skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chris came up with a great metaphor to explain online identity.

Most of the people leading major product decisions in this area either have very common names or are already famous. But for the rest of us, using our real name online means that anyone who meets us can discover our online identity with a google search.

When I "meet" someone online (such as reading a comment he/she wrote on HN) I really don't care what his/her real name is. I don't understand why Google cares.
if to look at civilization development through energy harnessed/controlled, our civilization has been through the following stages:

1. at human body energy level by gathering/hunting (ie. what nature provided)

2. at human body energy level, managed/renewable. I.e. agriculture.

3. at industrial energy level by gathering - fossil fuels, nuclear fission.

we're at the end of the stage 3. with stage 4. "managed/renewable industrial level" (solar/wind and nuclear fusion) appearing on the horizon.

Increasing available energy levels allows for increased population growth. There is no limit in sight. The Moon and Mars are waiting :)
... I've said too much.
Thanks! :)

I'll apply that change forthwith!

I do actually have Google Analytics already hooked up. I posted one article and it was pretty neat to see the big spike... followed by a return to (effectively) zero traffic. :)

It makes sense though, there's hardly any content on there yet. A year from now I'd like to have maybe 10-12 more blog posts and more projects as well. I guess we'll see how that goes!

Thanks again Mike!
I don't know what I find my humorous, moot's hair or the stairs for your dog...
My point is, they seem to be serving their users to their satisfaction, there has been several iterations of social sites (Geocities, Live Journal, MySpace, etc) and Facebook seems to be the best combination of simplicity and features right now.

I'm not saying there isn't a business model for Poole's ideas, but execution will not be simple. Which shouldn't phase the HN crowd, as the rewards for doing it better and still meeting the needs of the users could be a large pay off.

This general "you're doing it wrong" thing reminds me of Jonathan Blow's comments on execution and Doom. It's easy to nitpick from afar, much hard to succeed. I know Poole has a successful community under his belt, but it's a community that's not exactly easy to generate a living from.
Exactly. The price of oil reflects not so much its rarity as the difficulty in extraction. As the difficulty increases, companies like Solyndra will have a much easier time selling substitute products, and will stop going bankrupt despite heavy governmental assistance.
R-dee-o.

Love the service, but I was confused about how to pronounce it for the first few months.
I think that at some point in the future (after DNSSEC takes hold), FQDNs will be used both for identity and messaging (both realtime like IM/voice and non, like email). We're already seeing some of this in the form of *@personaldomain.com addresses.

I wrote about this a while ago: http://sneak.datavibe.net/20100227/the-future-of-the-interne...

I think that most people's FQDNs will be third-level or deeper, granted by some identity provider, though once the whole user@host format is abandoned I'm guessing that there will be lots of identity/email providers that allow one to one-stop register a domain and integrate it with the service (something that's beyond most casual users of email today).
Until now, it was believed you couldn't set a "geofence" (location-based reminder) for anything except home or work... but if this tip is right, "home" and "work" are just the two default instances of "named location types".
Siriness – what Siri said.
Quick side project
Because Mustache is such a clean language, you can also build some pretty cool features on top of it. For example, my implementation includes concurrent evaluation of a template and the ability to take output + template and produce the data provided for testing, mocks, etc. Those kinds of features would be nearly impossible to implement in any template language that allows arbitrary logic:

http://www.javarants.com/2011/10/09/new-features-and-extensi...

All that though is overshadowed by how easy it is to understand the templates and collaborate on them with designers, front-end and back-end developers.
Republican presidential race sparks computer game sale
Yup. The thing is, people don't need to choose between real life identities and personas on the internet. Most people want both: they want to be in touch with their real life peer group and they want escapist personas that can be provocative, obtuse, interested in niche subjects or authoritative in a way that would only be undermined by their real life lack of credentials. And in different arenas, they can.

It's the former area that naturally tends towards large, unified networks worth billions though. Its understandable that Facebook prefers not to lose the factors that made it unique by permitting joke accounts and impostors and devils advocates and trolls, even if many people find them find entertaining. Not to mention all the other things that come with a truly liberal policy on identity (like hundreds of millions of autofriending spambots).

There's the rest of the Internet for that...
The "work on things you enjoy" part I buy - not the raise children part, but the article was written in a way it sounds like retirement = success. "This is how you become a me" kind of blog posts flood this forum. Very often I get the feeling too many in HN community are driven by money, which is sad.
The law requires a little more proof than that, otherwise you could just ship drugs to people you don't like to get them arrested.
> Mustache still has loops and conditionals (how those don't count as "logic" is beyond me) and you'll almost always have to use them.

This is a bit esoteric, because conditionals and loops are what most programmers are familiar with. I think the big difference for me is that it's not really a conditional or a loop but a context.

