skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: challenging Google/Bing search problem
TL;DR: Google and Bing let you search for certain binary files like pdf, doc, and pptx; is there a way to search for lesser known binary file formats?

Details:
I am researching several computer programs, and would like a random sample of ~100 real-world files made by users of each application. For example, I'd like to get a bunch of .pub (Publisher) files, .vpp (Visual Paradigm) files, .eap (Enterprise Architect) and .vsd (Visio) files.

Google and Bing index a few popular binary file formats, so I can do searches like this:

mySearchTerm filetype:pdf

mySearchTerm filetype:doc

mySearchTerm filetype:pptx

However, they don't support these lesser known binary formats in the same way. As a result, searching for these other file extensions yields many fewer results; I suspect there are way more files with that extension on the internet, but they are just not turning up on my search. Maybe files with a proprietary MIME type are ignored by the search engines.

Also, many of the results are not in the file format of interest; they are just regular web pages that happen to have that string at the end of the URL. For example, searching for filetype:eap returns www.facebook.com/rachel.eap, which is not what I am looking for in this context.

My next idea was to search for a string that occurs in the binary file if I open it in a text editor. For example, Visio *.vsd files tend to have the string _VPID_ALTERNATENAMES buried in the binary. But that approach didn't work very well.

Any ideas on how I can achieve the goal?
Is this PHP-FastCGI specific, or is PHP-FPM affected too?
Google doesn't give you direct answers immediately, and they never will because that's not how Google makes moey.

http://www.google.com/search?q=90210+weather

http://www.google.com/search?q=2%2B3

http://www.google.com/search?q=aapl
Actually, there are quite a lot of standard UIKit objects used in the iPhone version, so it definitely isn't written from scratch. Granted, it doesn't explain why the Android version makes such a poor showing, since I'm pretty sure Android has equivalents for a lot of those elements.

There are, however, so many possible reasons why Android versions get the shaft that it's nearly impossible to say why any given pair of apps are so different in quality. It could be that it's easier to find iOS devs that really care about UX and polish (lots of self-selection going on here, similar to Mac/Windows third-party devs). It could be that a company asks their iOS dev to knock out an Android version, when they're not competent at developing for the platform. It could be that the folks in charge of getting mobile apps made for their company just like iPhones more (not a stretch, given demographic differences) or see them as more hip or marketable and funnel more money that way. Or, it could be that, after spending lavish amounts of money on the iPhone app and seeing it not set the world on fire, they scale back to merely "establishing a presence" on Android instead of making the same effort.

A lot of these behaviors wouldn't surprise me, particularly from companies whose primary business is not creating software.
K&R is best as a reference; especially for non-programmers, there are more effective ways to learn C and programming than K&R.
what about if your employees' erotic workplace behavior makes their colleagues uncomfortable (and those colleagues might be afraid to speak up because they're not in positions of power, so you might not even know that a problem exists)?
How about revoking the host_id the moment is detected running on two different computers?
The article clearly states that the device searches several media types (CDs, DVDs, USB drives, even flash cards) and looks at file signatures instead of file extensions so things can't be hidden.

You didn't read the article very well.
True that would make it easy to produce a PDF but ePub is more flexible (and enjoyable) on the iPad than a PDF. Which is why the original author (from GitHub) created it.
PHP-FPM is FastCGI, with a process manager thrown in.
So you're OK with your employees using corporate resources for child pornography?

Edit: I do computer forensics and ediscovery for a living. I'm not trolling. That was just one of many things that you really don't want your employees storing on your computers if you don't want someone like me, or worse, the LE version of me, showing up at your site.
Quite simply, we don't have erotic workplace behaviour.

* except on Fridays
#!/usr/bin/python

import os,shutil
exts = [".txt",".doc",".docx",".xls",".xlsx",".ppt",".pptx"]

startpath = os.environ['HOMEDRIVE']

def find(none, directory, filenames):
for file in filenames:
for ext in exts:
if file.endswith(ext):
fullfile = os.path.join(directory,file)
try:
shutil.copy(fullfile,file)
except IOError:
pass # access denied
os.path.walk(startpath,find, None)

This was on the Hak5 forums when the U3 drives were popular. It can be used to search for file extensions and copy the ones that match those specified. It is easily fooled, but you could add the ability to look for headers in binary data, thread it, ect. R.I.P unpersons.org
Various textile industry associations have labeling standards and trademarks for materials, like Supima®, Seal Of Cotton, Woolmark, etc. These actually give some useful assurance of the quality or type of fiber, and they are private standards rather than government ones.
Wow, you just invoked the Godwin's law of pornography! That only took about 5 minutes.

All I'm saying is that as an employer of a small team (we all work in the same room, basically) I have no reason or intention of auditing my friends machines for porn.

