skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"PGP is not in widespread use."

Depends on what industry/domain you work in. The reason PGP isn't more widely used is: It's expensive, it's complex to the typical "user" and businesses don't want to invest in real PKI even if they need it. (People are lazy and cheap...)

Add in the factor that most developers don't have the chops to figure out and implement nicer software based on the mess that is GPG. You have a few serious tools wrapping it used in ETL applications and ilk like Gpg4Win and the Bouncy Castle libraries.
> If you don't want it, don't use Gmail.

I'm pretty sure that is exactly the point Microsoft are making with this campaign.

They are using the fact you can't opt out of a "feature" as an excuse to opt out of a "product".

They are leveraging peoples perception of 'Privacy' to do that.

Really do you think buying an Audi will mean you can kiss the girl at Prom? Or by wearing Calvin Klein you'll look amazing from every angle? ... No, Ads lie all the time... Chrome isn't technically "Faster" but they still run ads that say as much...
Microsoft makes Microsoft look bad, unfortunately for them. But it seems to be in their company's DNA to spread FUD about others. It's like crack to them.
Ghostery blocks everything third-party, CSS or JS.
Well, there goes my weekend.
Also:

"Chance favours the connected mind." -- Steven Johnson

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...
> That is incorrect.

It looks correct to me, you're both saying the same thing. It's not the site's frontend developer, it's the browser's, but it's for the same reason.
Offhand, I can't think of anything that algorithmic spam removal can do to compromise my privacy. I don't have to be careful around spam removal.

Targeted ads, on the other hand, can provide a lot of information to the advertiser if I respond to the ad. If targeted advertising is showing up in my email, I have to make sure that I do not respond to the ads. Essentially, a targeted ad is a little privacy land mine that I can easily step on if I don't keep my guard up.
Spatial Smearing
So why not move? Ideally, you should compete on a global market. Even an entry level programmer from a good university can do better than that in Beijing.
You are conflating two different issues, "I don't like seeing ads" and "algorithms reading my mail is a privacy breach". If you don't like seeing ads, I think even Gmail themselves would tell you not to use Gmail. But it's not a breach of privacy!

Or are you trolling?
The people who maintain this are volunteers right? If so there shouldn't be too much blame.

There isn't enough information. I would have thought sometime between June and January someone would have looked to see if back ups were being made and if the size of the back ups were consistent with the amount of data stored on the website even if they weren't properly checking that back ups were valid.

I would expect from this someone has now been assigned to checking that regular back ups are stored and are correct. I have been a part of a few communities were back ups were supposedly being taken but no one was given the responsibility for ensuring they were correct or even actually being made. Once or twice a moderator rampage has lead to a lot of lost data. I would expect this is one of the key lessons they have learned from this.
Yeah there's not much of a startup community down here in York, it is much nicer than Newcastle but also more expensive on average. We really need a HN meetup in the north(ish) east.
Personalized ads is not an issue.

Excessive and invasive email scanning and analysis is.

It's really a bait-n-switch technique. They are substituting a bigger and more important issue with something tactile but of a superficial value. "Your tumor hurts? We have a Tylenol for that."
The suckiest aspect of what they're doing is the target.

GW are sending their nastygrams to a novelist. And not a best-seller, but a low-budget self-published author who's been donating a chunk of the proceeds to veterans' charities: someone without a sufficiently deep pocket to fund a legal defense.

