worth studying!
I call bullshit. The only reason why Google has an interest in verifying your identity is advertising money. They don't care about these allegedly "evil" people out there, nor do they really care about talking dogs.

"Don't use Google+" is the only sensible thing I see here.
Exactly if you know who authored a peice of content then you can get a pretty good idea of how authoritative it may be. Google is pretty good about finding content but you want to know that the content is actually good (no content farms) if you know who wrote it then you can get a pretty good idea of how authoritative it may be.

This goes into some more detail about this: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/google-plus-identity-and-seo
I disagree with this statement: “Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it." Handwriting evolved out of pictograms, which evolved from doing artwork. So writing is very natural because it's really a form of drawing if you think about it.
that was very clear and concise, thanks!
The Debt,online
The Debt,online
At great risk and a considerable personal cost the mission team that has been made or was it The suspense is based on and through two different periods,
You're only giving more reasons why such things won't work. The cost of enforcing rules such that there is a high risk of consequences is absolutely staggering.

They've already declared yet another "war" on it, and we all know how much those cost.
We're developing one, but it won't be available for a little while.

EasyTestMaker (http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx) is an option, though their UI feels a little old fashioned.

The quiz maker from ProProfs (http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/) is also pretty good.

If all these fail to meet your specs, you could always create a form in Google Docs.
Of course, someone could just forge such an ID scan, which is far easier than forging the ID itself.

[Things could get harder the day governments start issuing cryptographic IDs (like, say, a smartcard which Google can query remotely).]
Golomb coding
But what about when you do need anonymity, for example to leak video of a corrupt official, or evidence your employer is knowingly causing harm, etc?

How do you propose to do this when all services are tied to identity?
Yes of course. Google sees themselves as being in the utility business, like the digital equivalent of an electric or water company. The whole company is basically a series of strategically placed loosely connected platforms that work in the background like infrastructure. Right now the Internet is still very young so they are essentially just building their moyo[1], expect the pieces to become more closely interconnected over the next ten years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moyo_(Go)#Moyo+.28.E6.A8.A1.E6....
> And he's right; they aren't. As a US company, Google must conform to US law. This means Google must store certain information and under various circumstances provide the police and the government with said information.

I totally agree, and this is true for all other services hosted in the US such as Diaspora who claim to protect you more than Google, this is simply not true. All services hosted there are subject to the same laws. Same goes for services hosted in Europe and around the world.
People wake up..!! There are two kinds of bribing/corruption. In most countries you will see officers take bribe for not doing something that comes in their authority or that is out of their authority. But only in Great India we can see that officers take bribe just for doing their job which they get paid for. Jan Lok Pal bill is the leash that the people of Great India have got to keep all the officers tied.
I was actualy wondering if Eliza* could get a G+ account. Honestly, I await the day bots can fool me.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Huh. Yeah, it's been awhile.

Way to make me feel old. :)