skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly the investigation is a bit bogus.

Also he is a public figure and a CEO you cannot expect the CEO to start ranting on random crap which could potentially poorly reflect on his company. Could be that his PR person told him not to.

Would you really expect a CEO of a billion-dollar company do put up pictures of himself getting totally wasted and drinking beer off the tits of some stripper they hired at a million dollar party? What about him posting his thoughts on Apple and his hatred of the iPad? That in itself could lead to bad blood between companies or investors, every word he writes publically must be cared for.

The only thing is... People should keep THAT in mind. Don't write everything as public. When you post it online, assume no amount of privacy settings will protect it. Hell assume that even your weird alias can be tracked down. Don't post it online if you don't want anyone you don't know or don't like to read it.
Don't put offsite images in secure searches.
Multi-core Redux: Virtually Indistinguishable
I think he meant on your site...
http://code.google.com/webfonts
Very silly and naive article.
Some recent PC demoscene stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON4N0yGz4n8
Yes, but then it is duckduckgo.com doing the query. Here they're passing on the query in the referrer string and the users original browser makes the non-secure request to amazon.

That sort of gives it all away.

So if duckduckgo would just send back the answers to the query and not use a page that requests resources from third parties they'd be fine.
It it just me or is this just a secret ad for Sokanu?
The heck are you talking about?

Sure, Amazon S3 could be spying on your searches just like any web host (especially a cloud host) could spy on connections to its customers' sites. I don't think this is very likely, however.

Nothing shown in this blog post indicates that DDG's S3 account is logging IPs or that there's anything at all wrong with the privacy policy.
It continues to amaze me that nothing comes close to simply colocating a NAS.

If you colocate a NAS, there's a significant chance that you'll lose all your data.

Amazon and Google, quite sensibly, don't want the bad publicity which would come with losing their users' data, so they replicate across multiple datacenters -- even Amazon's reduced reliability storage replicates to two datacenters -- which obviously increases costs.
For an even better contrast, compare with Microsoft.
How bad are the bad guys?
It is a duckduckgo issues because they should not be loading third party graphics. The referrer will be on in almost all cases. People just look at the 'lock' item and will assume they're safe.

Whatever happened to that 'mixed content' security warning, I thought that was pretty effective against stuff like this?
Code Metrics: Number of IL Instructions
I'm glad you guys did some digging on this one.
I don't quite understand the concept of this AppStore for the web. What kind of apps does it sell? a stand-alone Flash based game/app? stand-alone web-app (with possibly no server behind it, pure JS)?
You might want to use this if you were building an application on top of other Google infrastructure. But aside from that, I can't see anything here aside from some 20% googlers saying "Amazon S3 is cool, let's build our own version".
These aren't really offsite images. ddgw.s3.amazonaws.com is a server instance run by DDG. It just happens to live in Amazon's cloud.
I think as long as you have separate streams, they can be much more powerful and useful than email. Think about github and trac. Both have a type of stream to condense information that would be too much for email. Obviously, no one wants to actually integrate facebook with their business communications.
Thanks. But arguably there are no 'real terms'. Just words given meaning by those who coin them. And we are all free to coin terms. That said, I have heard that term before (just checked it on Wikipedia too), but it doesn't cover what I refer to as groglogic.
In the settings, http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html, you can turn on POST requests as well as disable favicons and 0-click. Switching to POST alone should fix this issue for you. In particular the Referer heading then becomes:

Referer:	https://duckduckgo.com/
The science of climate change -- The clouds of unknowing
For VP8 to succeed, Google needs to get a little evil
I wouldn't say there is a trivial fix. One option would be to encrypt the search term client-side with blowfish (or some other 2-way hash scheme) and use that as the url string.
Based on the patent claims, they are talking about absolutely nothing more than a Java applet with a menu in it.

This is insane.
Except if the same user clicked through to a result, the server of the result page would receive the same referrer header w/ the DuckDuckGo query in it.
I see an option for viewing html only, which loads up a flash video. Seems fine to me...
It's almost like there is an attempt to normalize all of human behavior, nearly to a borg-like state but with a "I am human!!" undertone. Neurotypical for the win, is the motto.
I can't believe how much crappy JS is on that page. Viewing the source is astounding.
A plain old Java applet with a menu that is embedded in a web page? That's a relatively good patent? It's pretty much exactly what Java was for when the patent was filed. That's like one person patenting a method of harvesting grain with a combine harvester.
Incidentally, the last MP3 patent expires in 2017.
They aren't passing on the query in the referrer string. Your browser is. This story is a non-story. Referrer is just doing what Referrer does.
Another challenge: can you write a correct selection sort?
Wait, for all this, there are just 17 fonts in their directory? I mean, appreciated of course, but is this all that helpful for a web developer?
I got my first paid programming job without having studied, without any references but a video tape of one my old Amiga demos.
One fix is to not directly send the users to the result page. Instead link to a redirect script on the ddg servers i.e, duckduckgo.com/goto.php?link=http://search-result.com/ and then have goto.php remove the REFERER from the request headers.
Better make that the default then for secure searches!
I'm happy not knowing. Perhaps you have already passed judgment.

