skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, there's been flack about Google's anonymization before. Specifically, they apparently remove the last 8 digits. Which allows you to (partially) reconstruct (some) people by tracing IP + cookie. A failed anonymization, absolutely, but blockable if you are already taking steps to actually guard your privacy online, as part-way-there is almost the same as nowhere-near when you have enough data.

Solved everywhere, of course, by anonymizing your IP address and blocking the cookie. And as you give your IP to the site you visit through DDG, as well as to their advertisers if you're not proactively blocking them (and those tools can fail / be nullified by a server transmission), extreme measures are the only effective means of actually protecting your privacy. As such, I don't find those two steps to be at all unexpected for someone who actually wishes to guard their privacy.
Gmail for personal and we use Google Apps for Mail at work, though I have found both getting gradually slower over the last year, frustratingly so in the last month.
Google has always had "bad neighborhoods" -- places where results weren't so good. What folks are finding is that the bad neighborhoods are on the rise, at least when it comes to short, popular searches. Now it appears the screen scrapers are busy at work targeting tech questions. In the last couple of months, when I had a technical question I got total junk for an answer -- lists of questions that took me to landing pages, re-dos of Stack Overflow pages, and random questions that didn't even have answers.

I use Google extensively for search. About once a month or so, I'll be looking for something in a bad neighborhood. It's not a pleasant experience. It's a shame to see tech questions end up like this.

But the problem, as another poster pointed out, is that nothing is for free. You are either paying money, in which case you are the customer, or you are the product. There's no "in-between" In Google's business model you are the product.

I think the business model can continue for a good, long time, but there is always going to be cross-incentives between people who want free stuff and providers who have to pay money to provide you with stuff. Not everybody can be a wikipedia and raise money with pictures of Jimmy Wales. They are an outlier.

My conclusion is that these are browser problems. After all, it's none of my business what people put on the web, and aside from liking Google and wishing them well, I really don't have a dog in the fight for their struggle. In fact, it's better for me to have a dozen search companies all using different algorithms -- makes it harder to game the system.

So what I want is a browser. A browser that uses multiple search engines automatically and completely eliminates any "fluff" from rendered pages -- perhaps even combining various pages into much simpler displays.

I'd pay for that, and that would make me the customer. Then I would have whatever web experience I desired, instead of the one that I get for free. I'd much rather be in the position of writing a check to the best browser provider that condensed and filtered information than the situation we have now.

(By the way, if anybody is interested in this browser project, please contact me, as it's been a pet project of mine for some time)
Does the duplication of private information reduce it's value? I think it does. If there is a transfer of value from you to a company then you can call transfer that a sort of payment. The company may sell you something in return, but I wouldn't confuse selling with paying.
I wish they would. I find content farms irksome.
How Not To Lose Twitter Followers
Researchers Hack Internet Enabled TVs
Exactly Google's problem. As Christiansen says in the Innovators Dilemma - managers don't allocate resources, customers do.

One of the reasons why all Google's products except search are commercial failures.
I think the UNIX philosophy goes a long way here. FP is also close to this. But it's not so simple... har har har.

Certain UNIX tools are fairly stick-like in their basic usage. Things like cat, grep, sed, sort, cut, paste, tee, less... they are all at least immediately useful with a basic command even if they have huge sets of options.

The UNIX grep vs. Windows Grep (see http://www.wingrep.com/resources/images/mainwindow1.png) is a great illustration, because the basic use case of grep is as simple as possible (`grep foo' for instance, operating on stdin). With the complex Windows Grep you get the whole UI (and more, with things like wizards and prompts) all the time, no matter what you need. You could never learn anything more about UNIX grep than `grep foo' and it would never get in your way, but with Windows Grep and other complex apps you get everything all of the time.

But, in the end, UNIX grep and Windows Grep can both basically do the same things.
Web Developer’s Guide to Getting a Startup Up and Running
maybe he meant the yearly "annual report" fee. i.e. in my state it was something like $125 to register and $50/yr for the LLC.
I really tried hard with this not to perpetrate any FUD. I re-read all the recent WSJ reporting many times and ran this by a bunch of critical eyes. Tracking down to the individual level is certainly real.
fwiw, I created a company with 100 shares of which I took only 1 at time of creation.

Apparently this makes things easier if/when you come to distribute shares to others as it will be a simple allocation of unallocated shares rather than a more convoluted 'transfer' process.
It's good, but it's not that good :-) DDG doesn't even log your IPs.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
I think in part you may be having issues getting sites to link to you because there isn't much of a "story" with just selling layers.

You might want to try posting "How To" articles to your blog, even for things that you think are really simple to do with Photoshop. Maybe even a link on the front page of your site that just says flat out: "Here is how you would use these layer styles" (with lots of screenshots).

