skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you seriously suggesting using a a package system that is bootstrapped by downloading and running a shell script with no security protections whatsoever?

Moreover, it's not just you giving a bad example, as the shell script then
clones a git repository, again with no protections whatsover (over http by default to make it really easy to MITM attack), and runs code from it. So this was written by people who just don't care, or don't understand security. Not people I'd be trusting with package management on my system.

This kind of thing might have been acceptible, barely, before 1995. Since then, we've
developed package systems with gpg signed chains of trust.
I like the internet being free, but it was also free in the early days before advertising and tracking of users were prevalent. The "content" was mainly of an academic nature, which also wasn't such a bad thing. I don't mind publishers making money on the net, and I hope they don't mind me blocking their ads, but if push comes to shove, why should we care if they go out of business when the worst case scenario would probably consist of the net going back to the way it was before?
The Best Economics Blogs
Close, but wrong.
IMHO, that sort of presentation is much stronger.

I think there is a difference between telling us you have a product (most of your current site), telling us you have a product that is probably somewhat valuable (the details in your blog post about how much effort was necessary to produce your styles), and telling us you have a product that is probably useful to us (demo pages/case studies showing the work in action, in contexts we might actually relate to from our own work).

Other ideas, for whatever they're worth:

1. If ever there was a site crying out for a trendy JS slide show on the home page to showcase lots of large graphics in limited space, this must be it.

2. You might like to look at what font sites do to showcase their new products. Like your styles, interesting fonts only really start to look useful when you see them working in context. For example, see the galleries at MyFonts or almost anything on H&FJ:

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/laura-worthington/yana/gallery....

http://www.linotype.com/1175/zapfino-family.html# (the "Usage Samples" tab)

http://www.typography.com/
No, nothing that I've ever come across says you have to save and store peoples' personal information. If you have it, then you have to abide for legal requests for it, but if you don't have it, you don't have it.
I'm not at all a Google expert, but it seems unlikely to me that the Alert team has figured out a way to filter crap results and the Search team has not.
Ah, yes, student dorms usually lack all kinds of material. I have a big knife but I can't use it well so I always use a small knife (this one http://www.edenwebshops.co.uk/en/pt/-robert-herder-paring-kn...). Why do you prefer a big knife? Is it worth becoming proficient using one?
You think spammers don't know what they're doing? They have all sorts of methods for harvesting addresses, ranging from scraping to data theft. They have figured out how to send a virtual shit ton of messages a day at almost no cost to themselves by developing and running botnets. They are on the cutting edge, and arguably, a major driver behind computer vision which they use for breaking captchas. They are a thorn in the side of every ISP, email provider and sys admin in the world. Years and too many man hours to count have been spent trying to stop spam, with a combination of technology and law. Still, the spammers manage to keep their enterprises humming along.

I think they have figured out how to sanitize email addresses.
SPAM has become a HUGE business. I'd guess they do have a pretty good idea about what they're doing.
I think you're being _just a bit_ reactionary.

Besides if you git clone, literally _every commit_ is checksummed. I'm no security expert, but I don't think MITM-ing a 'git clone' sounds 'really easy.'
Sort of like: 1979 "Gold Always Goes Up"

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/09/chart-of-day-inflation-a...
Google is filled with smart people and I suspect that they work very hard to find the optimum mix of advertising driven results and pure search results. Given that their market dominance, I suspect that most internet users have a high tolerance for advertising driven results.
I know I'll get downvoted for this, but honestly I think it's all just hivemind at work. There's no reason to hate facebook as much as people do.

Facebook's core business is closed, just like Microsoft's, and yes Google's. People just get seduced by all the 'free' and open services Google provides and forget that their core business is search, which is just as opaque.
"A related tendency some engineers have is that they dismiss the expertise of people who went to a design school or an art school. They think (incorrectly) that whatever they themselves "like" will also be liked by other people....Engineers, on the other hand, have this tendency to look down on art and design as "soft" subjects, to view them as unnecessary, and they tend to be dismissive of people who studied it."

I agree, whole hearted-ly. But I also think that, with effort, those opinions can be changed.

I have a similar background as the Author - brief stint in a Fine Arts school, went to college for Graphic/Web Design, transitioned into web and desktop development. I work in a "Enterprise Java" shop with tons of guys with Computer Engineering Degrees that think like this.

When I was hired it was like "here comes this girl talking about making things look pretty, blah blah". But I found after I just designed some apps (simple to use, nice-looking) and users started complimenting it, they started to change their minds. After awhile explaining to them what makes for good designs (simplicity, subtlety, small details, alignment, etc.) and why, a lot of those things started to work their way into our products.

