skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially.

That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing.

Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem like good things to me.

As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out).

To me this seems to be another of these "bubble" issues.

Take Apple as an example of that. Every time they release a new (iPhone, iPad, whatever) you'll see people in the tech bubble (largely of SF and NYC) dig up tired old cliches like "its evolutionary not revolutionary" (seriously, I'm so sick of hearing that phrase) and it's "not the upgrade I was hoping for". On HN you'll find people who are still somehow shocked that you can't out-of-the-box sideload a bootloader onto an iPhone (or whatever).

Consumers (outside the bubble) however love these new products. Just look at Apple's 2011Q4 results, which are simply astounding. Thing is, that happens every time and yet the same old jaded "bubblistas" meet every new release with the same mix of lukewarm cliches, disappointment and derision.

I see this as much the same way. All of this is about (IMHO) improving the user experience. You don't have to look very far to see accounts from users who love these new features.

If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing?

EDIT: as far as including Twitter/FB goes, Eric Schmidt addressed this [1]:

> I countered that Google seemed to have all the permission it needed, in that they’re not blocked from crawling pages.

> “That’s your opinion,” Schmidt said, then joked: “If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.”

> I pushed back that both have effectively given those letters since their robots.txt files — a method of blocking search engines — weren’t telling Google to go away.

> “That’s your interpretation of their policies,” Schmidt said.

[1]: http://marketingland.com/schmidt-google-not-favored-happy-to...
Right? Apparently they can't even agree on whether or not they want caps or dashes in their organization names.
How To Set Up a Computer is Not a Difficult Task
> it is generally better for organizations that are going to have charitable aims to be directly accountable, whether via the democratic process or the donation process.

Aren't these "benefit corporations" also ultimately accountable to shareholders who invested money in them? Although social benefits are more difficult to measure than profits and dividends, that doesn't change the fact that whoever pays the bills will have an incentive to ensure that the corporation does what they think it should do. In fact, shareholders might be in a better position to hold managers accountable than donors to a non-profit are.
Hacker menargetkan Saudi Israel bursa saham dan operator Nasional udara
Saudi maya Hacker OxOmar menyerang lagi pada hari Senin. Kali ini mengganggu situs-situs Israel bursa saham dan operator Nasional udara. Minggu lalu ia telah membocorkan informasi pribadi tentang lebih dari 400.000 Israel. Perusahaan kartu kredit mengatakan sekitar 25.000 angka, beberapa dari mereka berakhir, telah diposting . Kelompok pro-Palestina adalah merujuk pada dirinya sebagai " mimpi buruk . "

Situs El Al jatuh, tetapi pejabat di pembawa bendera Israel tidak akan mengkonfirmasi atau membantah insiden itu pekerjaan hacker. Seseorang yang akrab dengan situasi di El Al Israel Airlines mengatakan pembawa menurunkan situsnya Senin setelah jaringan hacker diduga Saudi di balik serangan sebelumnya memperingatkan bahwa kedua situs akan menjadi sasaran.

" Ada serangan oleh hacker pada rute akses ke situs (Tase). kegiatan perdagangan Bursa saham adalah operasi normal , "kata Orna Goren, wakil manajer pemasaran pertukaran dan unit komunikasi.
Setelah media Israel berlari apa yang mereka digambarkan sebagai wawancara yang dilakukan dengan OxOmar melalui email, surat kabar Haaretz mengatakan seorang blogger telah melacak hacker bawah dan menyatakan dia adalah warga negara 19-tahun dari Uni Emirat Arab belajar dan bekerja di Meksiko.
AFP: Google revising privacy policies, data use
>"I can't imagine they will change that, or they will see a mass exodus from their platform."

I have observed people tend to accept vendor lock in. Particularly when the migration costs are high.

Likewise, the cost of lost enterprise accounts would have to offset the revenue gained from mining the data...assuming of course that Google isn't already mining enterprise data.
The data liberation thing is about adding data to Google, or copying the data out of Google so other services can use it. I may be wrong, but I have not seen anything that says you can use it to actually delete the information from Google's servers (if I'm wrong, please show me).
You've taken a nuanced interpretation and condensed it down into a generic, obvious, and uninteresting soundbite.
Cara Hack Password Smadav ~ ZakiR HackeR
While multiple terms definitely incentivize, it also presents the problem of forcing the politicians to begin campaigning for their next term while still in office (quite possibly hindering performance). Maybe the best solution from an economist's prospective would be to leave out the term limits but to somehow boost the popularity of recall elections.
Note that the $125 "gateway" fee is minor compared with the storage/transfer fees themselves - $0.14/GB/month for storage, for example. At that rate, a small 5 TB volume is already $700/month.
Tech blog echo chamber?
its people's hero making ability that inspires people. ignoring a success will not going to help anyone.
KDE releases version 4.8 of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform
I agree with almost everything you say here except:

How is Apple "controlling the tools used to develop for the platform". I am using AppCode for iOS application development and it works just fine.
Definitely a well known phenomenon but I'm glad to see more industry professionals acknowledging it and speaking out.

