skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?

So Google should start manually tweaking sites supporting public figures in order to garner favors from them in case they get in a position of power?

Talk about setting a bad precedent.
I was actually thinking that the client would store the private key somewhere (e.g. in an HTML5 browser:)) but what you described is brilliant and definitely works.

Something like that is not used probably because the bigger problem is clients getting hijacked, not servers.
Why are they blogging about it now? Look at it as advertising.

Air BnB haven't been in the news for awhile and sales have been slumping, so they coughed up this hairball of a post to stay "top of mind".
I see a lot of discussion about analogies to help explain to everyday people the problems SOPA (and PIPA) would cause. Let's get some PSA style analogy videos and pictures up for everyone to distribute to their friends and family via (fill in social network here). I'm sure the Reddit community can get the ball rolling with their meme prowess. It's very simple, but it could be very effective.
The "dangerous precedent" you're talking about was set by the Google web spam team a long time ago.

Yep. If you wanted to look at one particular event, several years ago a major Nazi site ranked #1 for [Jew], because the people who care about [Jew] and were early adopters on the Internet happened to be Nazis. Google, at the time, refused to hand-edit that, and instead put PSA AdWords ads against the SERP for [Jew] saying "While we're certainly not Nazis, the algorithm decrees that the most relevant result for this search is, regrettably, a Nazi site." [Edit to add: Wow, the page did not linkrot: http://www.google.com/explanation.html ]This was a deeply controversial result internally and externally at the time.

Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.
Having read "Down and Out in Paris and London" recently, I didn't notice anything too appalling. Just some stereotypical views of Jews, which I thought Orwell wrote with the purpose of describing a typical Brit from the early 20th century in order to criticize their antisemitism, but some googling suggests he expresses similar views in his diaries too, which is a bit more disconcerting.

> One could ignore this, just possibly, if it existed in a single book. And yet for 10 years the abstract figure of "the Jew" makes regular appearances in Orwell's diaries. Out tramping in the early 30s, he falls in with "a little Liverpool Jew, a thorough guttersnipe" with a face that recalls "some low-down carrion bird". Watching the crowds thronging the London underground in October 1940, he decides that what is "bad" about the Jews is that they are not only conspicuous but go out of their way to make themselves so.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/13/biography.higher...
The are a couple of possible reasons I see:
1. Hackers, and the kind people who really care about this kind of thing want to have the best; if someone says it isn't the best, even implicitly by saying that they prefer a competitor, we get defensive.

2. What companies you choose can be seen as a single pieve of what some perceive as an ideological struggle. Google the defender of openness, and Apple the harsh dictator, managing user experience with an iron fist.

3. People have their phones nearby nearly 24/7. It's possible a subconscious attachment to it develops in people, though I don't know the psychology of it.
Reminds me. Years back, I remember seeing an older guy hanging around the Trevi Fountain in Rome with a full inkjet printer hanging around his neck. He was taking photos and printing on the spot.
E-books Are Not That Easy
I do agree that is a strong word. I guess what I was referring to was it's obselenece as a mass profession. I assumed that was implicit, wrongfully.

I was hoping to drive home the point that while coding is the "it" thing right now, eventually someone will build a framework that makes having a technical background moot (similar to the power YouTube has given to the home movie producer or music artist).

I think you may be right in regards to the retail prediction. Amazon is going to continue to absorb the majority of retail sales, especially as baby boomers (the highest spending demographic in history) completes the retirement cycle and diminishes disposable income in the market.
Fixing a Broken System (Apple's education event)
The only reason somebody should be flopping around with such a softball question is if they for some reason think that they're being asked to find a near-optimal way of computing square roots. The only reason the candidate would be allowed to get stuck in a dead end for a long period of time is if the interviewer doesn't know what he's doing. But I see absolutely nothing wrong with asking questions of this general type.

And again, I do not think this is a good interview question. I just think it's bad for a different reason than the original poster claimed. Which was that it's supposedly not solvable even by top engineers unless they've recently implemented the algorithm.
1) Hm. I usually just click on "Ripples", and I see the entire _chain_ of shares. All the way back to the first poster. We can debate the discoverability of that feature, but it's definitely there.

2) That, again, is debatable. It's certainly imaginable that the discussion about his article is more interesting to people than the actual article. It's true for this article, too - we're discussing it here, not over on his site.

3) There's no accounting for taste.

