skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately they are going against the famously unethical and privacy-eroding facebook, which has a real-names policy and the bans to show for it (also, NSA alumni on the board). And besides “the competitor already does it”, here is what Google's reasoning may be:

Requiring your real name makes it easier for people you know in real life to find you.

Interactions with people who know you in real life will keep pulling you back in, because these people are harder for you to ignore.

Once you give your real name and the rest of your identity (they have been badgering for phone numbers for a while, to keep your youtube account, or open a google account, or to avoid annoying security/recovery notices when logging to gmail), you won't be asking yourself “should I be sharing this” questions, because you'll be in the habit of trusting them. Other features, like payments, deliveries and phone notifications, won't have to nag you for explicit personal info anymore.

So I think they will offer temporary or per-circle identities at most, while people who want privacy from Google or the US and affiliates will have to fake it while it remains possible, or be shown the door.
Well, it seems that Google thinks "Poettering" must be a made up last name. Guess whatever they er, googled doesn't know who wrote that avahi code they're surely running.

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/google-doesnt-like-my-name....
Bloomberg in general is terrible. From the financial side, they leak information to others, so the rule of thumb is to never talk to them unless you are absolutely desperate to raise monies.
Great point -- although not everybody's missing it; it's gotten press in Australia (where Aboriginal names violate the policy), Hong Kong (where bloggers have complained about the ban on using both their English and Chinese names), and even in the US after Google suspended their own employee Ping.
Yeah, I don't have a data plan. I look for free WIFI if I need internet.

Not to say that this doesn't work for you, but having a data plan is completely different. Being able to count on the fact that, most of the time, you're able to pull your device out of your pocket and access the internet, whether it's for email, maps, or looking something up is extremely valuable.

It may not be worth the cost for some people, but I will say that before I got my iPhone there were many times where my strategy of "open laptop and see if there's free wifi" failed to work, and occasionally involved driving to the nearest McDonald's trying to pick up their wifi from my car. Not fun.
You may be able to grasp the instantaneous distribution of forces in a building or charges in a circuit without needing to know the order that they deploy. While a computer itself is an example of a circuit where the order of execution matters, a radio is not.

Order-of-execution is not perceived the same way as cause-and-effect, even though they're both the same thing. It's a damn weird thing that I've seen people do. A little bit like how artists can comprehend how the position of an arm has an effect on the way bones, fat and muscle are distributed over the rest of the body, but can't understand why they got smacked with an overdraft fee when their average daily balance would have covered it easily.
Africa's Lost Eden (Full Video)
So is it common knowledge when they kick someone off for using them? Did it happen after this announcement? Etc... All this article does is speculate on what Google will do in the next couple months... how is it even relevant?
BuyWithMe Lays off More Than Half of its Employees
I'm with the OP, sort of. I ditched my iPhone a couple months ago and surprisingly I barely miss it. Email, browser, and maps were the most useful applications for me, but I never cared for much else.

Now I own a Motorola F3 (FONE). It's about as simple as it gets while being incredibly durable, crazy long battery (e-ink), and amazing reception. It's also pretty slim and light, but it sucks for texting and the character display is a little painful. Worth it for me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_FONE

Oh and my phone bill went from over $100 / month down to $25 / month, yet somehow I have way more talk time included in the plan (unlimited within the province).

I'm a software developer if you're wondering. Maybe I'd find smart phones a necessity in another profession...
I'm sure YC has been asked to participate in this kind of thing and they've declined. After watching this show, it's clear that they showed good judgment.

I do think there's room to do a quality documentary on YC or TechStars, but the dramatic reality show format is inherently crap.
Allowing pseudonyms is not just technically easy, it's the default. Also, it's no secret that Google uses your data to advertise to you (it is so far from secret as to be their business model), and that various governments at the least would like very much to have access to user data. The piece is almost completely speculation-free.

If you think the post's brevity was a shortcoming, though, read this, which was linked from the OP: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/08/nym-wars/
Because:

1) The short, speculative rant is well-reasoned. If you disagree with his reasoning that Google saying it will take "months" to implement pseudonyms implies that their solution is significantly more complicated than simply "stop deleting accounts with names we don't like", it would be conducive to discussion if you explained your reasoning.

2) This short, speculative, well-reasoned rant is written by JWZ, whose insight and wisdom is held in wide regard by many, many people. He's earned the right to have his speculations taken seriously many, many times over.
As I stated below, I largely believe Bloomberg did its job and techstars owes a big fat apology to their cos for putting them in this situation without covering all bases.
I think focusing (pardon the pun) on the "focus later" feature is limiting, for a lot of people this doesn't matter and it rubs many photographers the wrong way, as seen from the comments. Rather, I think they should emphasize that this is a new way of taking pictures, you may decide to have different focus planes on different parts of the photo, which may lead to interesting new effects in photography. It also has many scientific applications.
> They want to correlate my online activities with my offline identity.