Also, you seem to have done a large amount of work to generate the actual texture files, are you selling them directly? I would guess that the market for texture files for 3D work or whatever is larger than the photoshop layer styles market.

Thanks for posting such an inspiring and detailed analysis of your launch and first sales.
Speaking as a system administrator, "yum install trac" works as I expect.
Startup Quote: Chris Hughes, co-founder, Facebook
Google and Facebook: Algorithmic and Social Search
No, show them how the layer looks at first, then show them how it looks after you apply a syle.

I think a video would be perfect here... like, "Here's some bland white text on a black background in photoshop." then take 3 seconds to drag a metal style onto the text and a wood style onto the background. "Wow, Amazing!"
Here goes some feedback, hopefully we can gather some suggestions for Gabriel instead of saying 'Encrypted Google' all the time...

In my opinion (using my designer side) the site lacks basic design, the text is well written, and the images make it really easy to read, but its missing some eye candy.
Something to do would be structure each argument as a page/slide, and make the reading more like slides or a book.

In my opinion, -quite ironic- you should have a look (copy format) from Google's 20thingsilearned [1], the book format, with the beautiful design and the animations would make the site stand out and more attractive to be read than it is now.

But dont do as them, there is a pretty good job done keeping the text short and concise but informative and clear.

If the site is kept well formatted as well as structured and 'playful' will continue to be a pleasure to read.

Good luck with the campaign, happy to help to my default search engine :)

[1] http://www.20thingsilearned.com/
That site turned me off. I am using DDG as my primary search engine for many months now.

I really dislike the style and "atmosphere" of that site. The images are seemingly unordered and could use some borders. The images of the dog biting the women or the predator disgust me. Then some "motivationals" and memes that do not help the case.

This site gave me mental stress (the left-alignment of varied sized text and images maybe, maybe the white, maybe the images) and overall broke a chunk off the good impression the DDG creator gave me so far. I'd suggest either not making such weird site or at least make it properly designed.

(When I clicked the link I expected it to be related to the http://hackademix.net/2010/12/28/x-do-not-track-support-in-n... disaster which dramatically "uniquifies" your browser fingerprint so I started with a bad feeling. Thanks for adding ad-blocking recommendations though! And even more so: Tor!)
His logic doesn't quite track for me. Take the Twitter example. He uses that as an example of why you shouldn't focus on simplicity because it makes twitter busier with inline media. But to me that's an example of simplicity because it makes sharing media much simpler.

Any new feature is going to add some complexity. The point of a K.I.S.S. philosophy is trying to lessen that complexity as much as possible and that's example what Twitter did.
Flipcode - Coding Bloom Filters
I don't think it blocks the header for HTTPS -> HTTPS traffic though.
Use your own experiences and pain points to identify an opportunity. Be arrogant thinking you can do it better than others.

- Chris Hughes (@chrishughes)

http://startupquote.com/post/2582608515
Xtranormal would do the world a great service if they replaced the teddy bears and legos with straw men.
There are extra benefits to incorporating a C corp in the USA before 12-31-2011: the Small Business Jobs Act 5-year 0% capital gains thing.
If you live in California there's an annual minimum franchise tax of $800, plus whatever annual fees are charged by the state you incorporate your LLC in.
The only benefit I can see to Google are a lot of those spam sites rely on AdSense to make their money. If it makes sense for a developer to register 100 domains and game some keywords, then they must be making a little money.
clickable: http://www.beepl.com
Here is the order link (Amazon doesn't appear to sell new copies (and it's cheaper)) from the original source:

https://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/orderform_v4.php

Likewise I think this the only place to get Poor Charlie's Almanack.
Ask HN: Why does Facebook need another $500 million?
From the MSNBC article, "(FB) said the new money will give Facebook the financial firepower to hire new employees away from competitors, develop new products and perhaps gobble up other companies - all without being a publicly traded company."

Why can't they do all of that now?
No, it was parabole. :)

From what I understand, they use the same number every single time without exception.
For those of you using a custom domain for your personal emails, what kind of domain name do you use? Your surname, for example?
That "only benefit" is a pretty massive one considering AdSense accounts for nearly all of Google's profit.
It's actually $2/month per mailbox and you need to order for at least 10$/month (that is 5+ mailboxes) or buy Exchange service. Still a decent service, though.
They do indeed. Funny though, I was cleaning up my bookshelves 2 days ago and I stumbled upon old books "Software Engineering in UNIX/C Environment" (1991)[Honest: I copied the book from my university library before I graduated a few years ago] and "The Greatest Secret in the World" (1997).