Going from there to "Google+ is a bad service" at least deserves a "for Jon Mitchell" qualifier. "is going to mess up the Internet" is pure link bait.

"Have fun flaming, +Friends" at the closing of an article makes it pretty clear he's not really interested in any discussion anyways.
From what little I understand, you're absolutely right. Brain plasticity is simply your brain's potential to make lasting changes in its own physical structure.

The study cited by tokenadult says: "Fluoxetine treatment increased synaptic plasticity.. acted through local brain-derived neurotrophic factor." Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is a protein that facilitates plasticity, and there are a number of natural methods for boosting production of BDNF:

eat less; eat even less; fast once in a while; exercise regularly; eat turmeric; eat fish (or take a DHA supplement); do stuff with your brain.

I wish I had studies top of mind to cite, but most of this is summarized in a book called Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Englightenment (written by a neuroanatomist and a shaman). I read it after going on a 10-day Vipassana retreat and thinking that meditation is noninvasive neurosurgery. Effects differ depending on the style of meditation, but they all strengthen a fundamental pattern of brain activity, be it attentional control, physical awareness, emotional nonreactivity, compassion, etc, and there's plenty of studies documenting the neuroanatomical changes that result.

If you're interested in brain plasticity, look up Michael Merzenich, the UCSF research who coined the term neuroplasticity, on YouTube or TED.
Well, I (of course) cannot speak for the general google using population, but the few times I have ever googled santorum it has been to show people the gag results.
Well put, sir. tl;dr accepted.
Is Joe Biden going to be our interim President before the end of this year?
Web Sceneries: landscape photography of web pages in Firefox Tilt
Privacy is important. But why not just avoid keeping weird stuff on your phone? Keep it somewhere else. Or say, "hold on let me log out of my bank app" or something.
The "two PINs" idea would also be great for when a police officer pulls you over and asks you to hand over and unlock your phone. With the proper encryption you could even have plausible deniability.
Why would the austerity of current support hinder his lobbying efforts for his improved version? If compatibility is a problem, you can just run comments before flag day through the old code. Or write a converter.
"SOPA is the Great Wall of America"

"SOPA is Internet Mutilation"
I suppose that depends on what you mean by heavy sprint. 3-months long is excessive and burnt me out, but 1 month is not so bad. I totally disagree that it should be a once in a lifetime of a company type event to do a month long sprint. Many companies have a couple of major events a year that present an opportunity to make a big splash. You either take advantage of them, or let others pass you by.

It can kill morale depending on how it's treated, and how the company culture rewards. Just because you choose to meet a goal as a team that requires more than average number of hours put in for 4 weeks does not mean everybody is being dragged along. What does upset the folks doing the heavy lifting is when requirements get added at the last minute with "oh, can we please please just have this one more thing? It would be so awesome" from upper management. That's pure bullshit, and tends to rip apart morale above anything else.
It's a well known fact that Starbucks buy cheaper coffee than say a Tim Hortons.
Wow.. Prozac homestays.
Some criticisms on style:

- You said "you know" reflexively while she asked questions.

- You look young. The cool hair (which I like, personally) makes you look even younger.

- You bob your head.

- You mentioned PIPA without defining it. Most people you need to convince won't know what you're talking about.

- Emphasizing "One Million Dollars!" doesn't sound too huge compared with how often we hear "Billion" and "Trillion" thrown around in the news. LouisCK was great, and it's a good point, but I think it doesn't make the point you want to the people who don't already understand.

Some suggestions on content:

Play up "government intervention is bad" even more. The conservative electorate might be tough on crime, but they're also pro-business. Paint SOPA as a government-subsidized bailout intervention evil that is anti-business and taking away our constitutional rights.

People respect Google, and at least go "those people are smart!" even if they don't get the internet. A lot of conservatives got traction against Obamacare by saying "Doctors hate it, and we trust doctors." Play that up: Smart, innovative businesses like Google oppose this government intervention in the free market. We trust Google, etc. etc.

If I had one sentence to suggest it would be:

"SOPA lets the government intervene to take away the right to free speech from trusted businesses like Google that are the future of our economy, just to bail out the movie industry."

That's one hell of an oversimplification, but I think it's enough to perk up ears. This isn't defense spending - conservatives don't necessarily have any love for "Hollywood liberal PETA supporters" (as my mother puts it). In Hollywood versus Google, Google at least has "pro-business" points. The thing to remember is that if they don't get the internet, the won't get your explanation of any nuances.
Totally fair. Bloggers are professional trolls, but, as I think you've conceded (correct me if I'm wrong), I only trolled to get people in the door, and there are substantive arguments waiting when you get there.

