Tag: Hacker News

A Hacker News for education?

Posted on January 16, 2014January 16, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

I visit Hacker News every day. It’s a great resource of technie-related things – not just code stuff but things that people who work in that kind of area are likely to be interested in.

I’ve created something similar: http://ednews.meteor.com

Eight years ago, Will Richardson tried to create a ‘Digg-like site’. For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the medium to long-term. But his reasoning still stands:

[Th]is is all stemming from a bigger burr in my brain of late that has to do with the seeming randomness of all of the really great work that people in this community are starting to create. It’s just feeling like it’s all over the place, and that if we could in some way get our collective act together, we could start creating an incredibly valuable resource. I know it’s all about small pieces loosely joined, but wouldn’t it be great to point the newcomers to one spot that was a clearinghouse for all of this work? Not to mention the value it would have to us old timers in terms of bringing people in. I mean all of a sudden, it seems like everyone has a wiki, and most all of them have great intent and good content. But there’s also a lot of duplication of effort, and more importantly, dis-connection, at least that what it feels like to me.

Yes, these days we have Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many other social networks. But if the tech community find value in Hacker News (and they do!) why not one for education? I know there’s sites like Spigot but, while I find them useful, they’re not community-contributed links.

If there’s interest and it gains some traction, then I’ll work together with a few folks to deploy it to its own server/domain. 🙂

Try it! Add some links of your own: http://ednews.meteor.com

PS Let me know in the comments what you think (and if you have any problems with it!) I came up with the idea literally just now and did a quick search to see how I could deploy something today!

Moving on from SpiderOak Hive to BTSync

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

TL;DR: I’m now using a combination of BitTorrent Sync and Dropbox for my file sync and storage requirements. I use the former for private stuff and with the latter I just assume that everything in there is publicly-accessible.

Last month I wrote a post entitled Why I’m saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive. I learned so much in the 48 hours following its publication.

First of all, because the post hit the front page of Hacker News, this blog was overwhelmed with traffic. Whereas I get anywhere between 200 and 1,000 visits per day, on that I got more than 15,000 in just a few hours. It would have been more but I hadn’t configured my web hosting properly and so the server went down. That’s something I’ve sorted out, using the Quick Cache plugin for WordPress and signing up for the free version of Cloudflare.

Second, the comments I received on the HN thread and the blog post itself were eye opening. I’d assumed that SpiderOak’s commitment to encrypting my files using a password only I knew kept me safe. It turns out that’s not the case:

If SpiderOak had been compromised by the US government forcing them to install a backdoor, they would be forbidden by law from telling anyone about this. They would not be allowed to remove the clauses from their service description that claim no-one is able to decrypt your data.

This is the special risk of dealing with US-based companies. They can be forced to install decryption backdoors or hand over their users’ data while continuing to tell the users they are unable to do so. So you must assume no US-based service is truly secure.

(flurpitude)

I went down deep, dark holes investigating other options that I’ll not discuss here. What woke me up, though, was a couple of things. One person said to me something along the lines of:

Is the NSA a credible threat against you and your family?

To which I had to reply that while I feel uncomfortable about it all… no, they’re not. Their suggestion, therefore, was that political and social pressure to reform the NSA was probably better than trying to outgun a well-funded government body that has the force of law on their side.

Although there were some suggestions of some niche products, the most common suggestions were that I either encrypt my files before syncing with Dropbox, or that I use BitTorrent Sync. I’d already been experimenting with BTSync, so in the end I’ve decided to go with that. Having to unmount drives to ensure they’re synced with Dropbox in an encrypted state is an annoyance and something that I’m likely to forget to do.

So I’ve cancelled my SpiderOak account. They were really good about it, actually. And instead I’m syncing private files (like family photos, documents pertaining to money, sensitive information, etc.) between my laptop, HP MicroServer and kitchen PC. Anything I’m likely to want to share with others and which is fine being in the public domain goes in my free 18GB Dropbox.

It’s working pretty well so far, especially now BTSync has both Android and iOS clients. 🙂

Weeknote 35/2013

Posted on August 31, 2013September 14, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Observing the Summer Bank Holiday in England. Well, apart from the Web Literacy Standard community call. You can listen again to that here.
Catching up with email during a fleeting visit to the Ignite100 co-working space.
Thinking and writing more about HTML and CSS as skills rather than competencies.
Sorting out which service to use to store and sync my files. My blog post about moving from Dropbox to SpiderOak Hive hit the front page of Hacker News and led to 16,000 page views in 12 hours!
Attending the Open Badges research and community calls.
Giving feedback on various session proposal for the Mozilla Festival.
Mapping existing learning activities to the Web Literacy Standard.
Reading up about cryptography. The CryptoParty handbook is fantastic for beginners.
Speaking with some people interested in aligning with the Web Literacy Standard (including Makers Academy)
Replying to BBC Bitesize who wanted answers to some specific questions in preparation for an upcoming audio interview. I blogged my responses:
Meeting with Tim Riches from DigitalMe who’s helping wrangle the Badges & Skills floor at MozFest.
Resolving with Alvar Maciel and William Duyck how to go about translating the Web Literacy Standard effectively.

Monday is Labor Day in the US which will means I’ll have a quiet start to the week. I’m not travelling anywhere so I’m looking forward to getting stuff done before heading to Amsterdam with my wife to celebrate our 10 year wedding anniversary!