I browsed found interesting information. For example: SE in UNIX/C Env book mentioned Unit, System, Integration, and Acceptance Testing. Just like those Agilist/Scrum books are doing these days.

Og Mandino book is sort of self-help book that seems a combination of a few recent self-help books.

They're both thin and easy to read. I suppose I would believe reviews about old books than newer books from now on.
If you look at the topic of the thread, it's to a user. The ruby-talk mailing list is for general discussion, and the title of the thread is "Best Linux Distro for Ruby?"
How to force a user to unfollow you on Twitter
so if I were to create a website that (hopefully) generates money and in the future I'd like to add investors/workers, I should already start thinking about "shares?"
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4087.en.h...

It might be worth waiting until the official recording gets released at http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/ (named "Console Hacking 2010").
Homepage of the book:

http://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/seekingwisdom.html

Also love this quote (about Poor Charlies Almanac):

"This book is something of a publishing miracle – never advertised, yet year after year selling many thousands of copies from its Internet site."
— Warren Buffett, in his February 2010

Has anyone read Poor Charlies Almanac and if so would you recommend it?
Of course I'm not surprised that million dollar machines aren't sold that way. Sun had $3000 Netras, too. And lots of inexpensive workstations. These are what I was talking about.
Unhosted - Freedom from web 2.0's monopoly platforms
Varies according to business type. My Sole Proprietorship was about $25 four years ago.

[edit]
And that's one nice thing about the US: how quick and easy it was. I literally only created a business name and got a bank account because a customer wanted to pay me by check instead of the usual PayPal. The dollar amount was well worth it, so I took the check, registered the business and opened an account to deposit it all within a week or so.
You're right, but my point is that, if Google is bad, it should begin to lose market share. If it does not in fact lose market share while there are good alternatives, it must mean users are satisfied with what they're getting (or not unhappy enough to switch).
The first sentence when I stripped out the pictures was "When you search Google, and click on a link, your search term is sent to that site, along with your browser & computer info, which can often uniquely identify you."

Referrers are a part of the way the web has worked since before Google existed. They're a browser-level feature more than something related to specific websites. But if referrers bother you, just use the SSL version of Google to prevent referrers from being sent to http sites (or change your browser not to send referrers at all).

The corresponding sentence even for a website that strips referrers would be "When you search on domain X, and click on a link, your browser & computer info is sent to that site, which can often uniquely identify you."

Read more carefully in that light, the first sentence is really saying that third-party sites that you land on after searching or visiting a domain can track you. That's independent of whether you came from Google or any other search engine, of course.
This line of thinking doesn't make much sense with respect to a company as large as Google. The fact that the Google Alerts team has identified and solved a particular problem doesn't really allow us to draw reliable conclusions about what's going on in other parts of the organization.

So the question is: Are they not taking greater action against spammers because it would hurt their bottom line? And, if so, is that evil?

In particular, leading questions like this strike me as premature.
I would never hire him.

This guy would release everything he knows if someone in the company wont do what he want. "GIMME MORE MONEY OR I WILL RELEASE THE KEY FOR THE PS4!".

Sry, thats not business.
"Here's some bland white text on a black background in photoshop."

I actually do have a page exactly like that: http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/tutorials

It's the "support" link in the main menu. It used to be labeled "tutorials", but I found it was distracting visitors and not helping sales. It's definitely something I should revisit.
In my experience, the path from “engineer recognizes that queries X, Y, and Z return crap search results” to “search engine improves its performance with queries X, Y, and Z without creating more crap somewhere else” is more difficult than a lot of people realize.
Blood test to spot cancer gets big boost
>The company may sell you something in return, but I wouldn't confuse selling with paying.

Absolutely, those are entirely different. But you do seem to be defining "providing a service" as not-paying. If you go down that route, why do houses cost money? You are paying the builders for their service, but if that's not-paying, then you're just giving away huge sums of money for zero value in return. Tangibility isn't a defining line, or utility companies would be out (they don't provide water, they bring it to you. An intangible service.).

The service in these cases being fewer "enlarge your breasts/penis" ads for the wrong sex, or anything you may find offensive, replaced by ads which (ideally) would help you discover things you want which you may not have found otherwise. You're paying the ad services to be your personal product investigators, and they return value by providing relevancy.

edited to add more. I'm done now!
I always assumed the PS3 has top notch security given how long they had managed to avoid exploits. Seems from watching the videos that they could go a long way on a future console to prevent hacks just by plugging these issues. The hypervisor happily allocating/ running anything and everything seems like a good place to start.