If GW's lawyers really had the power of their convictions they'd have started by targeting James Cameron over "Avatar". After all, which infringement is more damaging to their brand -- an obscure self-pub serial with maybe a couple of thousand readers, or a big budget movie franchise that cost a billion dollars to make and presumably (Hollywood accounting practices aside) made the backers a profit?
I've never accidentally clicked on an ad, I think they're pretty out of the way in that regard. If that's what worries you, sure. Otherwise, the fact that you want to respond to the ad can provide a lot of information to the advertiser. If you're worried about that, just don't respond.
Check those dates more closely ;)

It was exactly 31 days later, but still on a reasonable schedule for a monthly backup. Either the backups where disabled or the staff don't trust the backups they do have (though that seems unlikely, given that it would allow them to recover the content offline without having to execute any of the backing code)
This is why write-only backups aren't just a good idea; like gravity, it's the law. I know funding for these things are on a shoestring budget, but there should have been an external service to ensure backups are being made on a regular basis. Or else, you don't know something's wrong until something's really, really wrong.
I'd love to see the followup where she discovers Google's algorithm is smarter than it looks, and actually her husband has a huge gambling problem and has completely blown their life savings.
I won't move without a solid offer first. (and not for 50k).

I have things to take care here, and if I ever move, I need to be stable enough and have money enough to return here sometimes to see how things are going.

I cannot just go adventuring and move without a chance of getting a job first.
there are individual user groups as well.

NEBytes for Microsoft: http://www.nebytes.net/

Ruby NorthEast: http://rubynortheast.com

PhP NorthEast: http://phpne.org.uk/

Ask your profs when you get back to Uni. I found out about these by chatting with a Newcastle Uni grad student.

They tend to help each other out so if you follow them on twitter, you'll get info on what's going on.
Saying that chrome is "faster" is one thing.

Saying that IE is "slower" is another.

Likewise Microsoft could have made a ad that showed how they protect your privacy, instead of pointing how their biggest competitor don't.
color spent "only" $350,000 on color.com so $10 million seems to be bit high for milk.com. On the other hand i totally understand the guy: He doesn't need the money too badly so why would he sell? Also domain prices are only going up so it is a good long term strategy to hold onto it
I very much disagree with your claim that invoices don't apply to SaaS apps.

Without an invoice being issued, it's a pain for my company to account for handing over money to you. In fact, it's enough of a pain that I won't use any SaaS app - or company for that matter! - that doesn't issue invoices.

I've also had people contact me, asking to pay on an invoice basis. I generally only do so for annual subscriptions, but doing so has brought in extra money I'd otherwise have missed out on. When you have a system that automatically generates invoices, it's not much of a pain to do so.
>fonts can help readability

Yes, this is true. But it seems that many custom fonts are not designed for being rendered in a browser.

Recently, I have seen pages using fonts which look blurred, fuzzy or have a weird shape. These fonts are used for the main content (copy text). There must be people who notice that this is hard to read, but nobody seems to say anything. Some days ago I was told that "it looks expensive".

I am also affected by occasional browser and OS freezing due to webfonts. The freezing may last for an eternity (subjective) and is accompanied by an intense feeling that I have lost control. A user experience can't be worse.
Can someone summarize? All I got out of it is "you should be excited because, even though it's nearly insignificant, it's one more data point in some statistical distribution we're trying to sample more of".

I'm not sure how "it's not very exciting, but we're doing it for a greater, also-not-very-exciting purpose" should excite me.
Machine code monitor on the Apple ][+...had to calculate jump offsets in my head.
if facebook has taught us anything then it's the fact that most people don't really care about privacy. you are wasting your advertising money again, microsoft!
Why do you hate them? I love them.
I had exactly this issue at a well known British telecommunications company, I had a personality clash with my (newly promoted) manager and leaving was impossible because the manager did not want to see a diminished headcount. I manouevered myself out by working almost all of my time on some other manager's project and it got to the point where the argument that I may as well report to, and be appraised by this other manager was unarguable.
Whatever they think will work for them. It's just not striking a chord with the HN audience, clearly. I find it difficult to believe that it would strike a chord with any large audiences, but perhaps their focus groups say otherwise.