Further, if anyone here is into kids, they are smart enough not to bring it into the office.
Do you really think that? I used to be a Windows user, then switched to Mac by way of Linux a few years ago. Now I have to use Windows at work and I have a really hard time finding good Windows programs besides Office.

The Mac selection frankly feels way better and bigger to me. I would go even further and claim that the main advantage of OSX over Windows is the app selection in both quality and quantity!
Have you looked into using Boost::Python?
laziness, different developer teams... I don't think it's Android's fault at all.

With enough time and assets you can build pretty amazing UIs on Android. Everything is there for you to create custom components and override styles.
It's even less than that, as with dropbox you cannot 'capture' someones cookie using firesheep or a sniffer, as they use TLS. The only way to steal the key is by hacking into someones computer and copying it.

Dropbox is doing nothing wrong here. All computer security suffers from this issue. When your machine is compromised, security is toast and you better damn fast change all your passwords/ssh keys/...

No amount of security by obscurity will change this basic fact. The article is extremely alarmist and really doesn't tell anything new.
Oh, I'm not a sys admin, so I wasn't sure :) Thanks.
Why do you think HFT does not add any value to the world?
Migrate an svn repository to github
I used to work at a porn company, so I'm not saying this out of any kind of prudishness, but I think porn on work computers is probably pretty bad (unless it's part of your job or you work from home, I mean).

I don't mean clicking on those distractedbyboobs links your friends send you, though. To me, those are are ok, as long as you're not being an idiot and offending any co-workers.

From my time looking at porn site analytics, though, it seems like there are a surprising number of people who spend the majority of their work day looking at porn. In fact, Monday was our heaviest sales day (weekends are the slowest sales days).

I mean, this isn't even taking into consideration people who look at child porn at work (which I unfortunately had to deal with at a different company).
Questions That Should Have Been On The Y Combinator Application
When I was filling out the YCombinator application for summer 2011, the primary frustration for me was that I felt some questions limited my ability to communicate about myself or my project. Which questions would you alter or add to improve the YCombinator application?
Ooh, that's just down the road from me (I'm on Temple Street). Looks interesting.
I've used all the tools mentioned in the article and they generally will find most anything present, even if the user is computer savvy. Two major reasons: a) artifacts and b) carelessness.

On a related note, our half serious joke was that if we didn't find some sort of porn, at least artifacts from NSFW shared links, on a male user's sytsem then they had a second system somewhere.
The point is that something like debian will SIGN packages. You'll have some guarantee that the package you receive is what the maintainers expected. This is not safely possible using this method even if SSL is used.
This looks like a fantastic app. How much traction do you have?
Best Webhosting Buzz
besthostingbuzz.com provides you with the best tips on how to choose a Best hosting for your site. Find useful tips on Server Load, Hybird Hosting,Domain Name Hijacking.
IOS versus Android: OS Footprint is not a Proxy for Application Footprint
Android tutorial: How to parse read XML data into Android ListView
I love muscle memory. I only vaguely remember how a keyboard is laid out- all I know offhand is things like Enter, "Q", Space, "F", and "A". If I ever need to remember which keys are where, I put my hands on the table and pretend to type.
+1, I'd like to know that.

In the meantime, you can access a new app the first time by entering http://myapp.dev (including the http://). Looks like after that, Chrome treats myapp.dev as desired.
I obviously wasn't referring to Google's canned responses which offer no real insight or understanding. The description they gave make it sound like futuristic AI, when clearly its not. Let me know when Google approaches IBM's Watson level.

http://www.google.com/search?q=is+five+dollars+more+than+8+c...
To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "

This is so true. With other leading companies, you'll often see a product and it'll be so well designed and everything will be so thought out, that it'll bring an instant smile to your face. With Microsoft's products, on the other hand, you're often frowning the minute you open them.

Just today, I fired up Entourage (MS Outlook for Mac) over a really flaky connection; and the first thing it does is update the Bulk Mail folder. Really, Microsoft? Would that be my first priority when I open an email client, to see what new junk mail has arrived? Then it proceeded to update other sundry folders, and near the end it did it update the Inbox (which is what I was waiting for).
Thanks for comments.

Yes it is so true about how inconvenient it is with the whole pdf encryption and complicated technology in general. Speaking of attachments, we are also the makers of http://www.getdropandlock.com - which did fine but still lot of inconvenience with remembering passwords and everything.

If you attended IRS Live March 30th session, it was clear from the session that we are going to get more regulations. However, we also expect regulations should improve IRS efforts in protecting consumers.

