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Our ancestrors did not eat meat or fish every day, today's vegetarians do not eat tofu everyday either. The goal is to be complete in nutrients: you won't be much wrong if you associate cereals, legumes, fresh vegetables, fruits/dried fruits (to get glucids, fibers, proteins, vitamins and minerals) and possibly some dairy products/eggs for lacking nutrients. Think of the traditionnal associations (rice and beans, couscous, houmous and bread, fallafels and pitta ...) and try to be diverse and curious. Cooking is a form of hacking !

My guess is that at a certain point we will have to reconsider our animal based food habits, not based on ethics but on efficiency mainly. We gain some specific contributions from them (B12 vitamin etc) but for others (most proteins included) there should be more efficient ways to get them. The higher you are on the food chain, the more efficiency you loose on the process, so it would better be for something specifically produced at that point of the chain.

Addition and concatenation have different properties: concatenation is not commutative. So the problem is not the types, strings vs int, but different operations. In a language that puts an emphasis on principles like haskell, I find "++" a elegent syntax for concatenation, but otherwise I find that Python's approach of using "+" and throwing a type error is good enough.

From what I heared here and there, one of their plans is try to "embed" Facebook, allowing people to view Facebook info or switch to "private" P2P mode when the other one has diaspora that. So it's not either/or.

Concerning hosting, yeah there's google etc, but as they seem to have discussed with Elben Moglen, they will possibly also consider his ideas about self-hosting on small pluggable computers. And yeah, you probably already hava one: your DSL box. Some providers could play a a cool move on this one.

edit: I don't know if they will have the time, but with encrypted replicated data and external data stores, many things are possible. E.g. you could host the most sensible personnal info and links on your box backed up somewhere and have your photos at Flickr.

Identity and data access are a key part of simplifying UI on the web but also on the desktop. I should be able to log and access my data on my netbook, desktop computer, and the web through the same identity.

This would also favor open APIs to manage/move the actual data more easily as they would seam so natural then. This would be a shield against people wanting to control our identity on the web (Facebook) and people wanting to disempower us of our data (Google's Chromium OS).

I'm kind of not so surprised there are 19 olds in PyPy team. This is a project that requires idealism and enthousiasm: "let's build python in python, compile to everything possible, and make it faster than cpython". Contrast this to the more pragmatic approach of unladen swallow. I envy this guy even now!

The question I'm asking myself: will this system crumble under it's own cost? If looting is made easier than producing that will happen at some point.

Everybody should listen the idea of the last part, or read it here : http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-Moglen-...

Basicaly Elben Moglen says that many of our freedom/privacy problems (Facebook etc) could be solved by using the web in a decentralised way, as it was intended. The problem is mostly technical: we need small pluggable personnal servers. We already have the hardware (ARMs) but we badly need a software stack for them, and one really easy to use.

That's not visionary only because that's what Facebook should have been from the beginning.

All early internet protocols where distributed before the web became companies playground and Conway law followed.

I think a visionary replacement will happen when something will just replace the cloud (which is too often a data ghetto) by giving users a way to easily and completely control their data and services, local as well as remote, in a homogeneous and synchronized way. A merge between the two approaches: "everything on the web" and "everything on your computer". Data (and metadata) and services being identities, media, documents, events, tags, access rights, version history, and links between all those things... So all this without giving all your data to google :)

I was just thinking that their name is fantastic. It conveys such a strong meaning: "we can't be all in one place anymore but we still relate". Maybe it's not a web2.0 buzz name, but at least I immediatly remembered it.

I the basic circuit componants are R, L, C and now M. I wonder, how one can build a transistor out of R,L,C ?

Wow, I'm surprised I actually got them all right: I used the force for the mattel and toyota one's ;-)

All parts exist on the web (OpenID, OAuth, JSON, RSS, microformats, etc...), but not in a usable form as easy to use as Facebook.

I'm happy there are regularly quite a few links about typefaces on HN. For me it was part of realizing that form has an impact on perception, and I'm trying to develop my taste. I feel quite alone amongst my friends though, as I want to rationnalize why choosing this font, and which other font does it play well with... This is still very dificult for me!

Ok, so now I need a social network obeying the following constraints:

- I control my data. My data are where I decide they should be, on my server or web-hosted somewhere. So it is decentralised and everyone has it's node.

- It's based on a standard API, not a product. It defines identities (openid url?), associated publishing of data (defined by its url), relation between data (like a comment on a photo. So some JSON here), and mainly access rights on this data by other identities.

- friends I accept are based on some sort of authorized_keys mecanism, with more detailed access rights.

- I can define some data-stores elswhere, like my photos being on Flickr... Of course I loose some control, but I can revert this.