It seems to me that the only legitimate use of circles is with respect to people you are sharing with that you know in real life. If you want to talk to total strangers, then you want to be pseudonymous but you also have almost no reason to not post publicly.

That's fine; there is twitter, tumblr, even HN fit that model. All pseudonymous posts, all public all the time. Discussions with strangers.

Google+ can be used that way; I guess many people do. I somehow got marked as a redditor when I first signed up and I still have about 3 redditors that are strangers start following me every week, and I think it's pretty awful.

There is a huge space for online interactions with people who you know in meatspace, and plenty of reason why Google would want to get into that game. Product recommendations is the first thing that comes to mind; would you rather buy an item that your real life friend says is good or that a random person on the internet says is good? That is a benefit both to you and to google if they can provide that.

If you don't want to interact with people you know IRL, there are plenty of other services besides Google+ available online. Gmail remains one of them, it's a perfectly legitimate service to interact with strangers. It seems to me that you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater just because they are offering a product that you don't want to use, but that's obviously your choice.

> The only reason that it would take months to implement is because they're using some authoritative method - maybe ISP customer info, or government supplied info- to correlate users to reveal real identity.

This is seriously bordering on "batshit crazy" level conspiracy theory. What you are describing is impossible on so many levels; legal, technical and PR. I have no idea what they are implementing, but it's probably more along the lines of allowing people who are demonstrably known in real life by pseudonyms (like Lady Gaga, but less famous). The advantage is not from you using your real name, the advantage is from knowing the name that lots of people already know you by so all those people can easily find you on Google+. No one you know in real life would be able to find you on HN unless you specifically linked them to your profile; which again is fine, it is simply providing a different service, one where you could be talking to your best friend and never even know it.
Oh, targeting a good VM is a huge win over a typical machine language for an implementer. My prediction is specifically that the inter-language paradise some expect will never come.

But even within the points you bring up, I'm not sure that VMs are as winning as they're made out to be. Size and compilation time aren't somehow intrinsically better for VMs; JS does quite well on both fronts these days. And I'm not convinced JS's quirks are harder for implementers to cope with than a silicon machine language's.
Good stuff Carl, it's been years (no decades) since I have seen a BASIC program.
The "nymnwars" will still be waged as long as I do not have the option of giving GOOGLE a pseudonym, not people in a given circle. The crux of the issue is the ability to remain anonymous from Google and their advertising partners, not my friends, who already know my real name.
Just signed up, and I don't know how I feel about it. On one hand I really like the UI and sign up process, because it actually made me want to give them information for some reason. On the other hand I feel like they just robbed me because they didn't give me access to the site.
In my experience just about everybody fancies themselves a great programmer and considers anybody who doesn't know (insert semi-random list of skills) to be a shitty programmer.

I kinda think it's like the Roth test for obscenity. I can't really explain what makes a shitty programmer, but "I know it when I see it."
the point is that Google is still able to rat you out (on a warrant or a subpoena)

If you wanted to use the platform to protest against the government, or if you fucked the head of CIA's wife and he found out your g-mail address on her phone, you might be in deep shit.
Not for the money, just for the fame. It's very Web 2.0.
I remember when I had dialup, I couldn't see the big deal about broadband internet. After all, I was primarily downloading text and I could get online in less than 30 seconds.

It wasn't until I went to college and had a persistent pipe that I finally got how different always-on internet was compared to internet you had to bring up.

I suspect at least some of your lack of use for a smartphone is precisely because you don't have a data plan.
Why on earth would you want to remain anonymous on social platforms as an entrepreneur? Frankly, most of your businesses' success rides on who is running the show, and investors and customers want to know about who is running the show. Even if you don't want a social media profile, that is OK. But to insist on an anonymous one? Why?

Seriously, for an entrepreneur, what is the motivation for having an anonymous social media account?

I certainly understand the issue of one's privacy, but if you are expecting to run a successful online business, your identity will need to be defined across the social media platforms. If that profile is not defined and you are a successful entrepreneur, your profile will be created for you (in wiki style).
I was aware that stuff was probably being edited and I think Melanie and Jason Baptiste got an unfair shake. If I am reading this blog post correctly: the production crew spliced together two unrelated bits of audio ("LinkedIn for fashion") and then played it off like it was actually said? And that it was the new pivot for the company?

That's messed up.
Android Open Source Project source code is back online
That's an interesting point.

I know that when I'm in the flow coding, there is a sort of Tick:the-program-does-this, Tock:the-program-does-that stepwise execution of the code in my head.

