skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your work mailing lists only have accurate stats if all of the recipients currently enable loading of images by default.

I don't think you're being sincere in your concern.
Is the FDA smothering medical breakthroughs?
I believe the claim was more of "there is no way for google to know those all point to the same image without following the link."
Alternatively, perhaps it is demonstrating and concentrating the raw bookkeeping costs of capitalism itself.
hasn't Google gotten pretty good at comparing very similar files?

Sure, but they'd have to download the file first. At which point the tracking has succeeded.
Hmm - so we can flood Google's cache by sending an email full of links to procedurally generated images?
Dedup on image data has no bearing on the information advertisers can collect. On image URLs it will cause advertisers to append query strings to image paths. Google can't win that particular arms race, but grabbing the images on email receipt instead of on email viewing neutralises any gains from that win.

One point nobody has raised yet, though, is that there could be valid use-cases for the sneaky stuff people were doing before. Images generated on the server that reflect current (updated or updating) info could be handy. It might even be worth serving different images to different clients based on user-agent strings. I'm skeptical on both counts, though.
Detecting Neo-Nazi Rock with "Nazi Shazam"
Speculation: how many steps away are we from some sort of AdWords for mass emailing?
Narrow Your Focus
Easy: a unique image URL for each recipient. Seems like a huge win for marketers and spammers.
ForkIO and Friends
Ok, but then Google's still making a request to, here, a user-specific URL. The spammer may not know where you are, but they now know that your address exists.
> Thinking about ownership is something that is natural for C++ programmers and will naturally affect design choices

Maybe this is the reason C++ guys always complicate things: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/14/why-do-c-folks-make...

As of Java being not-performant enough: that's why Java is used as one of the most popular language for implementation of modern NoSQL databases systems. Everyone knows performance doesn't matter in databases. ;)
Regardless if you are goofy or not SnapChat enables you to share that goofiness in a whole new way. You wouldn't send the stuff you send on SnapChat in a text or share it on Facebook.

And it's about much more than just being goofy. You share random things from your daily life that are interesting but not interesting enough to be sent in a text or be posted on Facebook.
Interesting how it has become a location for security experts to study Chinese hacking in the wild.
I went to Dharamsala simply because it is an amazing place :)
>>Go on, name one government which isn't.

China? Russia? Iran? Venezuela? Pretty much any country that refuses to do USA bidding is labeled 'enemy of the free world'.
Not too different from them removing actual referrer URLs from Google Analytics.
I think a software developer is more like a carpenter (and sysadmins are like plumbers, and electricians are like devops etc). I assisted in laying a 150m2 hardwood floor from a 40 year old warehouse earlier this year. There were quite a few invisible processes that were required to get the floor right. And it wasn't clear at the start that the job would be successful. But because of a very skilled carpenter, and my dedication in doing lots of prep work for him (cleaning, grading and flipping the boards) we got a result that cost the same as new boards[1] and looks amazing, and will last another half a century at least.

[1] only because I got the boards for wholesale price.
Well Google already crawls a ton of URLs so it's hard to imagine bandwidth being a major issue, right?

Even the same URL can return a different image. That wouldn't be super useful for tracking, but they can only truly dedupe if they read every response.
Is anyone using Cap'n Proto in production? What has your experience been?
Sorry, I'm just more of a cat person myself.
"First to file" refers to a different technical timing issue.

It has always been the case that public use or description of an idea was supposed to make it impossible to get a patent.

That's a dead letter today. The patent office will eventually approve just about anything if you're persistent enough and use a thesaurus to make your claims seem a little different.

For instance, an East Texas jury just awarded a $2 million dollar verdict against NewEgg for using public key encryption in SSL. The patent was applied for in 1989. Whit Diffie, of course, invented and published public key encryption in 1976 and testified at the trial. The judge told the jury that the Patent Office was entitled to the presumption of validity over Mr. Diffie.
Of course, if Google instantly downloaded every single image reference in every email accepted by their MX, there is no longer any useful information in that fact.
Often a maker's product image will be a single image taken at the best angle, hiding properties of the product that are not 'sexy'.

You'd see some really cheap goods but the image doesn't give any information about why it would be so, what trade-offs you're making. A shop can show these details and let people buy a better product if they feel like it, or buy the product without feeling betrayed at delivery.

Should every small shop care about product images ? of course no. Most of then should be OK with maker provided images. Would I value a shop showing even crappy but real images of the products ? Oh yes !
Consider this @codeflo:

1. Google may cache all images in all emails sent to gmail.com instantly and regardless of the existence of the address. This would remove the possibility for marketers to check user timestamp, remove user data from request and hide user email existence.

2. Google does _not_ need to save each image from each unique URL separately, all they need to do is fetch each image and check against an already existing (mega)array of images they've fetched. This greatly reduces storage needed, but doesn't do much for the bandwidth requirement, but they won't care about bandwidth in all their Googleness.

3. The single most important aspect of this change has been omitted in the article, and in your comment: This change completely eliminates the risk of CSRF attacks by spammers and the likes. CSRF attacks are still number 8 on OWASPs list of top 10 attacks.