In my opinion, most people that don't appreciate good design just haven't been exposed to the knowledge to appreciate it or just need to see concrete benefits.

Edit: It also helps win them over faster if you can write good code behind the designs too.
This is so believably amazing!
Vizio Announces Android Phone and Tablet
The browser would solve the cross-purposes problem which exists not only in search but everywhere else.

So, for instance, Facebook provides you this cool platform for chatting, playing games, and keeping track of your friends. But, of course, it's not really free. You'll see ads, get pitched products by your friends, and all kinds of other stuff that has nothing to do with (perhaps) your primary purpose for being there.

Since this "Hey! We're free! (Except not really)" problem is going to continue to exist on the web in various formats and places, fixing the browser is the only way to keep control over your experience.

We're already seeing this type of work in developers who build add-ins to control the user experience. Hell, I'd pay for a subscription that kept my browser updated with all the appropriate plugins, but I think we can do a lot better than that. For instance, if I want to send a friend a message, I could care less whether they are on LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, or just somebody from my address list.

The purpose of HTML is to separate the data from the presentation. It's the only way you can make the web work. But the implementation of html is full of walled gardens, addictive-play websites, and using your own friends against you. We need to get back to basics.
I have maybe a dozen e-mails at different domains, and they are all powered by one central gmail account.
Privacy versus transparency
Yeah. 'cos Perl is the best =)

(j/k)
This one was actually interesting. Usually they are obvious and boring.
Could anyone comment on how much of this stuff could be sidestepped by just using an incognito window in Chrome? I don't mind ads targeted to, say, me as a Java developer. But, if I'm going to look up anything I'd rather others not know about, I simply pop open an incognito window and... am I good to go? Is there anything besides my IP address that can be read when I'm doing that?
I just don't get why this is supposedly a Ruby problem rather than a $LANG problem, when Lucas Nussbaum's complaints about Ruby's packaging situation (sans the whining about Japanese) apply equally well to every other language you might want to install.

It's also pretty hilarious when a guy maintaining one of 50+ different distributions of the same software cries about division of manpower upstream.
I folded a sheet of heavy duty foil into 16 sheets and tried to measure the thickness and it was still << 1mm, so I think your estimate of about 0.01mm is reasonable.

In that case I would predict that a single sheet would have little affect on an RFID device operating at 125kHz. Note however that RFID devices appear to span a very large frequency range :

http://www.rfid-handbook.de/rfid/frequencies.html

and the foil would certainly block the higher frequency devices.
Goldman’s Facebook coup
My e-mail is firstname@lastname.name, which makes my business card minimalistic :)
Fantastic, he says he does not want to compile Ruby and modules himself and you give him a solution doing exactly that.
Even molds can suffer jet lag: Simple organisms shed light on inner clock
I think you should reach out to some dustin-curtis-like character in your area (i.e. a strongly opinionated designer with the talent to match) and get them on board to help you define your brand better... might be worth giving them some shares to incentivise them. If you're seeing plenty of business already even with bad branding, imagine how much you'll get if your brand is more convincing and memorable!
Expedia Against 'Search Discrimination'... Unless It Gets To Do It
Ugh, disagree. I detest the online-slideshow thing, and often wish people would just take their "slides" and put them on the same page and just let me scroll.

Whenever I see someone doing a slideshow-type presentation, my immediate assumption is that they are just dragging me through the process so they can get more eyeballs for their advertising. (Cf. much of Cracked.com and other "Top x Lists".)

There are things that could be done to make the page more appealing, if you're not into the lowdef look that I think they're going for intentionally, but breaking it into multiple pages if it does't really have to be is just obnoxious.
Truly sorry about that -- of course not the intention. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, and didn't iterate much on the design. I'm open to design changes if anyone has any concrete ideas.

Personally I hate disgusting images, and didn't think those two rose to that level. If anyone has suggestions for equally good replacements, I'm fine with that too.
Love this concept. You should do some for college students looking for internships for this summer.
Most of the good search engines have a TOS that disallows you from creating a meta search engine from their results (API or otherwise). And they WILL cut off your access if they catch you. Learned that the hard way.
RSS is an exchange format, nothing more. Don't conflate it with some historical transmission methods, nor ignore cases where it's behind a paywall, nor embedded tracking images (since nearly any reader will allow images).

Privacy has nothing to do with RSS. Some feeds I subscribe to have JavaScript and Flash - where's the privacy there? Some are behind paywalls - I'm identified by logging in, and even more so by providing payment info to be able to log in.