- there is a canonical open source implementation I can install at home.

- I can easily move my account or some of my data seamlessly, have my url point to it. It should be easier than moving a blog if you own your domain!

So it's just the web, openid, and some standards, or am I missing something. Is someone making this ?

edit: I precised some ideas.

> “It turns out we were searching around a position miles from the rover,” said Murphy.

This guy should make a law about improbable things happening ;)

But he is geek. He is owned by a lack of control, not a lack of knowledge. Everything is so interlinked on this kind of web services that even if he did back-ups, he would still be helpless without the access to his social network.

The line length is very small here, so it may be a pathological case IMHO.

It would be cool to integrate that to Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/)

A remarkably clear summary of the CDO/CDS fraud by a CS person.

The second part is particularly interesting and clear even if I already understood the CDO/tranching part and what a CDS was. Basically, for banks to sell all those crappy CDOs by tranches there where edge funds that where buying the "bad" tranches and gambling that the "good" ones would also fail.

Thanks! I did several times use manually "Inspect Element" and then delete stuff and add margins..

edit: well, hum, strangely, it does not work so well on some pages, skipping section's titles.

I don't really want to continue this discussion here, as HN is not a political forum, and as I tend to agree with many of your points (the devil is in the details...), and I IMHO the problem is rather the way different actors are "in position of force" as you note.

That's so true, and as I grow I'm trying to break social barriers/shields (being more open/authentic/personnal immediately) more and more with unknown people: it just makes relating to people much more enjoyable and profound! It's not even about the hypothetical profit you could get.

First point ("consumerism vs. repressive cultures"): reread my post, don't do amalgams. I fail to see the correlation between proponents of "authenticity" and dictator regimes. First, in the article authenticity proponents are pictured as "anti-globalization" activists: I rarely see vegetarians as mostly concerned by marxism. Moreover it is questionnable to correlate dictator regimes with Marxism: many south-amercian or african regimes are/were backed by the US/France/etc... Finally, Marxism was mostly productivist (except Lafargue), non-decentralised (you don't have to go to Lenin and Trotsky taking over the Soviets, you already see it in the argument between Marx and Bakounin), and moreover its analysis did not insist on differentiating financial and industrial capital, which is important to understand the current crisis. All in all, as I was saying, the media industry frames all opposition as "repressive" and "brutal" and makes it diffult to find alternatives: hopefully people everywhere are creative in actions and thoughts.

Second point: I was not formulating a binary centralized vs decentralized debate where transporting food is not allowed or we go back to the Middle-Age; I'm just saying that there is a need for more autonomy in the system to prevent crises like recent ones (e.g. the rice crisis in 2008). It's just common sense to say that third world countries with more food-producing agriculture (instead of say, cotton) are less fragile to speculation on food which can lead to disasters especially in bad years, or that controlling their crops vs using GMO's makes them less economically dependent on big corporations.

Motivators for cognitive tasks: not money but "autonomy, mastery, purpose."

Hey guys: it's not anarcho-socialism, it's science!

My bet is we are transitioning from a society of cheep energy to a society of cheap information: we'll be consuming less and interacting more.

Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily imply less powerful corporations: they're already fighting for the control of what we are allowed to create, how we can interact (privacy), what we can do with our stuff, which crops we will eat, etc. I'm an optimist though: I hope they won't eventually succeed.

So in 2007 we switched from the Republic of Email to the Kingdom of Social Networking. Where is the Rebel Alliance of open distributed social networking protocols?

The "authenticity hoax" is an intersting one, but the analysis is particularly shallow and consensual.

Basically he points out that the quest for "authenticity" is both opposed to progress ("consumer culture"...) and rather a quest of social markers. But he jumps to the conclusion that we should consequently "accept [modernity's] trade-offs". It seems like a typical example of paralogism: either your for us (our current implementation of progress, the powers in place) or you're against us. There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin?

Nevertheless, what he points about "authenticity" is important as people who reject consumerism tend to throw the baby out with bath water and seek a return to an idealized past. The problem here is the lack of visible alternatives to our regimes (so, in some sense, the powerfull media and propanda industry).

However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!

I wonder why they couldn't use Mono. I can't really grok how they managed library usage, and how difficult it will be to maintain the java one when on platform updates etc.

LLVM began purely as a research project, unlike many other compilers, so I think it's a bit harsh to blame its `appetite for "elegance"`.

Free software had GCC, and in my opinion LLVM has the success it has because it is composable. Even with the 4.x branch of GCC with GIMPLE, GCC was not made so pluggable (due to political reasons if I understand well), so they do not compete exactly on the same ground, and that's why they both exist.