I just want to point out that you absolutely can permalink to Disqus comments. The timestamp is the link, just like on Twitter.
Last time I went to China was just before the Olympic Games and security was a little higher - not sure if it's since relaxed. You needed to list an itinerary for the trip and, specifically, accommodation for each night you were there. I, however, was looking to arrive with basically the contents of my pockets and then make things up as I went along. (Turns out my phone died and I was still wandering Shanghai at 2am until I settled on a hotel, but that's a separate matter.)

Solution was to book a couple of the cheapest hostels in a believable travel pattern, get stamped confirmation letters and then cancel them once I had the visa. I think one of the hostels was so cheap and I felt bad about cancelling (even a month out) that for the $4/night cost, I just let them know I wouldn't be showing up but that they could keep the money.

I wonder if arranging cheap accommodation for this purpose is a service they offer in the van?
Awesome slides. Would you happen to have a transcript for it as well. The slides themselves are pretty clear, but there's probably stuff missing.
"If you publicly express an opinion that any particular platform is best for a significant portion of buyers, you’re effectively saying that the people who chose differently were _wrong_."

That's the fallacy right there. "A is better than B" does not imply "B is bad".

But a fanboy, who's gotten his identity and sense of self-worth tangled up with his product choices, has made a tremendous effort to rationalize his purchase of A to the point where he believes B must be bad. Any evidence that B is not bad forces him to rationalize the evidence away.

Two things make it easy to slip into fanboyism about phones. The manufacturers' marketing keeps telling us that owning A will make you one of the cool kids, encouraging us to derive self-worth from the product. We also have to rationalize spending money, perhaps more money than we can afford.

Most of us don't get nearly so emotional about, say, shampoo, because we can easily afford to buy any brand we like or switch brands on a whim.
Hi everybody. Sorry I can't respond to everyone, but this conversation has been very productive, I think. Thanks so much.
Test Driven Infrastructure with Vagrant, Puppet and Guard
Jeff Harris enters year 14 of his self-portrait project
Let me give you an example of 'painful environment,' something many people can probably relate to.

There's a kid. They're outgoing, talk to everyone, and adults constantly tell their parents what a smart kid they have.

Kid grows up a bit, and during puberty is constantly ridiculed in social environments. Eventually the kid withdraws into themselves - a shell of their former, outgoing self.

In their twenties, even though they aren't in the negative environment of getting ridiculed for every single last thing anymore, the mere act of talking to someone new induces feer and anxiety.

They know they need to be more social. That they aren't depresses them. They find alcohol a decent enough social lubricant, but it doesn't work as well as they hoped. So they use more of it. They may add a couple more drugs into the mix - a line of cocaine in the john will help liven them up, surely - and end in a flat-out spiral of drug and alcohol abuse coupled with crippling depression and social anxiety.

Their learned response to the stimulus of the social is emotional pain.

They go on prozac; they go into therapy; the increased brain plasticity helps the therapy hold; their response to social interaction is no longer flight-or-fight.

Get it, now?
I think the only problem here is that Google isn't updating fast enough to reflect an increased interest in Santorum the person.

When you say: I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank.

I am sure this is true today but I think it was definitely not true a month ago, and a year ago the opposite would probably be true. The difference between this and other Google bombs is that people really do the word Santorum in everyday conversation. (Well, perhaps not 'everyday', but definitely in contexts unconnected to Google search results and with the alternate definition of the term in mind.) I would expect that most people searching for "Santorum" before 2011 probably heard the word in that context and are wondering what it means.
This is also why any app that handles sensitive information (including, arguably, the photo and video galleries) on a phone should have at least the _option_ to set an in-app PIN that's required before it opens up.

Lots of folks hand their smartphone to their kids to play games and even if there's nothing sensitive on there, they might have things they don't want deleted like treasured photos and videos.
I concede immediately that I'm oversimplifying the issue. Google doesn't keep the "problem" Santorum result at the top of the SERP simply because they don't like Rick Santorum.

They're also (perhaps mostly) doing it to keep themselves out of the news, since the prevailing meme about that SERP now is "oh well, that's how the Internet works" and the result of a manual intervention would be a flood of news stories about an intervention Google probably doesn't want everyone knowing they do regularly.
> "If someone shoplifts in your store, this bill allows the government to shut down your store."