My three cents ;)
I don't understand how that helps. If I send an email to user_x@gmail.com with an embedded image at http://example.com/my_spam_images/image_for_user_x.jpg and google makes a request to that, I know the mail has been delivered and the user in question exists and is seeing my ads, because a request for image_for_user_x.jpg showed up in my logs.

Now, when user_y also receives my spam and I get a request for image_for_user_y.jpg and I just serve the same file, Google is probably gonna deduplicate them on their cache or cdn or w/e, but only after they've sent me the request and confirmed that someone read my email.

I'm not trying to overload google's storage capability here (lol), I'm just interested in the information leak.
Dirty little secret: ALL "green/clean" power has a negative impact on the local environment. With care you can shave percentages off instead of commandeering the energy source totally to the detriment of the micro-ecosystem relying on it, but don't fall for the attractive implication that there is no environmental impact on natural ecosystems. Seems he minimized the impact on fish by redirecting just a fraction of the stream, about as low-impact as any power source could be.
I wonder if the "12 Days of Bitcoin" on Bloomberg played a tiny part in this. I was watching a segment the other day which had one of the reporters talk about purchasing BTC and mention that Coinbase is very reputable.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/12-days-of-bitcoin-what-do-yo...
I'm planning on making not one, but two new cyrptocurrencies: the Shrute Buck and the Stanley Nickel.
With google's machine learning brain trust, I think they could still do a pretty good job deduping. Maybe not perfect, but I'd bet on them to win an arms race.

Edit: ah, codeflo and EGreg are right. I was just thinking about the task of determining that the images serve the same role in each message (which I'm sure google could do a good job of). But (as they point out) in the "Dear <user>" case they'll still have to show the right image to the right user. Although, as Nacraile and jaxn say, if they load all those images eagerly they'll remove the value of those unique tracking images, and impose a cost on the sender.
It actually should be possible to evaluate the relative performance of two teams without assigning them both the same project.
Take two projects, ask both teams to estimate the time required for both projects. Assign eah project to the team which thought it would be relatively easy, and rate each team against its own estimate, and the other team's estimate. You probably have to do this with more than one project to be confident, but the general idea should be sound.
I feel like I'm missing something, but what is a doge?
It would be really cool if they provided predictable builds, then we could just compare the binary against a self-compiled binary and be sure tehre are no backdoors we can't see in the code.

Sadly even truecrypt fails to provide that. So i guess we'll have to life with binary blobs no one knows what they're really doing.
I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press).

The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority.

TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4#t=38
I'm genuinely curious --- how come nobody thought of doing this (being some kind of platinum member and just putting it out there for all to use) all these years during the fighting about h.264 vs the open web and yada yada?

What Cisco did seems to have put an end to all those debates, and h.264 is available for all, with patents intact, etc.
I suppose... but if he weren't running TrueCrypt as root, there would be no way for another user to discover his recently used documents/files anyways.
Do you think it's a valid criticism then to complain about Ayn Rand's ideas when you haven't been able to comprehend them?
Reminds me I need to get my VAX-11/730 back on the net. Built in 1983. BSD 4.3. No GUI.
Everything Google does benefits big brands. This hurts small business and that has obviously been their goal since their CEO said the Internet is a "cesspool" and favoring big brands is how we're going to clean it up.

Google has a virtual monopoly on paid and organic search. Nothing converts as well as search. They are severely damaging small businesses right and left. It takes dozens of other sources of customers to replace Google.

Allowing Google to take over the Internet as we know it and turn it into their own personal business is dangerous and unethical. That is why since commerce began we have been warned about the dangers of monopolies. They became a monopoly through the media - both owned by the wealthy elite. The media chooses the winners from the products they built in the first place.

If you use Google Shopping to display your products I encourage you to log out of Google and go see what they actually display. You are likely to find that your products never show up for the money keyword phrases even when you specify you only want to see the products in your store. But search on something general and you'll confirm all your products are in their feed. That is an even larger issue than watermarks. Both are symptoms of Google being far too powerful. I first wrote about that in http://growmap.com/farmer-update-google-competitors/

Each major "Borg" site first hands small business a way to make money more easily and then starts taking it away. That is how AdWords worked, and now organic, Google Shopping, Facebook, etc. Expect it with Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat - any entity that is "Borg".

Users handed Google all this power and they can take it away, but first businesses and bloggers must offer them alternatives and make it clear why we need to use something else.

I know that sounds unlikely, but the tide does eventually turn. Wal-mart killed small towns across America - but they are making a comeback now that people realize what it cost them to be obsessed with cheap. We can do the same online, but it won't happen overnight.
Since all of these are fluid and electronic, it wouldn't take very much for someone like bitpay to write a coin-agnostic API that interfaces with multiple cryptocurrencies.
I swear, the term "goddess" is the indicator of the feminine equivalent of machism. Amazing there's no word for that (I'm assuming "feminism" doesn't qualify).
Supposedly having magical powers, he was also not limited by inadequate opt-in contributions from a minority of society.