There are many answers as to what the hardware is actually doing with the instructions, but more generally what exactly is the name of an imaginary discrete state of a program that currently only exists in a coders head?
I laughed, you bastard.
thanks for writing this. the formula used in the webpage, (HH+TT+HT)/TH, appears to be off by one. i calculated it myself from the series, i.e. sum(n=0 to inf, 2(n+1)2pq(p^2+q^2)^n), and through the algebra i work it out to the same as yours (doubled).

i'm not sure how the author's formula was derived, but i get the same result calculating the series for a slightly different (but wrong) algorithm: just keep flipping until HT or TH appears (not flipping by pairs). this series is sum(n=1 to inf, (n+1)(qp^n + pq^n)), i.e. sum(n=0 to inf, (n+1)(qp^n + pq^n)) - (p+q). the series works out to 1/(p(1-p)), but that last term would account for the one-off difference.
Ironically enough, Chinese residents in Hong Kong who do in fact go by Anglo names (an expression of their mixed cultural heritage in a former British colony) are getting systematically bounced:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=40356...

By some accounts, this is the reason for the odd "in one language" qualification in the Google Plus notions of what a "real name" ought to be. FWIW, there's at least one American-born Chinese who's gotten similar treatment: Ping Yee, who got bounced because someone insisted that his only Real Name (TM) was Ka-Ping Yee --- which is what it says on his birth certificate, but which no one (even family) uses much.

http://zestyping.livejournal.com/259131.html

What makes this one particularly odd is that Ping is a Google employee (or at least, he was at the time).

I suspect Anglosphere-born Chinese who go by "Alexa Chung", or whatever, aren't getting this level of systematic grief, but that only makes things more ridiculous: why should the acceptability of a name depend on where someone lives?
I think this is quite interesting. The ability to treat code as data is an incredibly powerful concept. I don't know exactly what Roslyn does, but I see a lot of potential:

1. Measuring code complexity. I've often felt that code complexity can be gauged several ways, and one is the number of "if" statements (or select..case). Being able to query the code base of an extremely large solution is a big step in that direction.

2. Being able to "query" the call stack - how do I get from this line to the base constructor of my "user" object. Rather than stepping through the debugger, it could be a query of the code base to find the path from here to there.

3. Detecting bit-rot. Finding any method class that's simply never used could be another "query" of the code base. Yes, proper test-coverage would help detect this, but not every production system has unit tests.

4. I've worked on projects in the past where we really wanted to add guid tracing to the preamble of each function to dynamically trace the code at run time. If Roslyn supports "update" queries of the code, it might be easy to add such a feature across the whole code base (or perhaps only classes that inherit from some known base class).

Managing a code base like this (rather than grepping/searching) is a powerful concept. Perhaps we could see a LINQ for source code some day?
"Software is thought of as a science,"

What?
Definitely true. Google want credit for being "open source" but they're not willing to put the effort into actually having an open development process.
I did not have to show up last night. But I also did not want Bloomberg to be able to guide / direct the last word on ToVieFor. In addition, Tisch and Cohen fought VERY hard to make sure the finale episode was positive, which I knew ahead of time. They felt just as disappointed and betrayed by Bloomberg as I.
This American Life's "Gossip" episode had a story from someone working on a reality TV show. TL;DR Everything is staged and drama is fabricated if it doesn't exist.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/444/g...
My bad; thanks to philwelch and saraid for flagging the error. The resulting discussion is interesting, as is 13 upvotes for a post based on a misreading :-). FWIW, my favorite bit on programmer's understanding each other's work is Yegge's Done and Gets Things Smart.
G+ is just buying time before a Wave-like death.
Well, that's showbusiness for you.

I have friends in media and showbusiness, so I've seen these things from behind the scenes, and have a good feel for the dynamics. Media is about getting customers just like any other company, and their product is stories. They try to make these stories as appealing as possible, just like any other company tries to make the product their customers want.Truth plays second fiddle to a good story.

Oftentimes we think the media is engaged in a search for truth, justice and a real portrayal of how things work, but unfortunately that's not the how it is. They are there to sell you entertainment, and if the truth isn't sexy enough they'll pimp it up until it is. That's how it works.

