The Libyan government barred foreign parties from owning domain names of three letters or less.

bit.ly still works though...?

I think that saying that car sharing will be limited to the privileged metropolitan residents is short sighted, too. Services like Zipcar don't work well in less populated areas, because the cars are exactly where the previous person dropped them off. Autonomous cars would be able to relocate themselves to areas where they are needed, and could optimize their deployment very well especially if people scheduled in advance.

A good many of the linked articles are full of snark and vitriol, setting a poor example for the commentariat to follow.

I don't know if I could adapt to Emacs with another input device. Part of being good at Emacs is training your muscle memory. I probably can't even describe half of the inane chords I do unless I was able to observe my hands performing them.

"This site is currently running on free quota--that means that things can and will turn off as people play with it."

Sounds like a suboptimal configuration for a dead man's switch. If you're unavailable, you aren't around for contingencies.

What's the threshold for an "old account"?

Joined in the first year of HN

I don't know why this is so hard or requires such significant investment up front. How is making a decentralized Twitter service more of a challenge than, say, IRC or Jabber? I know that the problems aren't exactly the same, but I would hazard to guess that they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of implementation difficulty.

So they have a runway before their maximum 10K paying users is only enough to keep a part-time operations team and servers up.</sarcasm>

I have to agree with you though. This may be more than <insert weekend project> we always hear about, but not _much_ more. I'd imagined the product would be mostly built already.

Maybe they wanted an injection of cash before getting a handful of servers, and we should see everything up and running within the week.

Maybe they think they need to be Twitter-sized day one, which would be a mistake on their judgement.

That was my biggest concern -- it would seem that if you're building a pay-supported social network, your scaling issues will be business-side long before they are server-side.

App.net is not actually decentralized.

Especially since it's already been done: http://friendica.com/

^ And that is hardly the only project, and it could use improvements like everything, but it's one that surprised me when I first heard of it, because it really does a lot and, well, nobody ever mentions it..!

One link of note, not that much there yet but surely something I will watch eagerly: http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/

If you wanna do it right, do it right.

This is the brave new world of SEO in our media. Once reputable news sources are more than willing to throw all their credibility out the door so that they can be the louder wall of an echo chamber for the sake of impressions.

Didn't the article point out that most of the "major" news sources covering this pointed out that this was an unconfirmed rumor?

That doesn’t affect SEO, does it?

My Page Down key melted from being pressed repeatedly so many times. Fucking designers.

Security traded for convenience, back to square one.