I'm wondering about wordpress - especially migrating to posterous from an installed wordpress site (rather than having a site on wordpress.com). One thing that is missing from posterous is the ability to put ads like google adsense...anyone know if this is coming? (I haven't seen any hints on their blogs)
There is one problem with Ballmer being on Dancing with the Stars - he would have to dance with a partner...I think that's part of the rules. As we all know, Ballmer can only dance by himself (and yell "Developers, Developers, Developers").
Come on - you haven't seen Dexter? That's an ethical serial killer show.
Your points are all well stated but he is quite funny ("nerdgasm"...come on). Otherwise - just add healthcare reform and Wallstreet debacle to your list and then build a bunker and never come out.
I keep having an image of Donald E. Graham hovering over Zuke and waiting for him to complete the article in long script and then handing it off to some flunky to be typed. Then Donald says "good job Zuke" and pats him on the head and Zuke smiles and says "yeah...privacy - my ass". And both leave the conference room they were in laughing manically.
Well - if we take a big leap here and assume that one of WakeMate's founders is a mod and this person deleted the post then the policy is not so good.
A possible approach is to allow the mods to have aliases to their usernames (and PG and company can be the only ones knowing the correspondence of alias to username). This way - HN users could see the history of deletions of a particular mod without knowing the actual user.
Granted, HN users are smart and someone could probably create a data mining app which would find the actual user by looking at pattern of deletions, topics of posts, etc... but that's life and that's what you get for having a lovely place such as HN.
Didn't know about this flag - thanks for pointing it out. As for the post - doesn't seem offensive at all.
PG: Hacker News improvement suggestion: for any post that gets deleted - show the username of the one who deleted it so when "showdead" is set to "yes" it shows this. An explanation would also be a nice thing to have as part of this mechanism. I'm going on the assumption that you follow Guido's BDFL model.
I heard this on my local TV news touting it as a new privacy measure...and then I found details via the link.
What exactly does this have to do with privacy? It deals with someone who tries to hack your facebook account but has nothing to do with their use of your information...or am I missing the boat on this?
I think that your analogy is almost on the mark but it needs one little tweak:
"It's like a bank building a safe with several feet of reinforced concrete on the top, bottom, and sides, but putting a plywood door on the front which looks like reinforced concrete."
The reason for this tweak is that content is king and the content providers know it. Hulu by itself without content is yet another website - just a shell (recall Hulu's tears when Comedy Central pulled its shows).
Hulu's goal is to make content providers feel that their content is secure. Only when they do this will they get the content and have more content providers sign on. Consequently, it is in their best interest to perform a song and dance routine on how securing content is their number 1 goal.
Really...so releasing in 3 months is not fast enough for you? If it was me, I'd want to work on it for 3 months and during that time - talk to other folks that are working on similar issues and have the code reviewed by some trusted mentors. This is pure speculation on my part but I suspect they already have that in mind...per their blog:
"...If you want to see what we are up to, we will be hanging out on the GNU Social mailing list, as well as a few other places as we work on defining some common protocols between like minded projects."
It seems to me this would allow the service provider approach and the ability to also have a commercial part (like the Funambol dual licensing approach...i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funambol). This doesn't seem like an overtly nefarious scheme to reach for your $5 :-)
My take on this is that they want to take 3 to 4 months of complete focus on coding and design. If you involve too many people by open sourcing it now - you could easily have a "too many cooks" syndrome and the whole project gets bogged down by too many opinions and too much time spent on moderation.
Feedback wise:
I signed up for the email and initially it wasn't obvious that all the checkboxes of vegetable varieties were applicable to the zipcode that I entered (so have something that states "these varieties apply to zip code: -----_. Also - it would be great to have a "check-all" option. I am a total newbie when it comes to gardening and I just checked off everything.
I completely agree with you. It has become a cat and mouse game with facebook where they try to expose all personal information while the user (some users) try to prevent them from doing this through the constant changes in default setttings. The unfortunate thing is that most users don't even realize how much of their information is exposed. They whine and bitch about interface changes not realizing that it is part of constant privacy changes designed to help facebook pawn their information.
I understand they want to make money but they seem to be quite underhanded about how they use (or mis-use) their users' information.
Avoid Wordpress...really? I can understand avoiding shared hosts because you have less control of the environment but going to an alternative blogging platform because it is more obscure than Wordpress seems to be a bad approach (and if you go with a vps solution you might have the headaches of maintaining a secure distro). This is like saying "you should use Linux or Mac because Windows gets attacked more".
Any piece of software that is popular (I saw a recent statistic that wordpress powers %10 of the top 1 million sites as ranked by Alexa) will be much more vulnerable to attack than less popular software. At the same time, you get a bigger community and all the goodies that come along with that popularity (more plug-ins, themes, etc...).
I don't think that getting rid of the software is the correct approach in this case. You need to approach it by assuming that your wordpress site will be attacked every day and you need to have a plan to remediate this. There is no perfect security unless you unplug your web server from the internet. For a one blogger site - one simple approach would be to:
1. Run something like open source tripwire (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/) on a nightly basis so you can get alerted if any wordpress files get changed (HN peoplez: anyone have a better tripwire-ish solution that is free?)
2. Run a nightly backup of your files and db and mail it to an external account (like a gmail account)
3. have a script that can reload your files and database quickly from your backups (obviously - this needs to be tested)