Let's assume that the guy responsible for enforcing laws at the state level is doing a good job. Should he refuse to prosecute people that have committed a crime against him simply because it might look bad on the internet? If so, he's not doing his job and should be fired.

I think people are responding to this based on a preconceived pattern in their heads -- big guy with lots of power tries to use his power to silence critics. If that's what happened, then lets all call him out for it. He might even be breaking the law himself and deserve to go to jail. Do you have proof that this is the case? Or is this just a witch hunt? Because I haven't seen proof yet, and the default position when not seeing proof is agnosticism -- I don't know. Something wrong with not knowing? Or is this the internet, where any kind of story must be commented on by people taking on an air of expertise, no matter how flimsy the data or preliminary the information?

I'm not taking you to task personally. Hell, I offered an opinion myself. But my opinion ends in "Beats me", as it should at this point in the game. My opinion was also offered in hopes of persuading people that there are usually two sides to every story. Or put another way -- I am naturally drawn to condemn this man and be outraged. Because I am naturally drawn to this response, I make very, very sure that I make a devil's advocate case and see how it sounds. Once I did this, I'm thinking there is much to be learned, and in those cases I try to default to giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Isn't this just common sense?

(There is another question about ethics -- if it looks bad it is bad. I'm considering that out-of-scope. My intent was to think about this in terms of legality. This was a thought experiment, after all)
Yes, but the headers are sent in plaintext.
AFAIK "is" is present tense!
Not if he makes the 'POST' option the default for secure searches.
The fonts render really ugly with Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows 7 (cleartype on). Anyone care to throw a few screenshots from Chrome?
It's a fine story, and it is fixable. And it probably should be fixed, if only because fixing it is less work than talking about it. And due to a terrible oversight the header is actually mis-spelled and it came out as 'Referer:'.

Fixing this will make duckduckgo.com even better, which is awesome.
Who woulda thunk it, fact checking is popular
"That's fine until you consider that antipsychotics work by blocking dopaminergic activity, which would exacerbate the pathology rather than repair it."

IIRC blocking dopamine causes the brain to produce more D2 receptors to compensate.
Wave for today's VC Panel with Paul Graham at Google I/O (3pm-4pm Pacific)
Not really sure how accurate that is....most ticket printers, magnetic card readers, weigh scales, barcode scanners, and other POS related devices adhere to the Unified POS standard.

There is a Java implementation of the standard (called, unsurprisingly, JavaPOS) as well as a .NET implementation (called POS for .NET). I've run a Linux based point of sale that used JavaPOS to interface with peripherals without issue.
[edit: figures were wildly off]

By definition, it's already the second copy of my data (since it's a backup).

For the price of S3 (~$5500/yr, not even including bandwidth), I could colocate 7 RAIDed NASes ($700 NAS, 4-year life, $50/month colocation fee).

If me and a couple of friends agree to exchange NASes to save on colocation fees, I could have 31 NASes for the price of S3.

For maybe 50% the price of S3, I could colocate a Backblaze pod and have 67TB of data storage, 22x my need.
Mark Zuckerberg

Does anyone else think it's weird that the sky is red at 2am?

Yesterday at 1:53am

Looks "open" enough to me.
I would argue that the age of Unix as an end-user OS is already here. See iPhone and Android sales figures. Also, WebOS, etc.
Not sure if that will work in all browsers, iirc a 301 or a 302 can still pass those headers on. The only trick I know of that will not do that is by using a 'meta refresh' with a time set to '0', but that has bad implications for the working of the 'back' button.
The “So-What” Factor
The Evolution Of Android In One Giant Showcase
Alberta tar sands become largest U.S. suppliers of crude oil
Also in response to this original suggestion (months ago on reddit), I started serving all images over https. I do not think the referer is sent in plain text, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499591/are-https-urls-enc...
This is a very exciting development that will offer great long-term benefits to the web. Relying on cross-platform fonts when building web pages was always challenging and limiting. I'm looking forward to this expansion of the font directory.

I also hope this improves the web browsing experience on Linux out of the box.
The example is quite valid. If I hire someone to make a sign, I will make sure it's done right before I pay them. Moreover, putting a crappy, poorly spelled ad on my vehicle reflects on me and my attention to detail since that's all the reader has to go on.
Do any of the browsers current support streaming with the HTML5 video tag?