Obviously other ways would probably eventually be found but as these guys say, just providing a way for people to run their own code to begin with takes a lot of effort behind people hacking the system. There will always be an army of people out there wanting to pirate games and an army of people wanting to profit off of it but only a tiny amount of them can really do anything about it.
I don't need to hire anyone currently, and I'm not looking for a job, but if your goal is to put technical recruiters and headhunters out of business, I support you 100%.
1) I sold soft drinks at a church event and made $130 in one afternoon.

2) I sold my iPhone for $1000 and loving every minute of my $35 non-smartphone.

3) I bought brand new electronic from online forums and sold it on eBay or to friends for a 10%-20% profit each time.
Longreads: A Digital Renaissance for the Long-form?
Using WPF in a WinForms World
Great progress, especially in the power consumption. However, last generation processors are already very fast. A better upgrade for most developers would be an SSD though. All of this speed is great, but useless as long as the processor is waiting on a mechanical hard disk.

Once you get used to your applications opening almost instantly, it's tough to go back to a mechanical HDD.
This is only an artifact of market segmentation and release schedules.

LGA1155 is their budget line. 2600K is not the best processor they can make -- it is the best processor they can make give very stringent whole platform cost limits. In addition to having the desktop budget line, they also have a desktop high-end line. Last generation, these were the LGA1156 and LGA1366 respectively. The processors they just released are the budget line for this gen, and the high-end line fits a socket called LGA2011, which will be released later, and on which the processor cost will range from 300$ to about 1000$.

In every generation, new Intel processors gain roughly as much more power as is the difference between the budget and high-end product lines, so it's normal for todays budget processors to win over yesterday's high end. Usually Intel releases the high-end first for better margins and to avoid this kind of confusion -- this time, they started on the budget end, probably to pummel AMD, who previously only competed on the budget segment and now cannot really compete much at all.
*throw
Mine is my first and last name. The feeling of redundancy between the username and the domain name went away after a while, and I prefer it over a surname domain (they just seem cheesy).

Big win with a personal domain is if someone already knows how to spell your name, they know how to spell your e-mail, too. This is really handy for giving your e-mail over the telephone, and a great alternative to some cryptic username that has to be spelled out.
The point is that Twitter started out with simplicity. My guess is if they started with their current design then there would be far less adoption because of the steep learning curve.
Before anything you should define what constitutes simplicity for the purposes of your post.

New Twitter is much more complicated than the old one.

You are confusing simplicity in the user experience with simplicity in the back-end. I'd argue the new Twitter is simpler. But its back-end is more complicated.

Great front-end simplicity often requires a lot of back-end complexity.
Ask HN & new startups: What contact info do you put down on your name card?
Beside the obvious name, designation, email and phone number, what other contact info is on your name card? @twitter? Facebook id? Linkedin id? Fax?
I have a question: does this policy of DDG violate their legal responsibilities? Thats a serious question. I believe that law enforcement requires some form of data retention but I'm not sure what.
I use my personal domain and forward it to gmail.com.

I want to have ultimate control. That is why I'm not using my work email.
The argument that there is a tradeoff between simple/useful is something I don't agree with. An app or website can and should still remain simple to use whilst having many features if the UI is designed well. Simplicity should always be the end goal but this should not be at the expense of features!! There seems to be a certain mindset where people believe that minimal, or simple interface design is the 'easy' option. It is not, it's often the opposite. Good design ensures an end result always feels AND looks simple to use for the end user. The features added to a service should never be considered, or be resolved in a way where they could be described as 'clutter', as you label it. I'd consider that a fail if I looked at a new feature that way. If the features are implemented well by a good UX/UI designer, the products perceived 'simplicity' will not be compromised, in fact it would probably be enhanced if it were providing added flexibility.
> So what I want is a browser. A browser that uses multiple search engines automatically and completely eliminates any "fluff" from rendered pages -- perhaps even combining various pages into much simpler displays.

Aren't you describing a "metasearch engine"? They have been around for quite some time (which does not mean they could be much improved, of course).
Yeah, it sounded more tongue-in-cheek in my head than it comes across in the comment. If this is the reason we see spam results, then the benefit must outweigh the negative effect of potentially pissing of users.
That's a good point :) It doesn't
The referrer header is indeed a reality of HTTP, but that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't work around that reality and correct for it, if it has real privacy implications, which I think it definitely does.

By getting rid of that header I think we take away a lot of private context, i.e. the actual search terms that landed you on that page, which in and of themselves can provide a lot of background into what was personally going on with that person on that page.

So yes, the first sentence is all about the referrer header. And yes, it is just one piece of the privacy puzzle, but it is one that I think can certainly be solved. It is also a piece I feel the average person knows nothing about.

Here's the original post when I made the change to make searches externally anonymous: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/duck-duck-go-sea...
If promoting spam sites filled with ads was so profitable why wouldn't Google just put more ads on its search results page and cut out the middle man