For me the Scroogle site gives off the same sort of vibe that a conspiracy theory site does. It doesn't look like it came out of Microsoft. Perhaps it's not meant to. Perhaps they want it to look like a grassroots movement against Google. In the end everyone sees the Outlook logo, though. Then it feels a little deceptive.
RequestPolicy for Firefox blocks all requests to other domains. I sometimes think it should do sub-domains too. When you use this you will see just how many assets websites load from or place elsewhere.
Even since when Microsoft was good at common sense?

Microsoft is good in getting sales, not common sense.

As you said, privacy to them is a strategy, not something that is really important or part of the company culture.
When working freelance I bill by the hour, but for the purposes of creating time estimates for clients, I consider a workday as 6 hours.
However, there is prior art for "Avatar" in hinduism.
Et si le Galaxy S4 était présenté le 15 mars?
custom fonts shouldn't be used for body copy?

Shouldn't technology be bending to our will? Not our will to technology?
I hope that Microsoft does succeed in making privacy a competitive differentiator, but I feel they lack tact and common sense in many cases..

There is no love lost between them, and IMO Microsoft will get some traction because Google is desperate to increase revenue and keep their PE at over 20.

Their shopping is 100% ads and probably 90% of most transactional query pages are ads. Search for a commercial item and you are greeted by so many that "unbiased" search is drowned out. Google has ruined their product in search of short term profit thanks to Larry Page.
"gpg is hands down the better way for mortals..."

Snort! How many clients/friends/coworkers have you had to explain PGP, GPG, public keys or just compressing a file with a password to?

For us semi-interested cypto/security aware geeks, it's not difficult. Easier than learning the details about git or picking up Erlang. But for the normal user/client/manager it's like speaking Latin or the understanding Alchemy economics in Skyrim. PKI/GPG is one of those things that falls outside of their give-a-shit enough to understand circle.
Didn't The Register do one called Salmon Days too?
This site suffers many ailments, but I think the biggest problem is that the examples are not very compelling. They all amount to Google's contextual ad algorithm not being perfect and getting the context a bit wrong. The (supposedly devastating) effect of that is that if you bother to read the ads, the ad won't be relevant like it's supposed to be.

It feels like this initiative came top-down at Microsoft, probably starting with Ballmer's quote about "Google reading your email." I wonder whether Ballmer has even used email. It feels as though they're fighting an imagined problem that doesn't end up being much of an issue in practice.
I think you're pretty close to it. The last line seems a reasonable summary though:

>"Just finding one large prime number is a fun puzzle to have solved, but it doesn't say anything basic about how the world works. The patterns behind the primes, however, both proven patterns and ones only suspected, are the lens through which humanity can apprehend deep and unfamiliar truths about how reality is structured." //
Show HN: Warble Alerts (Google Alerts for Twitter)
10,000 employees all making over $85,000? Where do I apply?
It gets better and better: "We will also enable HTTPS access to the wiki to further enhance security and avoid having to send clear text passwords over the network in order to log in to the wikis."

Wait, what? They did send the login passwords as clear text up until now? So even if the logs weren't deleted there is a probability that the original attacker would have used a stolen account.
Why this guy hacked his Kindle to email Jeff Bezos
I see a lot of comments quoting 6 hour days etc. I work for very large (fortune 100) clients onsite and even though I bill daily, I don't really have a lot of control over number of hours especially less than 8. Sure, there are days when I can leave early or there are days when I work 10-11 hours, but it really depends on your clients at the end of the day.

In general, for me, it has been 9-10 hours for a day of work if I bill daily. Of course, I ensure that my price accommodates that (I usually multiply my hourly rate by 10). So YMMV.
I'm not conflating anything, I'm pointing our privacy was just a vehicle that was being used to deliver a message, and that message is valid:

"If you don't want gmail splashing ads all over your messages, switch to outlook."

No need to be a jerk about it and accuse me of trolling.
Right, that was where I got my summary from too, I just wanted to know if I missed something and am being too critical. Thanks for the clarification!
This is definitely not the best way to base a marketing campaign on privacy issues.