Thus, by losing RSS, we would lose zero ability to read privately. It's only viewed as being without all the privacy-sniffing bells and whistles because most providers don't do so. RSS can lose all its currently-common privacy attributes while still being RSS. We should be worried about the loss of privacy online, which is rampant, not the loss of RSS (if it does die). And RSS is a particularly bad flagpole to gather around; anyone up in arms about it is much more likely to be up in arms about privacy than the reverse.
It's just a new wave. Saying what we used to believe are wrong.
Agreed.

Google shared with us early last year that the revenue split on Adsense is 68% (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...) - meaning you keep 68% of what they are paid to run the ad and they keep 32%.

You can imagine some very respectable proportion of their income every year is the 1/3 coming from spam/scraped/etc. adsense placements.

Another interesting article on HN just new is that Google's algorithms already seem to know what crap content is and what good content is: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2011/01/google-probabl...

and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income.

It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters.

Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time)

Google's compute power is other-worldly. This WP article doesn't do it justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform#Data_centers

and I have had a hard time trying to find an article that was written 2 years ago about the data centers around the globe that Google has built. The scale is unbelievable of each installation and there are something like 30 around the globe right now:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-c...

More than nefarious under-dealings, I think this situation literally snuck up on Google and by the time the publicly-traded company had algorithms to determine the extent of the shenanigans, they realized it would have a noticeable effect on their bottom line if they simply culled all those results out in one day.

They are either going to roll out changes in stages and slowly increase the quality while keeping an eye on what that does to Adsense income and really publicize each change so they rebuild trust with all of us, or they will respond heavy-handidly in a year or so with a "new algorithm change" that "online publishers are up in arms about!" again.

My guess is on the slow-and-gradual approach with a big publicity boost so we are shown they care and are working on it Matt Cutts-style :)

While I've noticed the lagging quality in their search, I still use the Big-G... it's fast for me and gives me accurate results. Then again I mostly search for tech, if I was searching for weight loss, health, sex, appliances or any other topic that is DOMINATED by ads, I would have given up and gone back to using a damn phone book a while ago.
No law, as far as I am aware, forbids a monopoly from producing a crappy product. Antitrust law comes into play when a competitor offers a less-crappy product and the monopoly tries to drive the competitor out of business.
This paper might have some answers: http://www.usenix.org/event/woot08/tech/full_papers/drewry/d...
Career Shift Often Means Drop in Living Standards
The 'F' in FUD stands for fear. While tracking down to the individual level is certainly real, it certainly isn't anything a typical user needs to be concerned about - at least not to the extent that the WSJ's encouraging.

(Many people in the ad industry assume the WSJ's spreading such FUD because the WSJ as a premium brand benefits disproportionately in a world with dumbed-down ad targeting. I don't have any evidence for this - but it would explain the WSJ's vituperativeness.)

To me, this looks like you've just reproduced the WSJ's FUD, since the FUD just happens to reflect favorably on DuckDuckGo. That's not exactly laudable, although it is understandable.
Yes, I wanted to keep the lowdef look, though I'm happy to entertain any design changes within that look.
One thing that isn't immediately clear to me is if there is are provisions for "dynamic" allocation of storage providers. That is to say, instead of selecting one host to store the encrypted application data, could some sort of routing/load-balancing layer be used to allow the application to automatically select and use a provider (and recover when a provider disappears unexpectedly)?
I'm in the process of switching to using my tech blog domain, techinch.com. My personal site's domain wouldn't be any easier as it doesn't use my name.
Hold on a tic. You're complaining about clutter in the search results, but didn't you just say at http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/confession-i-... that you make several sites like facebook-login-help.com to target specific phrases? So you're complaining about junk on the web, but you also own domains like buy-fresh-blue-cheese.info, and at the same time don't want such sites to clutter up search results? My head hurts.
No, you're clearly not a security expert.
If you're doing a git clone over HTTP, you can't even be certain you're talking to the right git repository. Sure, each and every commit may be checksummed, but how exactly do you anticipate knowing what the correct checksums are?
Wow, that's an amazing recruiting video. It makes me want to take up punch dancing.
The script itself is transparent. In fact, rvm's site suggests[1] reading it before using it by running the internal curl command in a terminal.

Beyond that, if joeyh is Joey Hess[2], I would be curious to hear how you think Ruby devs and Debian might work better together to fix the current situation (assuming you don't think everything is fine from Debian's point of view and screw the Ruby devs). I'm not trolling or baiting. I am a Debian user myself (since Etch was testing), and as someone who uses Ruby regularly, this whole thing drives me nuts.

[1] http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/

[2] http://kitenet.net/~joey/
In many European countries it costs considerable money to keep a business alive, REGARDLESS of any income.

