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Comment by mayank | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious -- what is your faith in them based on? I feel sorry for the amount of expectations they were shouldering, but are you being supportive because you truly believe in their (unproven) technical abilities, because you hate Facebook so much, or are you just being nice because startup criticism can be really soul-killing? If a large corporation had released alpha code like that, would you trust the corporation with your data, even down the line? As much as it may be a nice Don Quixote story, results and credibility are the only things that matter here. The four of them are probably wonderful people, but that means squat when it boils down to code.

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Faith? Support? I certainly don't have faith in them any more than I have faith in you. I know neither you nor them. How could I have "faith" in an unknown? However, I believe that most of the time people attempt to be good. And given that they are willing to let us see their code (unlike many other institutions) I would argue they are living up to my belief at least for now. So they released an alpha that had security issues? The model of open source validated itself; they received critical feedback and will hopefully act on it. If they do not act on it, so be it, I will not trust them with my information. But I don't believe in cynicism especially cynicism aimed at a self-advertised alpha project.

Does that mean I support them? Very well then, I support them! Go hunt some giants! Change the world! Go make things better while your critics sit on their hands and tell you can't, too afraid to build things themselves!

Being good and being able to write secure software are very different, somewhat orthogonal, qualities.

If a large corporation had released alpha code like that, would you trust the corporation with your data, even down the line?

Have no misgivings: Facebook has exactly the same kinds of buggy messes while features are in development. The only difference here is that Facebook's prototypes never see the light of day, whereas Diaspora's did.

Do you use Facebook on a regular basis? Things are better now but 6 months ago I wouldn't consider that statement to be accurate. I'd consider a Win98 system as reliable as Facebook was then.

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