That said consumer products are traditionally ad supported, and regular consumer appear to tolerate it, mostly.

Internet advertising is quite unlike TV or print advertising though, and consumers are definitely not sufficiently informed of how much they're being tracked, particularly by products of companies like Google and Facebook, that live on advertising in one way or another.

Google Web Analytics (reportedly used on half of the websites on the net) and the "like", "tweet" and "+1" buttons are arguably much more likely to track your interests than GMail, even if you have never signed up for a single Google, Twitter or Facebook service. My guess is the creatives who build the campaign either had no idea or didn't know how to communicate it in a personified way, which has more emotional impact.

So Microsoft's campaign sucks, and I have a fundamental anti-Microsoft bias that stems from their despicable business conduct in the 80s and 90s, but Google isn't any better these days, Schmidt's comments on the "creepy line" make me shudder. Perhaps it can be a good starting point for discussing privacy issues.

Privacy shouldn't be a competitive advantage, it should be a sacred right of anybody who has children or financial/health/private issues.
TOP 10 bizarre programming languages
I would have thought that the primary users of Office are the corporate world. Large companies use Windows, and will continue to use Windows for at least the next decade. Fashionable development may have mind share, but corporate practice isn't particularly fashionable. Corporate licenses must make up a huge proportion of office income.

Apple's made no real moves to become more corporate friendly in the desktop space (and things like their recent blocking of Java definitely won't help them) and Linux on the corporate desktop is miles away from adoption (some public bodies which did adopt it have moved back to Windows).

People talk about the new era of tablet computing, but tablets are pretty much useless for a lot of typing-heavy work. Perhaps eventually a descendant of the tablet (perhaps something like the chromebook) will start to dislodge windows for lighter-weight corporate usage, but I believe it'll be a long time coming. Most large companies have piles of weird internal web-based tools which can't deal with touch, perhaps run on Java or Flash or depend on IE6 technologies, and the slow and cumbersome process of replacing them will take an age.
If anyone doubts that this is anything other than a cynical PR attack do consider the source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battl...

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-03/did-mark-pen...

And are we to conclude that Microsoft doesn't provide spam/scam protection as we are led to believe that they don't scan email contents?! when they use terminology that suggests human intervention they lose all credibility.

It’s also pathetic how increasingly they mention Google in their PR/marketing campaigns, it’s as if they believe it’s the only way for them to remain relevant.
> I'm pointing our privacy was just a vehicle that was being used to deliver a message, and that message is valid

The vehicle is not, though. There is no issue of privacy. They might as well have said "Gmail kills babies, switch to outlook", it's exactly as true (which is, to say, not at all).
Try to move away from the PC analogy. Imagine a 30" display, running iPad applications. Your input consists of the exact same gestures, but now in the air instead of touching the screen.

Painting, drum-machines, games and many more applications come to mind. DJs moving from turning knobs on impenetrable devices to conducting a live mix on a huge ass screen? Yes, please.
This. It is always a good idea to invoice even if you are charging for a SAAS app on monthly basis. Sure it might sound like an overkill for very small SAAS apps or businesses, but invoicing is a good idea in terms of record keeping which will help accounting.
A lot of this can also be alleviated by being smart about using a web app's login screen to preload resources that will be needed on subsequent screens, as well. It's relatively simple to include a bit of JavaScript on the login page to fetch webfonts for the rest of the app before they are needed.

Furthermore, if you use JS to load your webfonts, you can have the site display in "web safe" fonts until your custom fonts are loaded.

Example: https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader#S...
From the article. "It turned out that the Google cache was unusable for the task due to a surge protection on their site."
If he's smart, can he get a job out of this if he decides, today, to self-study as hard as he can and see if he has an aptitude for this kind of thing?

Aptitude for what kind of thing? Since this is HN, I'll guess it means becoming a programmer, but you might also mean non-technical startup partner, other entrepreneur, or something else.