So when I say {{#var}} I'm saying within this context, output this partial — that partial can be a separate file or an inline HTML snippet. If that context doesn't exist, it doesn't get rendered (conditional). If that context is a collection of items, it renders each one (loop).

So, yeah. It's easier to say that they're conditionals and loops since that's what programmers are familiar with. But if you start thinking a bit different, you can see how there's really only one mode for Mustache: outputting stuff. You can't filter the output. You can't output parts of it. You can only output it or not.

If you spend some time with liquid (a templating language with logic, but with extremely similar syntax as mustache) you'll notice the difference. It's subtle, but (I think) important.
Danah boyd doesn't capitalize danah boyd's name.
I'm sure that content producers want to be involved in an upstart by the founders of the filesharing network Kazaa.
It's a tor hidden service, and it works really well. I know lots of people who have used it from both sides of the commerce equation.

It's the main driving force behind the price of bitcoins on the public exchanges, which makes for a rather novel opportunity for a market-moving attack I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Asics Gel Stratus 2.1 Shoes Red-White
"SpeakToIt" seems a lot like Siri. It seems a lot of companies were already doing this. It's just now that Apple pushed it to its new iPhone that people are really starting to get interested in them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myE498nyfGw
Identity is prismatic, but the faces of that prism aren't disjointed. They're all part of the same whole and for this reason I'm not sure his metaphor works with his point about how we present ourselves differently in different contexts.

I've always used my real name on everything I do since I got in trouble in high school for being part of a group prank under a pseudonym. My father told me that unless I want what I do to be associated with my real name, I just probably shouldn't do it. I've found those to be good words to live by. And if you've ever explored 4chan for even a minute you'll see why this is important, the anonymity there turns those people into, well, freaks. I think "real names" can be considered a product of evolution, they came about for a good reason.
Teenagers Will, Like, Totally Abandon Facebook for Google+
> how is calling bitcoin deflationary FUD?

Businesses trying to deal in Bitcoins will find their value going down much faster relative to cash value by end of day. That's the very definition of FUD.
This thread is now about Moot's hair.

▲
▲ ▲

wtf
I have my own domain for email which is iain@workingsoftware.com.au but I also have iaindooley.com (although I haven't used that for email for some time).

I run a DTC server (like open source CPanel) on which I manage email addresses for my workingsoftware.com.au domains, but I just forward all mail from there (for multiple accounts) to a single gmail account, iaindooley@gmail.com.

I have setup that account to allow me to send email as multiple different accounts, and send using my own, external SMTP server so that it looks "real".

I then have fetchmail running on one of my servers which downloads everything from gmail (except the spam) and I mostly read my email with alpine although using gmail as a waypoint has the advantage of lots and lots of free storage, excellent search and very easy accessibility from the web and multiple devices.

I periodically archive this when it gets too big onto the same server that holds my nightly backups (a 5.3TB RAID-Z NAS in the same rack as my primary development machine).

If my gmail account got hacked and all my messages were deleted, I'd still have them (because I POP them off) and the email address that I use publicly is not associated with my gmail address, so I would just be able to open a different gmail account and forward my mail there. I'd lose the ability to search a crapload of messages, though, without un-archiving all my old tarballs that I'd popped off of gmail but that's more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe.
> loath

Aha! -> loathe! (I think?) Correcting you on the off chance I am actually correct and can then check off "corrected the grammar of a professional author" on my bucket list...

In my defense, I recently bought The Hidden Family and The Clan Corporate during Border's clearance sale, so I feel I'm entitled to this rude behavior as a paying customer.
> there will be no legal/enumberance/techincal barriers to doing so

> it won't be [...] a plug-in to your browser

These seem at odds, because you won't have support in older browsers.
BareMineralsMakeup
Only reading the 118 page thesis' abstract? Probably not. Kudos to her for writing it, and you linking it; I've saved it for the weekend.

But my point wasn't that "it's an original thought that he's had and no one has ever considered it before!" just "I was ignorant of this exact problem until it was pointed out to me. Then it became evident."

But, maybe I'm just reading that as a little more antagonistic than intended.
I think it's dangerous to rely on some corporate owned address as your long term identity. Even a company as big as Google or Microsoft could disappear in 20 years. It is much better to own your domain and be able to switch out the underlying service provider as needed. Though DNS wasn't really designed for that and it is probably beyond the capability of the average user, I do recommend it for the technically inclined.
Are they purposefully mocking the stereotype that Android apps have poor design?
Ask HN: [redis] ruby client for splitting reads/writes to slave/master
Moderation is the solution to he problem you are describing, not identity. It is a bizarre logic to say "A is better than B. Here is an example of how A fails. Therefore A is better than B."