I think a lot of the industry's professionals are looking for innovation and a way into the future while the industry itself refuses to provide.
I still use Google for Gmail and for a (now abandoned) Google+ profile, but I've switched to Bing for search. The results are "good enough". The benefit is that none of my searches are attached to a personally identifiable account.
Show HN: Binb, a realtime multiplayer musical quiz
Hello guys,
this is my two week project with the aim of learning some node.js
What do you think?
> I'm not looking at messages/interactions/networks/existing groups/friends list. Just the underlying graph of friendships.

Other interactions may give you better signals may increase the accuracy of your system. Cool app!
good advis www.zakir-hacker.blogspot.com
"... or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check."

And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street?

I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice care to the point of death rather than paying for (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation) treatment. Lifespans would be shorter, death quicker but it is IMO a reasonable and far less expensive option.

Nobody really survives cancer although they may die trying. We need to terminate the cancer industry (but maintain cancer research). They are an industry selling pure hope with no significant probability of a cure today. They are a cancer on our economy.
Sarah Palin and machine-translation
Wanted: machine-translation (or text summarization) tool, to convert Sarah Palin quotes into simple prose
Hello, Mr. Chips
An antidote to Daring Fireball's readability issue 
Daring Fireball make your eyes blurry? Me too.

Snowball is here to help. This small bookmarklet makes the background light, the text dark, and makes your eyes happy.
I've been using "GMail for Domains" service for years to filter spam. Can anyone recommend a viable alternative?

I read e-mail in Portable Thunderbird, it's downloaded/uploaded via POP3/SMTP, so I don't have to browse the internet with Google cookies. Also I don't have Google+ account, and I have separate browser to access Analytics and Webmaster tools and AdWords. My main browser clears all cookies at end-of-session except ones from whitelisted domains, so I'm not bothered by the search query spying that much. They can bind search queries to my e-mail account only by the same IP address used in HTTP search and POP3/SMTP mail transfer.

One more question: does Chrome browser (on desktop) have some kind of builtin instance/installation ID it transfers to Google servers every time I connect? I use Firefox, but anyway.
According to glass door, of the people who submitted salaries from Lattice, no one has salary of close to 130k of base income. So she definitely seems like an exception.

It must be awkward though having your co-workers know approximately what you make now. I would be uncomfortable.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Lattice-Engines-Salaries-E31...
>The problem is that everybody feels entitled to a top 10% salary and many would kill for "their fair share" when nowadays even the lower 10% have their basic needs covered and some left for leisure.

Nonsense. Everybody doesn't feel entitled to a top 10% salary: most would be happy with the kind of jobs that were commonplace a few decades ago before globalization enabled the economicly fortunate to sell their fellow citizens out.
Computer Associates auctioning security.com domain with above 1mm reserve
"If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing?"

Sure, everything is harmless until it's not. Just yesterday I was on a conference call that was fairly boring. I was surfing in the background when suddenly I was reminded I didn't have my speakers muted by the sound of a massively loud Dulcolax laxative commercial from some asshat site that started up a video ad automatically. I couldn't shut it down for 7 or 8 seconds while the person talked about being constipated in full earshot of my conference call until I could find the mute button on the unfamiliar phone I was using.
It shows how hostile a dying industry becomes. Looks to me like the RIAA and USPS are in similar situations by the way they're acting.
It's not good for the environment. Why kill more trees with junk mail?
I am trying to imagine ad placement analytics based on commits and projects watched...
Is the state of tech blogging so, so poor or do you just not agree with the conclusions? For instance:

"It must force Chrome and Google+ down the throats of users who are simply looking for a brilliant search engine."

Google just recently started showing Chrome 'faster internet' ads to Firefox users (before it was only displayed to IE users). This blog is a bit over the top especially with claims like "[Google] search engine that’s no better than Bing", but fundamentally I think it's right on the money.
If the alternative does turn out to be unemployment on a massive scale due to automation, the Soviet Union doesn't look so bad in comparison. It's probably not optimal, but at least we know that it works (badly, no doubt, but life went on under the Soviets). I seriously doubt Friedman's idea of sending everyone to college would work at all.
What strikes me the most about this whole debacle is that people have complained for ages that Google doesn't "get" social. Its products have been poorly integrated and incongruent. Then, when Google says "Okay, we're going to integrate the balls off of everything, and provide a single consistent experience across all our products", people pitch a fit. It seems they can't win either way. This is a necessary step in fixing Google's broken approach to social and personalized information.