So that you don't have to download the entire video before playback can start. And so that you can skip ahead and start playing something towards the end of the video without downloading the whole video.
Something that annoys me both about this article and your comment is this idea that there's something unique about the current generational dynamic. Do you really think that every new college graduate hasn't said the same thing you're saying now? This isn't about "millenials" and "boomers", it's about young (excited, ambitious, energetic, inexperienced, immature, naive) people and old (experienced, accomplished, responsible, "big-picture", cynical, bored, scared) people.

From the article, this stood out:

> Millennials strive to find work that is personally fulfilling, provides opportunities to make new friends, learn news skills, and be a part of a larger purpose.

How condescending is that? As if no previous generation every wanted to do work that was fulfilling and served a larger purpose.
I don't think they are actually: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499591/are-https-urls-enc...
I've known both schizophrenics and artists in my personal life and I'd say one thing they have in common is an ability for their thought processes to "color outside the lines", jump the tracks, etc. But for healthy artists they have a greater ability to recognize it and control it and channel to productive ends, whereas the schizophrenic goes off into wild goose chases, endless philosophical thinking dead ends, and outright delusions unbacked by externally confirmable observations.

Speaking of the dopamine connection, there has been an increasing body of evidence and belief within the scientific community studying schizophrenia that the dopamine/receptor activity is just a symptom or downstream effect and that the root cause may be related to a virus that has infected the brain's tissue or blood supply. Possibly an endogenous virus embedded in the DNA, that had previously been considered part of the inactive "junk" DNA.
Either you can't see ahead one logical step, or didn't take the time. (or this is a game to make me type the obvious)

For me, Shitty isn't a Boolean. It's a quantity or a qualitative assessment. I use Microsoft and Apple software because those particular examples haven't exceeded the threshold.

Adobe is in a different league. Different order of magnitude, really.

(And for the record, Mobile Me chased me off because it exceeded the threshold awhile back.)
Some people, perhaps most, don't like POST because it is annoying to copy URLs and use the back button. I'm not opposed to making it the default for https, but I don't want to make a default that most people don't want either.
I think the combination of a POST instead of a GET and the images via https should be pretty much bullet proof. If someone is stupid enough to re-enable GET requests for their https connections they have only themselves to blame if there is any leakage to the target sites.
UC Berkeley Asking Incoming Students For DNA
ok fair enough.
Does Typekit have any advantages over Google? Google has better infrastructure, a simpler impelentation (no signup required), and a budget to license a wider variety of fonts.
The Chrome Web Store
Will they start using GStreamer in Firefox like in one of their Fennec branches, or will they just add libvpx along with the existing liboggplay and implement their own half-baked media handling layer?
Google may however sue MPEG / MPEG members in retaliation, and that could be an effective deterrent.
I guess shipping stuff in beta is ok. (Google)
That's a good point. Maye you could put a small warning on the page if they disable 'POST' that there might be leakage of their search terms to the sites they visit?

"Hello dear user, you probably know exactly what you're doing, but on the off-chance that you don't, please realize that disabling the POST option for https connections may leak your search terms to the visiting site".

Or something to that effect.
What the Internet knows about you
The complaint is that the search terms could potentially be logged.

"They certainly could log that information if they wanted to."

This is a problem with ANY site and ANY system that I know of.
Ask HN: Who's right now on Google IO or in SFO available for networking?
A chilean friend is currently on SFO and he's right now on Google IO. He's the director of http://www.ChileAyuda.com , a web app that he developed with another chilean guys focused to spread information to help the victims of the last Earthquake that hit Chile on Feb 27th.
They worked even directly with Google, on the person finder app
( http://chilepersonfinder.appspot.com/ )

He's looking to do some networking with developers and any guy that is interested to share tips on developing and funding at nonprofit web applications.

Please contact him via:
email: pedrofuentes at gmail dot com
http://twitter.com/pedrofuentes
Our startup, Favetop (http://favetop.com) provides similar shortcut functionality for web apps along with direct site search capabilities. We also allow users to save all their favorite online media alongside their web apps with the ability to share these with friends and followers if they choose.
Farbrausch's "debris." shows just how much you can pack into 200k (including the audio, btw). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg&fmt=22

For the webby crowd: "Masagin" features animated, recursive SVGs with antialiasing and motion blur at high rez and high frame rate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY&fmt=22

Or, you could download both demos from http://pouet.net/ and run them on your own PC.
Yahoo: A second rate company trying their damndest to be third-rate.
That was about the headers to the image server which was not using https at the time I believe ?
Amazon to publish foreign language books, in translation
Depends a lot on cost of living. For example, I'd never work for as low as $50/hr unless I was very desperate, but I also live in NYC. Typical contractor wages seem to be about $100/hr depending on YOE and type of work.
Unpleasant Medicine
Ask HN: Gmail IMAP auto-setting your new emails to 'Read'?
Anyone else seeing this odd behavior? It appears to be a change in their IMAP setup.
Somebody will be taking notes through the Wave.

https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w...
From the intro page:

a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

Am I the only one who couldn't help laughing when reading that part?
Non-"print now" link: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/05/17/w...
Granted, my print layout needs are modest, but these days I do nearly all my writing in Markdown in a text box on a web form, and save my documents to a database with version control.