I like the analogy, but it's off by a mark. "If someone leaves stolen goods in your store, this bill allows the government to shut down your store." would be a closer match, but misses a nuance.

"If someone post a notice advertising stolen goods on the community noticeboard in your store, this bill allows the government to shut down your store." would be even closer, but is a little harder to grok.
So I am basically clueless on how to transfer bits via audio without data loss (doesn't noise corrupt the bits?)

Does anyone have any links or resources on how to do a 'hello world' of audio-based data transfer?
>One Ivy League computer science program only required one course where students actually write code.

Which program is that?
Sales guy and coding hobbyist here.

My snarky answer to this is if a software guy wants to get rid of commissions, he shouldn't complain when I client gives him a mock up in Word.

My serious answer is the problems his sales department had were symptoms of a broken system. Many easy, smaller fixes could have alleviated the boiler-room atmosphere he describes.
I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. In my experience, tablets get shared far more often than phones.
Thanks - that Experian link seems to be what Ive been looking for
This is the thing that got me off OO altogether. Typical OO code is hard to call from the REPL. You have to know what objects to construct before constructing an object that has the method you want to call, which probably requires more objects to be constructed and passed as args, etc. Yet more often than not the function in question is simple enough that it ought to be easy to call without all that baggage. That got me so annoyed that I finally just started making all my functions easy to call from the top level and never looked back. You're right that this leads to better designs.
Watch Beneath The Darkness Online
Watch Beneath The Darkness Online Free camera work is by Massimo Zeri which is edited by Eric Potter. This film is planned to be shown in theaters on January 6, 2012 under Sunset Pictures studio.
There are a lot of people who program in the course of their work in some other profession. Most engineers can hack some Matlab, at least. But the bar is much higher--most engineering professions are at least as intellectually challenging as programming.
Note the that text from this 12/29/2011 politicstoday.biz link is the the same text from the snopes link from 2009.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/occidental.asp
Haven't people suggested this with regards to TrueCrypt's hidden volumes, with "rubber-hose cryptography" being the most common answer, and "yeah, well, prove that this is your REAL phone unlock code" being the second most common.
Because the 'phone' is just a small subset of my iPhone. I would be curious to see my most used apps, but I imagine the phone app would be about an 11, with skype at 10.
Nobody should be asked brainteasers in a Google engineering interview. I have no idea where those bogus "20 Google interview questions" lists with stupid puzzles come from. But really the interviews are supposed to cover things like coding, algorithms, and systems design.
Why English is hard to learn
If timezones aren't good enough to display the time, what good are they? If Mexico is calling PST/PDT a different time than everyone else, shouldn't they be using new values instead?
Very interesting until the middle, then he talks just about aging simulation and not about a solution.
Kodak to file for bankruptcy
I did a similar one (a markdown/stickum mashup) a few weekends ago. - http://ronin.io/md

My interface isn't nearly as friendly or clean. But tab indention works, so I got that going for me at least.
Amazing face substitution software
Most likely, but they partnered with a (what looks like) fashion magazine for the images.
Sick of emacs buffer names like init.py〈1〉, init.py〈2〉? There's a quick fix.
You'd think that people doing a verbatim repost of _anything_ would at least have the decency to put the whole text into a search engine.

The world needs "Internet Duplicate Detection!" ;)
ESA Officially Supports SOPA, VGVN Members Left In The Cold
It still ranks 3rd for the term 'jew', right after 'jew watch', which I assume is a hate site.
> But why not just avoid keeping weird stuff on your phone? Keep it somewhere else.

My girlfriend texting me about medical issues isn't "weird", but I still don't want my mom to read it if I happen to hand him my phone for a few minutes.

My mom emailing me photos of my childhood self taking a bath isn't weird, but I wouldn't want my friends to see them.

My friend asking me if I'll be showing up to the Atheist Association meetup isn't weird, but I wouldn't necessarily want my boss to see the message.
I can't dig up the link, but I recently stumbled across an article that highlighted a start up that was building a robot that would kill weeds (for agricultural purposes), replacing migrant workers.

I agree that not all workers will end up being programmers, but a shift towards automation is inevitable as routine human labor will eventually be too costly and inefficient, regardless of the location. China is already starting to show signs of rising labor costs due to an improving economy and a shortage of labor. I would bet against human labor in the long run, as counting on lax labor laws and a population of workers who are willing to tolerate abject poverty as a method for keeping production costs down seems like an unsustainable solution.