Personally, I like this direction. I really don't care Google will have the my same data in Picasa and Docs and Gmail. If anything, it's going to mean a better product for me. It's not like Google is suddenly sharing all this data with an external entity - it already had it. It already used it. Now it's just using it across multiple facets rather than limiting it to a single one. I'm just not sure I get the brouhaha. Maybe it's because I already use all those services as a single user, and have wanted better integration between them, so this just fits me better. Maybe I'm just ignorant about the implications. I'm not sure.

I do have to ask, though - if you have an issue with Google's having access to your data, why do you use Google services? As with any web property, if you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.
Some examples of things you've done?
Mobile Wars are Over (and Apple isn’t winning)
If either side is compromised it is difficult to reissue (e.g. if they are undercover in another country).
The beauty of public keys is that they can be revoked and the other side can use your new key without you having to transport/transmit a private key in peril.
This is why I use two different browsers. My main browser, Chrome, is where I'm logged onto my GMail account. I use another browser solely to connect to Facebook so that it doesn't collect my Chrome's site usage data.

Also, I think I've always assumed that everything I've entered in Google Search will be linked to me indefinitely...so...sensitive searches are done in the non-logged in browser.

Of course, there's IP tracking, but I'm not feeling that paranoid yet.
Here's my new free AdSense iPhone app, I hope you guys like it
Even if you carry it yourself then you don't necessarily know if it was used right?
It's too bad that so many career-advice books, essays, and blogs tell job searchers to answer like "D" list candidates.
Mail theft exists. In fact it's one of the leading causes of identity theft.

And computer viruses? Any one ever been delivered anthrax through email?
After being reminded of the "You wouldn't download a car" meme yesterday, I could completely see this becoming the next one.
Gee, it's not like you can search for [tptacek dnssec] in the search bar down there and see me howling at the moon for years about how likely this stuff is to happen.

(http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=tptace...)

When an SSL certificate fails to validate, your browser is prepared to kick off a whole UI state machine to allow you to decide whether to visit the site or not. That's because HTTP, at least as used by browsers, is an application-layer protocol.

DNS is an infrastructure protocol. It's like a dial tone; it's there or it isn't. Programs are built on the assumption that if DNS isn't working, either the site doesn't exist, or your Internet connection is misconfigured.

Protocols like DNSSEC work on the faulty assumption that trust is a binary thing; either a site's name is good or it isn't. In fact, trust is the product of a series of policy decisions. It's something that needs to be expressed at the application layer. DNS is simply the wrong place to host security policy.
Nokia 603 Review and price in India..
The Geography of Venture Capital -- Silicon Valley vs New York vs Boston
Do you guys have a donation link somewhere? I'm using TileMill for a small project and The smallest Mapbox hosting is way overkill. I wouldn't mind donating some money as it's an awesome product and TileMill is wonderful!

Edit: The initial dataset is huge but the implemented map is only a small subset.
Of course, that's be ideal, but it would take longer to compute the weights. The idea here was really to show that just by looking at friendships it's possible to find accurate results.
Looks like Apple has a monopoly on the selling a lot of stuff category.
This is pretty obvious stuff.
I'm glad Wil Wheaton is so vocal about his distain for the industry practices. He holds a lot of respect in many "geek's" minds and is a good spokesperson for many people to get behind. If enough people start raising questions then hopefully we can see more public debate regarding these practices from the general public.
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The true answer to this is more involved than a simple comment can treat with justice.

But... the dysfunction in our political system has been getting more and more noticeable over the last several years. Yes, it is ass backwards and it has never been this bad before. The more notice that it receives, the more people will begin to get involved, the better chance we have of changing how it works.
It's because until the Obama administration starts implementing the treaty or brings it to congress, none of the rules have actually been broken. The constitution allows the president to sign any treaty he wants. After that, it needs to be brought to congress. Historically, presidents have signed treaties whenever they thought it was necessary, regardless of whether or not it would actually get ratified.

For example, Woodrow Wilson's signature is on the Treaty of Versailles(http://foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-23.html), but congress never ratified it.
AWS Storage Gateway a Bridge to Cloud for Important, But Not Too Important, Data
As far as I understand it (which isn't too far), quantum bits are physical things. So only the person who has the qubits can see the key exchange. As long as the qubits are physically safe in the hands of the person you want to talk to (admittedly a big if), there can't be a MITM attack.
Its interesting that he wrote this post praising Apple, but seems to have missed completely what Apple's guiding principle is.