On a broader note this is a huge problem for democracy - what we believe to be a guard against lies, bad politics and corruption is in reality just entertainment created by for-profit corporations with no interest in keeping a government honest or multinational corporations on the right side of the law. It's about business. Big business.
Wanting support for pseudonymity doesn't mean you're always using it. I can see someone using a non-anon account by day, anon during off-time.
No, they literally just made it up, and paid a narrator to do a voice-over.
Just FYI, I love your articles. I routinely forget who wrote them and where to find them again, then fail to find the link in my bookmarks, so I spend a half hour Googling phrases I vaguely remember being included in the essays ("how to deliver without everything getting fucked up", nope. "how to write code without shit exploding", nope. "how to..."). I think they reside in some kind of cognitive null zone in my brain. So, thanks for linking them again!
The program counter isn't the only element of that "what the program is doing now" state though. The context in which the current instruction is being executed makes a world of difference.
I will add only this: if you desire to do a lot of typing (writing, emailing, etc.) with a smartphone and you do not have a device with a physical keyboard then you need to go out and buy one (droid 2/3, mytouch slide, g2, etc.) before you continue complaining. It's a solvable problem.
More information on Linux and the UEFI secure boot feature.
Direct Marketing for Selling Costume Wigs
1. Software that shows videos of real visitors using our website

Forget ClickTale. Check out Mouseflow. Love it and much more affordable.
http://mouseflow.com/demo

Useful for debugging purposes too and they have a "live" version.
Yikes - that's even worse...
I agree with this.

At my house there are constantly three things on the coffee table: an Android smartphone, an iPad 2, and a Thinkpad. The iPad 2 was novel at first, but now everyone reaches for the Thinkpad first when they are sitting on the couch.

Also, (shameless plug) I wrote about my own experience without a phone here: http://codebrief.com/2011/06/living-untethered/, and came up with a similar conclusion.
I've been a big fan of TechStars... until this show. I thought the entire tone of the show was just horrific for their brand. It played off the worse stereotypes and came off as very patronizing toward entrepreneurs. Tisch seems to really reflect the character of Techstars New York and thats unfortunate.
Just got the updated version. It's a great game.

You can bet I'm going to be borrowing your "Tweet your score to gloat" feature for some of our apps in the future.

linkage:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dropzap-2/id378977964?mt=8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroutine
The Church-Turing thesis simply tells us that different models of computation are equivalent — and as applied to programming languages, anything that one Turing-equivalent language can compute, another can. But it emphatically does not mean that idiomatic code in one language can be mechanically translated into idiomatic (or even particularly readable) code in another language by a simple process.

If you did have a C-to-Lisp converter, it would almost certainly produce very imperative-style Lisp code that mimics the form of the C input, not nice functional code like you probably want.
The Google Apps case is harder because of the existence of a separate "domain administrator" role with some powers over the user account. Many people on Google Apps domains are employees using their work email for personal business. If you want to create durable identities around email addresses, these people are kind of a problem, because the obvious way to do things gives control of their digital identities to their employer's IT department.
I miss speed dial. Other than that, my iPhone is a limb.
Have you tried an iPad?
Agreed, I've owned my first smartphone (an HTC Trophy) for about a year now, the last six months having the data connection on (using prepaid data). It certainly makes the phone a whole different experience.
The idea that Google having your Real Name via Google+ helps them be helpful to governments (authoritarian or otherwise) is... odd.

If a government wants to tie a Google account to a Real Name, they have plenty of options:

- get a history of IP addresses that accessed the account and contact the relevant ISPs

- track other Google accounts logged into from a similar pattern of IP addresses and see if there's a Real Name for any of them

- look at the content associated with the account (e.g. email), which may reveal the Real Name and/or give pointers to other services (e.g. Paypal) that might well have it

- if you use an Android phone with the Google account in question, Google can tie the account to a SIM and an IMEI. If the SIM is postpaid (or even prepaid in many countries), that will directly lead to a Real Name (note: authoritarian governments are very likely to require all SIMs be associated with a Real Name). Even if a prepaid SIM isn't directly associated with a Real Name, there still could be a payment trail for the SIM and/or top-ups ...

- probably other angles I haven't thought of yet

These are additional steps, but many of them are easy because they involve actors (e.g. ISPs, carriers, credit card processors) that are known for cooperating with governments (and sometimes even private actors like the MPAA & RIAA). Beyond that, anyone trying to tie a Google account to a Real Name is likely to do some or all of these things anyway to check whether or not you lied to Google.

Giving Google your Real Name for Google+ affects whether or not they can use it. If you're not happy with how Google is going to use your Real Name, Google+ isn't for you (and probably wasn't even without the pseudonym issue, since you have concerns about Google's business practices). Giving your Real Name to Google for Google+ doesn't meaningfully change whether or not a government (or other entity in a position to legally compel Google) can tie your Google account to a Real Name.
You can be pseudonymous to google but known to your friends, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

After all, google is just the transportation medium why should it have any knowledge on whose data it transports, as long as it reaches the intended destination it's all good.
I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.
Rangement Garage - Metalia
"Whatever Google is planning cannot be [just not kicking off pseudonyms], because they think it will take them months to implement."

That's relevant speculation, regardless of whether he's right.
Blackberry could face lawsuits over outages.
A golden oldie from Patrick:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...