In Spain you have to pay €250 a month Autonomo, a social tax, even as a sole trader/freelancer. €250 x 12 months is €3000 (roughly $4000). This is a lot of money to get taxed for nothing annually in a country where minimum monthly wage is in the region of €550 and rent prices are high.
Ever been to Barcelona and wondered why it wasn't the design Mecca it had all the makings of? The fantastic design scene seen in the design of posters, flyers, logos, shops, interiors, all the design festivals, the conferences… yet nothing significant comes out of it. The social tax prevents small business there from starting up, a policy that makes room for large companies.

In Poland, it costs a similar amount of social tax (ZUS) just to stay registered as a company (a sole trader that is, there are higher costs associated with keeping a proper company registered).

It's better in the UK and Republic of Ireland:

In the UK the minimum amount of social tax (NIC) for a sole trader with minimal or no income is £2 per week, which seems fair enough.

In Ireland the social tax (PRSI) is 3-5% of your income but no less than about €250 per year (might have gone up this year). Seems bearable as well.

In both countries (not 100% sure about UK) you can register a Business Name (€20 in Ireland) without having registered a company. In Ireland you can start trading without even registering with the Revenue until you make around €3500.
I guess that is our point of disagreement. I don't think the WSJ stuff is FUD. I think it is a long overdue expose on what is actually going on in this industry that the average person is completely unaware of.
I used to think so too until I learnt about Haskell's very lazy evaluation. It's worth reading up.
Agreed. I didn't see FUD here, just an accurate presentation of how much tracking Google does. So I decided to start out the new year by switch my search to DDG and seeing how well it performs.
IANAL, but I don't think so. What law would that be? If I walk into any retail store and pay with cash, is the store owner required by law to get my personal info? No, they are not.

Perhaps in heavily regulated industries such as banking that might be different but search engines are not government regulated (for now).
Ok, fair opinion, but if you look at the google website, It doesnt look neither spammy nor disgusting (at least for the regular user (i think). Its clean, informative, and fun to use.

Anyway, A/B test should give him the answer to which is the best way to aproach the Google non-techy crowd
Promo Lesson: RunKeeper downloaded 1 Million times in 4 days after going free
Which is why I edited my top post. No need to spread inaccurate information.

Since you're going on the offensive, a defensive move might be in order: no, I wasn't. I said "odds are", not "DDG does", because I didn't know for sure and did not intend to claim to. The odds are in my favor, the fact is an aberration on otherwise almost-uniform behavior by search providers.
Please link to the original article.
They definitely know about mahalo spam site, but they kept it in their index anyway, even though it's against their TOS.

Google search is turning into crap.
Out of curiosity - what site do you recommend for registration of a small business?
The answers given there cite denial of service attacks as the big threat.

When I wrote the regexp matcher that comes buried inside of GNU Arch, I was careful to ensure that client programs could limit both amount of memory and the amount of time used to attempt a match. If the matcher runs into the memory unit, it trades time for space and simply runs more slowly. If it runs for too long, programs can just stop the match and free everything up. Of course, on many normal, non-malicious patterns, the matcher is simply fast and memory efficient.

That matcher also supports matching text that is not contiguous in memory. For example, if your text is split up into lots of separate strings (as in a DOM), this matcher can treat those as if they were all one long string.
Ask HN: How long did it take you to learn Ruby on Rails?
Being a Java/Visual Basic programmer, the whole ROR syntax really does take some time to get used to. How long did it take you to pick up ROR?

days?
weeks?
months?

Any tips to shorten the learning cycle? I am hoping to use ROR to build a simple web app to compliment my email newsletter.
If your first name has an 'a' in it, try setting up a vanity email address like mine: M@rkChristian.ca. I'm a big fan of it. :)
These strong types will always be somewhat cumbersome, because they are the proof that your program is correct in certain respects, and non-trivial proofs are not free. When you hear someone use the phrase "correct by construction," you should ask you do when you accidentally construct the wrong thing. I'm afraid the answer is that you "correct by reconstruction."
Fair enough. Like I said, I don't know enough about this.

> how exactly do you anticipate knowing what the correct checksums are?

Well, because the repo you're cloning knows what they are... I wasn't thinking about the repo itself being owned, but git's whole job is to make sure that chunks of text get from one place to the other in an identical state, so...
Whoops, that was a mistake!
Yes, but there are many sites (even reputable ones that should know better) that don't allow email addresses with a + in it. It's infuriating... but it's real...
It Is Not Called The "STL", Mmkay?
Same for me with Cater Allen.
What about a scrolling format but more visually appealing? Something like benthebodyguard.com [1]

In light colors avoiding the darkness but funnier to scroll

[1] http://benthebodyguard.com/
They're not as profitable as they like us to think. I am guessing declining game ad spend and increasing cost from new users in countries that cannot be monetized.