I use python-markdown2 to convert it to HTML, and I wrote a simple library that generates a table of contents with anchors for whatever heading levels I want to capture.

I get spell check for free when I use Firefox, I can drop into HTML when I need more structure than Markdown provides, and if absolutely necessary, I can copy the formatted output and paste it into OpenOffice Writer if someone really needs it in .doc or .docx format.
Also the equivalent of the Broken Window Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows
Indeed, I'm the youngest person at this particular office and I dread going to group lunches and having to hear about husbands, kids, mortgage payments, and other stuff I just don't deal with at this point.

I remember thinking this, exactly!

And then I remember a few years later, having to pretend I was still interested in younger peoples' stories about drinking, clubbing, getting high and dating - when I really wasn't at all anymore. Strange - once I loved that stuff and couldn't imagine not loving it... and then it just got boring.

Still later (right now actually) my wife and I have made a big effort to branch out and maintain friendships with people everywhere from a decade younger to a decade older than us. I think it's been a pretty big positive change in our lives fwiw.
Do you feel like Mozilla and Opera will be betting heavily on VP8 instead of Theora for the next few years? Or will they take the position that both are equally as good and stay out of the fight?
Activity streams? Like being on your dev group's build queue and CVS commit log email aliases?

Being easily bored and ready to work anywhere, anytime -- like every enthusiastic college student or young hobbyist programmer ever?

Sounds like not much is changing.
Does the thing use web workers anywhere? I still get script timeout errors. This thing needs a high end workstation to run, it won't work on netbooks.

They need to port it to NativeClient or make drastic changes. It just doesn't perform in JS.
The Marijuana Position Survey
Are you for or against legalization...which side of the issue do you really stand on - see how you stack up.
Were either of you using Webkit browsers?
So that you don't have to download the entire video before playback can start.

That's called progressive downloading, and it would be totally stupid not to do it.

And so that you can skip ahead and start playing something towards the end of the video without downloading the whole video.

That's called seeking, which is harder. Firefox can do seeking if your Web server supports byte ranges. It looks like Chrome does the same thing but I'm not entirely sure.
Will there be support for one login to multiple apps? Would be useful to essentially have a Chrome Apps login that then provides auto-login/off for the other apps installed on Chrome
I hope it does, but believe it won't.

Much like Theora, the primary reason to oppose Vorbis is political. It's not covered by patents and doesn't support DRM, so to content providers it's a significantly worse codec than MP3 or AAC.

If Apple or Microsoft were going to support Vorbis, they'd have done so years ago.
I'm really sad there aren't some price wars going on here between S3 and Google. Maybe S3 should fire the first shot.
A computer program is writing great, original works of classical music
How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
Tekpub.com was originally written using ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft's newest framework - which the founders new really well. However they recently moved to Rails and NoSQL.
Watch Out Rivals, With Latitude API Google Starts Taking Location Very Seriously
That's a dangerous road to go down, though. Nobody should try to be the inferior option that piggy-backs on other, more competitive products.
Glad to see that Google isn't going to push Typekit out of the way with their new project.
If that's what they want to do, they could still have the IE9 installer install the codec system-wide, but it doesn't sound like that's what they intend to do.
Albert worked for me and knows how to code - I've seen it. He also has an actual CS degree as well as his PhD.

I can't vouch for the rest.
Am I crazy or is the absence of a single mention of Google in that post completely conspicuous?
techcrunched > mashabled
Well you do talk a bit about fights becoming more structured, but I get the impression that you're talking about "emotionally engaged" discussions there.
Fermilab scientists find evidence for significant matter-antimatter asymmetry
This is the second bunk Facebook privacy article today. They aren't helping :(
From their graph, looks like Gen X got screwed even as to the number of years their generation covers. Boomers and Millenials are both allotted 19 years, while Gen X only gets 13.
Not any more but they were when that was written. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362122
>The dominant cost of keeping data on-line at the moment is the cost of the electricity to run the server and the air conditioning.

That fell under "storage and redundancy".

Storage = the hardware and electricity required to store/minimally serve the data

redundancy = number of places the data is stored

thusly

cost = storage cost * redundancy

I really hate having to verbosely explain things like this. Is it even remotely possible for you to give me the benefit of the doubt and not assume I'm a blithering moron when I don't expound ad nauseam every little detail of what I'm describing?
Probably, it was for our work site and I don't really want to link ecommerce sites here, don't think it's kosher.