Hacker News Reader

mrviron S4 - $12 for 1 year of 1 TB write-only storage

I see your point. More optimized data flow which could enable them to even use diskless storage servers.

Hmm, at least they fixed it and apologized.

Orkut privacy settings fit in one tab. There are seven settings of which five have just two options. All in simple English. I don't need to read a blog article to understand them. What is your excuse, facebook?

mrviron S4 - $12 for 1 year of 1 TB write-only storage

Next FAQ item:

Q: Do you use any file compression on the storage servers?

A: Yes, we use unix compression program: rm -rf

mrvir on [dead]

There are already several alternatives to facebook. For example Google's orkut.com Seems to be popular in India. All the developers I work with there use it rather than fb.

mrvir on Openbook

True, CNN doesn't get your Facebook data directly, but if FB automatically creates a connection and CNN gets added to your interest then, if i have understood correctly, that network can see at least basic info about you.

mrvir on How Linux Saved A Fast Food Giant.

During that time MD also used SCO Unix widely. I worked for a retail systems company where the SCO sales guys always bragged about it.

mrvir on Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

I guess letting users run nodes presents some man-in-the-middle security issues to be solved as well.

mrvir on In Defense of Facebook

Basic engineering approach is to look at the direction and the rate of change to estimate where the system is heading. The decline of privacy in FB has been well documented by EFF among others. FB has taken 900M of investor money. What is their business model to make money? I think this is what worries many people here.

mrvir on Facebook Calls All Hands Meeting On Privacy

Not very likely scenario as the CEO has publicly stated that he's not a big believer in Internet privacy. It is already evident that they are ready to take bad press in slowly loosening the privacy. The real issue that Facebook has with privacy is how to get rid of it.
My two cents: FB is set out to collect as much social info about as many people as possible. Probably they have much more data about the folks than we know and that can seen through FB site or API. Their problem is that they cannot openly sell/share that data with partners. So they need to get to the point where they can argue legally (guessing this will end up in court at least here in Europe) that the members have permitted them to collect all that info.

mrvir on ALL code is ugly

Exactly, seeding a long array has never been pretty. Some languages allow you to get rid of the comma but that's about all. Get over it.

mrvir on Absurd Complexity of Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook interface issues are silly. The privacy settings are made confusing deliberately. They have plenty of talented people and could fix this quickly if they would want to. IMO the root problem is not interface design.

mrvir on Attn: Startup Founders, You Need a Hobby

Devenir vieux, c'est quand on ne peut pas fumer les plantes que nous cultivons. Just joking ;-)

mrvir on Stephen Fry on binary choices

Never lived in the US, but getting an impression that the political system also contributes to this binary syndrome.

mrvir on Facebook is Dying

No, I think it will be great fun for your grandchildren to learn about your online obsessions.

mrvir on Facebook is Dying

Facebook will die, but your profile data will live forever in some company's database.

mrvir on Facebook's new features secretly add apps to your profile

Not that simple. You visit FB, then visit some other site. Your visit to that other website causes FB to subscribe you to an app of the site that has access to your data. How much profiling and tracking is reasonable to expect? Are other services doing this?

mrvir on Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″

HTML5 really makes sense for the online viewing. Guess PDF will stay as popular offline reading format. At least until we get some universal cross-platform/cross-browser webarchive format. Could be an idea for a start-up ...

mrvir on The Case for Working With Your Hands

That's a neat story :) Did one interior renovation myself with tight budget/schedule before we could move in. My wife still wonders how we survived that. I nowadays take very seriously the advice my in-laws gave me: "Concentrate on doing what you do best. Hire the pros for other serious work."
PS Just wait, your computer skills will get you appreciation from the younger generations.

mrvir on IPhone, Gizmodo, and moral clarity about crime

Who has the story about our software engineer? Talk about hangover after birthday party...

mrvir on WSJ: Federal antitrust probe about Apple's iAd service, too

Sure, will be interesting to see how Reality-Distortion-Field [tm] works in court :P

mrvir on Why I Canceled My Facebook Account

Creating targeted ads is one thing, identifying you personally is another. FB knows your name, birth date, gender, city. That pretty much singles you out. When combined with all the data about your page views on partner sites that could become privacy threat in the future.

mrvir on The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash

This is exactly what bothers me: Talking about open standards and then making their own versions of them. The Redmond strategy.
Makes me want say the same comment about Jobs open standards sweet talk as he made about Google's slogan... That's BS.

mrvir on The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash

They can totally CONTROL what html5 can do in their devices.