This attack really makes me uneasy. git is distributed, in principle, but the hosting layer that most people use is not. The fact that it's intermittently available drives home what before seemed like a very intellectual point about the importance of using p2p systems in resisting this kind of attack.

By way of participation in various youth government simulations I rose to a kind of statewide power intense enough that I would be recognized by other students from the opposite side of the state, and frequently on the streets of the larger cities in the region.

I took this as far as I could, eventually being selected to lead a national version of the youth/gov't simulation which was so popular where I grew up.

This was completely ephemeral, and had little influence on my regular life, where I was nothing special, always second to someone's thunder and never really the center of any social group. I was between them all and frankly a bit lost and lonely.

Put me in front of a crowd of two thousand strangers and I can move many and make a not insignificant number of them cry with joy and feeling. This is a skill I have never found use for, and never exercised since, but it is still there, waiting for the right moment.

So I never was quite popular, in the local sense. But maybe this helped me stay me and get out of the tiny city I grew up in. There was less to stick around for. I'm not sure if this made me a popular one, but it sure was interesting.

Yes, a thousand times yes!

Still overwhelmed by it. Any site interaction results in this.

I hope this is a good sign of the site being more heavily-used than it has been!

Would you be willing to write up how you did this? I would like to follow suit. In the end I just feel lost.

This is exactly the problem I've had in finding content on the site. I think it's healthy to have multiple views into the set of links and comments, but the default view is still a social dead-end, which might be confusing or difficult for someone who comes to the site without any background.

The founders should try to re-join as new users and see how long it takes them to build up a meaningful feed. It's taken me months of (weakly) trying and still I am very dissatisfied with what I have. global is much better.

I've come and went, and came back. I'd like to stay, and use hubski more. One problem I found was that links and comments I submit tend to feel like hidden to the rest of the users on the site. A few core users submit lots of things (and nice ones!) but I feel outside the core cabal. There is no mass of users that I can meld into.

I tend to go directly for the "global" page. Otherwise I just see the same core users who I followed, and it's hard to learn about others.

Just rambling....

It could be that military capabilities could be disclosed by sharing all the documents related to the disappearance.

In Cambridge, Mass. — home to M.I.T. and Harvard — they include the $100 million Ragon Institute for immunology research, the $150 million Koch Institute for cancer studies, the $165 million Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, the $250 million Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the $350 million McGovern Institute for brain research, the $450 million Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the $700 million Broad Institute for genome research.

This to me is really the core problem with this arrangement. By empowering the wealthy to drive science, we risk consolidating power in a space that benefits tremendously from diversity and openness. Can these be supported even if science funding is progressively privatized and centralized? It might be hard. I say this from my own experiences and interactions with the Broad in particular, which frankly is doing a tremendous amount of damage to science through its heavy-handed pursuit of a truth its founders have believed for decades. What we need in science is not pursuit of glory, although it helps. We need some real openness, and this is supported as much by the mess of public funding as anything.

I expect this mechanism to have a chilling effect on HN. I have long been a lurker there. Recently I have been using it more frequently, thinking that it stands as a nice alternative to reddit (which I have followed since its birth), but now I wonder if I will ever be able to participate in a real-time discussion there. If I cannot participate in such discussions, how can my karma reach 1000?

Fascinating in light of Falkvinge's article. It seems very likely that this was an inside job, and moreover a scam following mybitcoin.com's.

I have continued to avoid bitcoin out of frustration about the rampant speculation which has driven it into the public eye. As a currency, it seems ideal, but the concept of bootstrapping it on greed frustrates me and makes me wary to use the system in everyday life.

Hopefully this period will cool and it will become a system that can be used reliably for many kinds of transactions in lieu of government-backed fiat currencies. Still, I have doubts as these currencies benefit tremendously from the stabilizing efforts of governments. As of yet, no one has any motivation to stabilize the price of BTC, and as such risk dominates any potential utility for small users of the currency.