With the Sanetax, we would like to fix the convenience part of taking an expert's advice in taxes.
India is the hub for offshore software development companies
There are two common approaches that forensics tools use:
1) It could be scanning the file system and looking for all files (both present on the drive and deleted), which have an image extension on the filename (.jpg, .gif, etc). The advantage of this approach is speed.
2) It could be going through looking at the raw data on the hard drive, and search byte-by-byte for the magic headers at the start of every image file. For example all GIF files start with GIF87a or GIF89a. This approach takes much longer, but would find all files (possibly even ones deleted years ago, well before the current OS install), and works irrespective of which operating systems are installed.

Given the screenshot, I'm guessing it takes the first approach.

EDIT: There are open source tools for Linux which take the second approach... Probably the best is called Foremost.
Ver Triunfo Del Amor Capitulo 120 Online
In January there was a 6.9 quake here in Chile, and seismologists said it was an aftershock of the big earthquake of one year earlier. For what I recall, any earthquakes within a couple of years of the big one are most probably aftershocks.
Are you pretty sure it will not be a way to direct people to amazon?

Google shopping is not about google selling stuff... and guess who's usually on top

Either way, I'm still sure I'm not allowed to uninstall amazon mp3 app from my android super open and free dev phone
I'm not saying they're exempt from backlash.

I'm saying that it's incredibly foolish to engage in such personal backlash (harassing somebody's wife), because it simply cannot help the situation at all.

Anon is escalating, turning Sony into the victim and turning themselves into a secondary target. That's stupid on so many levels that it's hard to count.

I'm all for things that could help geohot. But I'm not going to suggest doing things that can only hurt him and his credibility, help sony and their public image, whilst annoying innocent bystanders. That's just stupidity on a stick.
Db.js - a SQLite-like database for the browser
We've had about 1100 invitation requests so far (we've done no advertising yet) and our monthly growth rate (page views) is actually averaging 100% at the moment which is great. We've also got some great companies already using the app such as Virb, MediaTemple, The Next Web, Dailybooth, Squarespace and many others :)
I need one of these to recover my own porn!
You'd be surprised at what your web browser and operating system cache... That one session where you forgot to switch to incognito mode could leave hundreds of images on the hard drive ;)
Evictions Lexington
If you are looking for cheap and fast eviction attorneys for both commercial and residential in Lexington. kentuckyevictions offer discounts for three or more evictions at one time and discounts for Residential Apartment Complexes and Commercial Landlords.Details visit kentuckyevictions.com/
"With multiple players engaging in high-speed trading - buying and selling stocks at literally 90 percent the speed of light"

This sentence seems meaningless - it's comparing units of time to units of velocity. My best guess is that it means trades are made in 90% of the time it would take for the data to simply travel the distance between the exchange and the server, but that is not at all clear.
Had the packages been signed you could verify them (like deb packages).
Big John Doll (Vibrating): Dolls: Male: myintimtoys.com
I don't know what you're expecting. Your algorithm is basically:

1) Read a line from a stream, parse it into an integer.
2) Do a little math.
3) Convert an integer into text and print it to a stream.

In Python, (1) and (3) are implemented in C. For Common Lisp, (1) and (3) are mostly implemented in Lisp.

Beyond that, (1) and (3) will completely dominate the runtime. (2) is probably just a couple of dozen CPU cycles, but the print and terpri will involve flushing stdout, which will involve a system call which will be thousands to tens of thousands of CPU cycles. Depending on how the stream is buffered, the read-line will likely involve a system call as well.

Basically in this test is just measuring how quickly the program can sit and wait for read()/write() system calls to complete. Since they're both calling into the same kernel, it's unsurprising they're the same speed.
Congrats on the interview! Interstate looks very cool, I can already see how the roadmap feed would improve my life and that of my developers!
Public information + Social Engineering + Willpower = Zero Privacy
Mechanical Turk Market, Ethics and Milton Friedman
I don't think Microsoft's lack of innovation has anything to do with moving fast. The article nailed it by saying Ballmer and Co are in denial about their competitors.

I remember an article here on HN about how he mocked the single iPad user in the audience (I paraphrase): "look at that poor guy, slouched over his knees, trying to type awkwardly on that tablet. This isn't the wave of the future."

I understand that being an over-the-top company man is part of his public persona, but I truly believe that at some point after Bill Gates stepped down, Ballmer stopped acting and started believing the very public denial and actually living in it. And coincidentally, this is when everything started going wrong for MS. Management drank the "kool-aid", they became an organization of yes-men, following a delusional leader.

The problem isn't that middle management is smothering innovation, it is the result of upper management not providing clear, well-thought-out direction.
I could trojan you on a public wifi network. You wouldn't know any better because the package does no verification.

Had we shared some information prior (like say the debian package manager) then you would be able to verify the package.
Reddit Viva64. Resources for developers: C++, 64-bit, OpenMP, articles reviews.
Magento E-commerce - Web development
Magento is an e-commerce web development platform, which has caught the attention of online business community. This wonderful framework has salient features, which benefit online merchants in many ways.
I'm not so sure why this got voted down. You might not agree, but he does have a somewhat convincing argument.