If you are dreaming of being a programmer but have no programming experience, I'd have to wonder what it is you are dreaming. It's not a glamorous profession when seen from the inside, but if you've been programming for a while and love programming enough to want to do it whether you are paid or not (like me), then it makes sense to try to get paid for it. But you'd have to program for a while before you could know that.

I think someone in your position should just find a job, any job that leaves your evenings free--Home Depot is hiring--and try to teach yourself to program every evening after work. Programming is frustrating for quite a while, so don't let it make you feel stupid. Just see if it starts to grow on you eventually or you gradually lose interest. If it grows on you, then start attending in-person meetups, participating in projects online, building things of your own and (later) showing them off, and talking to people you meet about your interest in a programming job somewhere.

Continue building skills, relationships, experience, and your resume by being strategic about gaining experience. If you can live with a Home Depot-level salary, you'll probably find small companies that won't care about your lack of college if you don't care that they don't pay much. Big companies like Google or Apple probably won't even talk to someone without either an impressive degree or an impressive list of professional accomplishments. You can eventually come up with the latter if you really do come to love programming, but until then, a bootstrap strategy suggests starting with programming for free (after work), then programming for a small company (that might not pay much), then specializing your skills a bit into whatever area you do best, then working at better (but not giant) companies, then deciding what to do from there.

If you find that you hate programming, don't despair. My Silicon Valley plumber makes $140/hr and thinks my programming job sounds like having to do math homework all day long for a lifetime (as if that were a bad thing, go figure), while his is driving around saving people and socializing, running his own company, working whatever hours he feels like...and the grime washes off at the end of the day.
Having looked at parts of the Office source I would be extremely surprised if this is anything but a statement to placate OSS devs. The sheer amount of effort required to port Office to Linux would be a few orders of magnitude greater than any sales that could possibly be achieved from Linux users.
They claim all the images are CC:

> We extracted the colors from 10 million Creative Commons images on Flickr
The inverse of IoC is Control
There's more:

http://readwrite.com/2013/01/03/googles-ftc-settlement-is-an...
Allow me to point you guys to a project we did 4 years ago at the Exalead labs that does just that: http://chromatik.labs.exalead.com/
Inline-crypt.el: simple inline AES encryption for emacs
Again this post?

Well, at least this time I can comment.

I must say that Lego in Brazil is ABSURDLY expensive, it is just ridiculous.

And this is very bad, since I love Lego!!

And I miss "Tente" (a Lego clone that existed here, and had some nifty stuff, like wheeled blocks with metal axles)
How do you know Google doesn't create and store an ad profile based on what your email contents usually are? Example: StravosK is likely to have high cholesterol and too much debt.
Not terribly impressed...but it has potential. I like trello better thus far. Toodledo is nice, but doesn't have collaboration.
That says more about WSJ than it says about Ubuntu on mobile...
Roole, a language that compiles to CSS
Roole is a language that compiles to CSS.

It drew many inspirations from other CSS preprocessing languages like Sass, LESS and Stylus.

The most unique feature of Roole is that it has vendor prefixing built-in, so the language stays dead simple yet being able to prefix some extremely complex rules transparently.

Roole is implemented in JavaScript, so it can be run both on the server side (via node.js) or in a browser.
You can pay for gmail and have no ads:

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...
Why? Because they're too busy deciding what ads to serve you. ba dum-bump tish!
Is this functional on windows?
The 'Should I automate it?' Calculator
I misread this as "meatballs". Needless to say, this was not what I was expecting ;-). I like the effect. I wonder what meta-metaballs would look like...
How do I know Microsoft (or any other provider) doesn't? This is a risk you accept when you give your data to third parties.
CoinVisitor
It is not, a spamfilter tries to understand if the message is legitimate, while an ad injection algorithm tries to understand the message to extract your interests from it. One of the algorithms is actually trying to extract privacy relevant information, while in the case of a spamfilter any such data is just coincidental.