Mainstram media forums are full of idiotic posts because the mainstream is primarily composed of idiots.
Any recommendations? https://github.com/oggy/redis_master_slave doesn't seem too widely used.
He seems to be advocating that the solution is built into all levels of the stack: OS drivers, native browser support (i.e. no plugins), etc.
Strange use of the word "saturated". They sold 4 million in the first weekend. Everyone wants an iPhone; the only thing holding them back are price and connectivity. Therefore, the iPhone market is the phone market. Apple currently has 4% of that market. (When he introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said even 1% of that market would be huge. It has exceeded his ambitions 4x.) That leaves 96% of the market, which is still growing, to expand into. So, saturated? I think not.
Even though users typically don't care whether a service is centralized or not, decentralized services have the advantage when it comes to building infrastructure around them.

With Paypal, the same company is responsible for sending, receiving and storing your money. A decentralized currency like Bitcoin could act as an intermediary protocol that would allow users to choose different companies to handle each of these tasks.

Bitcoin to me seems interesting because it's essentially an open protocol for transferring and manipulating finances. I kinda feel that talking about deflationary currencies or currency fluctuations is somewhat missing the point.
Google and FB are full of 4chan content... love it or hate it, 4chan is the source for a huge number of the memes that eventually bubbled up to the mainstream over the last few years.

Anonymity (or at least, properly contextualized identity) allows people to try out different identities and modes of creation. Removing all social context results in a smoothed out, lowest-common-denominator of personality, but it's the jagged edges and oddities that really make people interesting - or ugly.
So why require Facebook to register on Canvas?
I am not convinced hiding points results in voter apathy. My points received per comment seem to be higher after that change.

Of course PG has presumably actual statistics about this.
As an rdio subscriber, a streaming video service that offered some sort of integration with rdio would be pretty interesting. A single subscription plan that would allow for unlimited streaming of music AND movies could be huge.
That's the point of his presentation: your Twitter handle is not you.
I think we're actually just on the verge of the real world network effects starting to kick in. Technically, Haskell is something like 20 years old, but it reminds me in practice of how Python felt when I first came to it in the 1.5.2 era; promising, but missing a lot of infrastructure. It's starting to come in, though. The recent work on performant bytestrings and text representations was one big stopper, and the web frameworks for Haskell are, well, for one thing plural now, which is a nice sign, and many are improving rapidly.

If you're interested but unsure, you might take a look around but I don't feel all that guilty suggesting waiting another year or two.
Context aware software can be built only when rich repositories of background knowledge are available. They don't come cheap. Either you need hordes of linguists and domain experts or you get garbage. One can try using OpenCyc, FrameNet, WordNet or UMLS but it ain't easy. You might as well spent the time on writing Q/A templates for your bot. Hurdles, hurdles, hurdles.

Nonetheless, Watson and Apple showed that there is something shiny on the other side of the rainbow.
I've always wondered why more people don't discuss a future based around the idea of practically unlimited nuclear energy + practically unlimited clean water from desalinization + practically unlimited hydrogen from electrolysis.

It seems that that would solve a vast number of problems, no?
Even assuming a limit exists, without hard numbers this discussion is a waste of time. There is a huge practical difference between a limit of 8 billion and one of 20 billion; especially as these same UN population models, which the author mentions, predict that world population may stabilize, or even start declining, by 2050 (http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/popnews/Newslt...)
Anyone who liked this should really check out Hacker's by Steven Levy, the last third of the book is about Sierra and more or less how it summed up a third generation computer user. Simply wonderful if you're into computer history
> "DON'T REUSE PASSWORDS EVER"

You can reuse your password as long as it's for an account that you don't care about. The more secure the account needs to be the more secure that password needs to be. I.e. use the same password for all crap accounts, use a pattern for semi-secure accounts, and use separate, secure passwords for all secure accounts.
Better a write with an index than a read without an index, my grannie always said.
Sun was close to licensing Java patents to Google for $28 million
They could still use Kickstarter to help fund one of the startup's projects – they just can't offer equity in return.

One attempt to find a legal workaround for securities laws which make it hard to crowdfund startups is ProFounder:

https://www.profounder.com/
Has anyone ever wondered why spammers don't use proper grammar? Is it because the majority of people they target can't type with proper grammar, or because they're foreign?
I thought that these agreements didn't actually involve any payments to Microsoft, and in some cases even involved payments going the other way, to give MS fuel for its FUD.
"The National Security Agency operates the world's most popular child pornography web site, originally founded by Chris Poole. Let's all listen to what he has to say."

Fixed.
So stoked...!!!
I don't think having profiles, like here in HN, means the system is no longer anonymous. As long as if you have nothing to link you to your other identities, it's anonymous.