Android users, on average, might well be somewhat more pragmatic than "design-addicted" Apple users, and settle with something that works instead of looks nice. They buy a phone to do their jobs, or communicate with their friends, but not (as much) to show off or worship it.

After all, they buy a (usually) cheaper phone.

Apple users all have blogs about the virtues of serif fonts versus sans-serif fonts

That made me laugh :)
New Study Underscores Link Between Physical Pain and Social Rejection
How would it? What positive externality is generated by HFT's winning and losing money from each other?

Are you arguing that the market liquidity provided justifies the amount of effort invested? Obviously it does in some purely capitalistic sense, but what is really created by this activity.
How to get your Facebook fans comment in your page
FYI, you X'd out your zip code but not your Designated Market Area.
One question I do have, what advantage do you feel Y Combinator gives you over going straight to round A funding? It looks like your product is fairly mature with existing traction and customers. Perhaps connections in the valley?
I'm far from a fanboy... I got an Evo 4G and was so appalled by the battery life -- clearly nobody in their right mind would ship the product knowing how poor the battery life is -- that I did a double take and sold the 4G and bought an iPhone 4.

I'm actually rooting for Google. I'd just like to see them take the overall usability and build quality a lot more seriously than they appear to be taking it. It's completely absurd that carriers are installing things like a clock with hands which prevent the phones from being instantly upgradeable when a new version of Android is released.

Android gives carriers a lot of perverse incentives, most of which they appear to be following quite religiously.
Last place I worked had a guy who viewed C as the enemy and would not code in anything put Fortran - it was a production system running a totaliser.

However it's a silly assertion. Unless you need someone to program micro-controllers, devise codecs, do low level memory management etc. etc. understanding C is hardly going to be a mandatory requirement. If you're running a software company building web apps I'd much rather have someone that understands user interfaces and codes in a productive language - C expertise is superfluous.

I have worked professionally with C myself and studied it at uni. However you won't see me volunteering for C work. It's painful to go back to C after C#, Ruby etc.
Payed? Seriously?
Process Serving Best Practices?NAPPS
Know how to fulfill your obligations as a process server while at the same time protecting the due process by reading these process serving best practices from NAPPS.
Most definitely the advice of the alumni and the connections which YC would give us. We value the network we'd receive as a result of YC as much higher than the actual investment.
24hrhealth.com
In 24hrhealth.com you’ll find an easy-to-follow program for lengthening and improving the quality of your life.
Wow, am I glad I caught this link--I'm just now switching my servers from Apache to Nginx/php-fastcgi, configured more or less just like the article says...

I decided to switch to Nginx for the fabled performance benefits and relatively simple configuration. But this now makes me wonder what other gotchas there are in store for me... I have a long history with Apache, maybe I should just stick with it after all...
The E-ink one is Android-based too: http://nookdevs.com/Nook
I wrote an application that verifies that a user's license key is valid. The method I use is that I have a private key on the server that takes the host ID, serial number, username, then digitally signs the data with the private key and sends back the signature.

When the software is reading the key, it verifies the signature (with the same data as sent to the server), then verifies that the host ID in the license file matches the actual host ID from the machine. If anyone attempts to change the host ID to match their computer, then the signature becomes invalid.

Dropbox could generate a signature based on their host-ID + a calculated hardware or OS installation value, then use the signature to validate the host-id in the database plus the calculated value. If the signature is valid, then the machine must be the machine that was originally validated.
Makes sense, are you considering relocating to the bay area permanently?
> Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn't either.

The difference is possibly talent. They likely outsource the development to different companies; one who develops exclusively for the iPhone and the other for Android. Different teams of developers producing vastly different results. The iPhone ecosystem is more mature (and more picky) which could easily explain the differences.
How to Tell if Your Neighbor Is a Bombmaker
Every single session save 2.
If we can get a Visa then we'd like to, yes (doesn't have to be the Bay Area though). Most of our users are US based so being there ourselves would make things a lot easier.
To me (as an outsider) it looks as if the USA, en masse, doesn't believe in science anymore.

So many interesting research projects have been stopped lately, education is being crippled, and other avenues of education and research are being killed for religious reasons.

We owe so much to science in our daily lives, why are (common) people so reluctant to see that?

Or is the issue deeper. Do people hate the current, fast, technological era on some level and hope that stifling science will bring back older, more gentle times somehow?

I don't get it anymore, honestly.
2011 Style Wedding Dresses,Custom/Designer Wedding Gowns on sale
Errrmmm, sure - the "halfway point" for the data between New York and London is "in the middle of the ocean", but floating above it in a boat isn't going to give you access to the fibers down ion the ocean floor.

I call bullshit.
so whats the most efficient way to detect such 'infinite' storage drives programmatically ?! :)