In fact, Apple's guiding principle is almost a secret to hear the way many people talk about them, but it shouldn't be.

Apple's guiding principle is to do right by the customer. That's it.

For instance:
"Apple seeks to control the whole stack and eliminate competition at every layer - from controlling the apps that can be installed, to restricting expansion and peripherals, to controlling the tools used to develop for the platform."

If you want to see Apple as evil, its very easy to interpret them doing right by the customer as somehow having nefarious intent.

They want to control what apps can be installed simply to keep out malware and porn, so that they can do right by their customers who don't want malware and the parents who don't want porn apps. (They leave Safari open and give it effectively native app capabilities, for people who want to deliver porn. They even do right by that customer, though its a shame that so few people make use of this completely open and unregulated way to install apps on iOS devices. In fact, many people don't seem to know that you can have apps written in javascript, download them from the web, save them on the device and run them offline.)

Apple doesn't want to restrict expansion and peripherals. Far from it. For iOS devices they've created an API and a completely reasonable licensing agreement so that you can make your peripherals for iOS to do just about anything you want-- except harm the device. Again, they do right by the customer by having a very vibrant and active peripheral and accessory market-- which they do, and its quite massive-- and they do right by the customer by ensuring these devices work together. Its the same as WiFi or any other branded protocol with a licensing scheme that requires interoperability.

As for "controlling the tools used to develop for their platform", that one simply isn't true. Unity Technologies makes a development tool to build 3D games for the platform. Coronoa makes a flash like platform to develop apps for iOS. In both cases, these third party products simply use Xcode for the code signing or compilation steps. I don't see Apple stopping anyone from making tools to develop for their platform, and I certainly can't fault Apple for providing free tools to develop for their platform.

Of course, when you're large and successful, you'll naturally attract people who don't like you for whatever reason.

But, by definition, doing right by your customer means putting the customer first. That doesn't mean compromising that principle in order to comply with the beliefs of non-customers. This is why Apple doesn't ship Windows as their core operating system, for instance. Apple chose to ship an operating system that is better for their customers, to the continued derision of non-customers who claim that Windows is the industry standard (not, notably, that it is actually better.)

It is gratifying to see a company win in the marketplace by sticking to a principle like this.
HyperCard was wonderful. It whet my appetite for programming when I was in third grade. The verbose syntax gave me the ability to open other people's stacks and learn the fundamentals of imperative programming by example. Now I have a CS degree under my belt, have had great jobs for the past six years (it's been that long already?), and feel no way compromised by having originally cut my teeth on a toy language.

I think the author is wrong here. It should be something like this: please learn to code, but just keep in mind that there is always room to improve your craft. I've seen a lot of novice programmers who cling to the one language they know and guard their One True Language jealously. Just don't be that guy, keep moving and keep learning, and you'll be fine.
You might try adding a little more context. Being open about projects helps customers have confidence in you. Transparency sells =)
This is a project that I would like to see succeed. Emacs is my most important tool and the best improvement I can think for it to have is to have a better Lisp behind it. Threads, better error handling, tail-recursion, all would be huge wins.
Sales numbers by Apple are hard, cold, verifyable numbers.

"Activations" is still a term that has no clear definition. Google has hinted at what they are (and are not), but even their meaning to Google in terms of the bottom-line are unclear.

Android is no doubt a phenomenon that is sweeping the mobile world... how does Google profit or succeed from this?
> Trackpads are very common. Index finger pointing sticks are not. And they are much more effective than trackpads.

Meh. Some people love them. Some people hate them. Most people who have both the nub and a trackpad seem to use the trackpad. I personally find that modern trackpads are far more usable, even ignoring the benefits of multi-touch and the improvements of the new clickpads.

HCI is moving toward direct interaction. The nub is the opposite direction. Touching the screen can provide something very close direct interaction. A trackpad or mouse adds a later of abstraction, as your motions are not directly on the screen, but instead translated to the screen. The mouse cursor becomes a proxy for your finger. The nub adds yet another layer of indirection, as your actions are reduced to prodding a tiny joystick. No longer is the mouse cursor a proxy for your finger, because it does not move with your finger.
I don't think GitHub has the cheddar to acquire Google.
Totally agree. Even though I went through the Agile book previously, I went through half of Hartl's tutorial primarily to learn how to use Rails with Git, Heroku, and TDD.
Good one.. Laziness, hubris and impatience come to mind.