Besides, 4chan is a clusterfuck for other reasons; it's part of the culture of the place, and that even differs for each section. /lit/ is much more civilized than /b/, for example.
For a little bit on BIOS I go here: http://sites.google.com/site/pinczakko/
A friend of mine got his gmail hacked - he believes through POP password brute forcing vulnerability. The person or persons who stole it used it to steal his domain. Fortunately he was able to get it back. I turned on 2-factor auth for gmail soon afterwards.

http://secretgeek.net/sg_hijack_1.asp
http://secretgeek.net/sg_hijack_2.asp
Fine, money is loaned to a bank, and they have an obligation to repay the loan. With what does said bank repay the loan? Money, of course. Where does that money come from? Ultimately: other loans.

"It's loans all the way down..."
What you were doing before was a bad idea. HN talks about a lot of things I don't know much about --- Haskell, high frequency trading, scaling Cassandra and Riak, AI search. But it also talks about some things I know very well. And it was not my experience that comment scores generally tracked correctness on those threads. Generally, they track what people want to hear, or what the "cool kids" think.
When I was taught A*, I was just given the mathematical definition of admissible and left to run with that. The intuition the author gave transforms some vague notion of a weight function with certain properties into an almost obvious mental picture. I wish more things were taught this way at school.
He talks about that in the video (linked elsewhere in this thread, on YouTube.) It's used to keep out the more casual trolls. But on the site itself, you're not required to reveal your identity.
New Song: Justin Bieber - Mistletoe (Audio Official) - MTV Fresh
Video: Quantum Levitation
Why not just make your password 'AskNotWhatYouCanDoForYourCountry'? That seems pretty strong to me.
Yes, but imagine.

It would be a brave new world of child prodigies & parentheses, of Lambda symbols drawn on the wall in crayon & kids playing jump-rope games while singing songs about side-effects & mutable state :)
7. Additionally, automated file importing needs to be added to xcode.

8. Global space is polluted with constants and enums
I'm full up with taking the AI and ML courses from Stanford. Both courses provide background material in linear algebra, so I guess I'll make do with that for awhile. Two notes, though: The book is rather expensive (over $100USD) and, notwithstanding the glowing comments here, has some pretty scathing negative comments on Amazon. The question that comes to my mind is: If a book is going to reach an internet audience, is it still appropriate to charge classroom prices?
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i laughed at reading the end of this it was still incconcievable that the author and his wife were personally responsable fo rthe mess they find themselves in.

using crappy passwords,using unprotected computers,not backing up.....

i want my 10 mins back.
Open Source Networking - Are OTS Hardware and Virtual Appliances the Future?
This post improved my overall quality of life by about 1%.
EROI for blowing up mountaintops in Virginia is significantly better than 1970's saudi Oil. It's also better than directly minding the stuff. Which is why the cost of coal is so 1/10th the price of Oil per unit energy.

PS: People talk about Oil like it's the single most important energy source out there, but it's only important because it used to be so cheap.
Embedded Systems and Robotics QA for Indian students
Actually, the dog is a little acrobat and has no problem getting on the couch (she regularly hops up the BACK of that couch.) I actually just flop off the side and put my ipad on them for reading. It works great for that.
Rings a bell, changing nickname on IRC was essential part of self expression.
Indeed I have. And most of those libraries are unfinished, poorly documented, or both. In short, it's great that people are putting the effort in. But Haskell has a long way to go still before it can compete with languages like python or ruby.

Don't get me wrong. I love Haskell, and am willing to put up with things I wouldn't put up with in other languages. But it makes it difficult for me to sell the language to others who will also have to work with it.
I was very excited when I first discovered git-annex. When I saw it was written in haskell that sealed the deal for me. The haskell code I run is all very robust and I was very happy you'd selected it for g-a. Have you posted anything else about how specifically Haskell has made it better? I'd enjoy reading more about that.
Very very good article. Shit, in fact, the fact that I hurt my foot. But, other than that, not shit, but an excellent article. Not shit at all. Congrats.
Foundation: responsive CSS framework from Zurb
The limit is right about what we have now.
I agree that this is likely missing some pretty important pieces.

Due to all the recent talk about Apple and Siri I decided to look into Siri the startup a little more closely. That's the company that Apple bought to bring you Siri the feature. I was curious how much of this technology was created by the startup and how much Apple contributed. While I didn't find the answer to that question, I did discover something even more startling.

It turns out that Siri the company was born out of one of the largest computer science research programs in U.S. history. Or so claims the press release [1]. Looking at the the research project page [2], it appears to involve at least seven major universities, a lot of government funding, and several private corporate collaborators. While some of the pieces may be open, the license for the project itself only allows for non-commercial use.

It's also fantastically complex and combines many state of the art techniques. While it's certainly possible for a company to reproduce much of the implementation from the open pieces, it is a lot more than 8 hours of work.

All said, Siri is an amazing accomplishment, and more than anything, a great example of why science funding is important.

[1] http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html

[2] https://pal.sri.com/Plone/framework