For all of history this has been a problem too big for charity to solve.
Right. Now show me some widely used OS kernel written in C++. No, not some research thing. Becaue I hear all the time C++ is a system level language, yet it is most widely used to write games and desktop apps, not systems.
the lucky miners pool is already cranking out 98918.00 KH/s!
I don't understand how this is different from the standard RPC model.

A typical RPC in a C++/Java/C# language looks something like this:

var client = EchoClient::Connect("corba://example.com:9000");

var request = new EchoRequest();
request.set_message("hello world!")

var options = new RpcOptions();
options.set_timeout_milliseconds(5000);

Future<EchoResponse> futureResponse = client.Echo(request, options);
EchoResponse response = futureResponse.Wait();

According to the article this is going "back in time", but that's completely silly -- the response is being returned at the point of the Wait() call, which blocks until the server has finished RPC processing.

And of course, languages with proper thread support (e.g. Haskell) don't need to bother with futures at all, because it's easy to spawn a new thread for each request instead of blocking some central main thread.

And it's fairly easy to provide syntactic sugar over this to provide closure-based control flow
I'd imagine that they are going to de-dup the images they proxy which means email marketers need to generate unique images per mail and that means no more 1-pixel tracking images.

A solution would be 1-pixel high tracking lines - a 1 x 128 pixel wide image that encoded 0 and 1 as two RGB colors adjacent to the mail's background color in the visual spectrum so the difference isn't noticeable would encode a sha-1 hash placed in the url.

http://example.com/tracking-line/{hash}.png
...the tracking has succeeded.

Succeeded in what, confirming that Google is still in operation? Please note that Google doesn't even have to confirm the receiving email address is valid in order to get the image.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

> Doge is a slang term for “dog” that is primarily associated with pictures of Shiba Inus (nicknamed “Shibe”) and internal monologue captions on Tumblr. These photos may be photoshopped to change the dog’s face or captioned with interior monologues in Comic Sans font.
You'd never win that race.
Neither software nor architecture are easy to understand.

The wall example is similar to "Write a simple calculator capable of doing addition, substraction, division and multiplication". Anyone can tell if that software works as expected or not and have some idea if it's well done or not.

A similar comparison would be a team designing and building a fully functional house on a budget. In that example it's not easy at all to assert how well they are working, as happens in software development.
It's funny that they went to the trouble of releasing a Mac client when even most of the interesting altcoin currencies neglect to do so.
What's the conversion rate?
Those figures seem to be in the context of a week long initial port. The team lead uses a figure of 50% in the video.
Ask HN: App of the Year?
What app has had the biggest impact for you in 2013?
If no actual http request between the email recipient and the sender happens, doesn't that also imply that the sender has less opportunity to do all the regular http user tracking stuff to associate the browsing session with that email address? That seems vaguely beneficial.
Learning Dvorak: A Year of Frustration.
Well, you shouldn't be running it as root anyway (I'm not sure why you would) -- I just installed it on this laptop (Arch Linux) to test and it works just fine as a normal user.

In addition, this would still not be an issue if 1) you were running it as a normal user and/or 2) DACs were properly set.
> You're ignoring the rest of the research that clearly shows that most Republicans are notorious for being deniers of everything from warming itself, to it being caused by human activity, along with impact denial.

Which doesn't equate to hating the environment, nor does it associate that {non}hatred into profiteering.

> You're actually very much using the tactics of global warming deniers as well. Ignore the vast amount of evidence against your argument, while cherry-picking small sections of data in a desperate attempt to fudge the overall point.

No, I'm pointing out that your initial statement is meritless, while you attempt to dilute the issue completely.

> Once AGAIN, I didn't say ALL republicans.

Okay, fine. Even if MOST Republican agree on climate change, that doesn't mean they hate the environment. Even if it does mean that, it doesn't mean that they're hating the environment because it's unprofitable to do otherwise.

"In fact, in areas where curbside recycling is available, an overwhelming 70 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans say they “always” participate."

That doesn't seem very hateful to me, even though it clearly isn't profitable to either party.

In short, your initial statement was baseless, and shame on you for trying to dilute the issue into plausibility. That isn't how facts work.

This still holds true.

> In short, you took an almost fact, overvalued its importance, devalued the importance of all other possible environmental concerns, and then drawn incorrect conclusions from that, for the purpose of unnecessarily vilifying roughly half the voting population of America.

Edit: Typo which, ironically, was quoted from an original typo I'd made, but which I now can't edit. :-)
Uniquely name at least one image per outgoing email where the image name is tied to a recipient ie a316f002a5d080a613dce89a4ad8f9a9.gif uniquely identifies myemail@gmail.com. If google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email you can also determine open time. If they request and cache all images at the time the email is received regardless of its having been opened then this doesn't work.
Java does support memory manipulation by DirectByteBuffers.
23, Me, and the Right to Misinterpret Probabilities
Depends what you want to base the dynamic information on. If you want it to be time based, I.e the current t stock price then that should still be possible. But say you want it to be based on user location, like the weather in the users location then that won't work because you won't have the users original IP address so you won't be able to roughly detect their location.
So there is something I'm not seeing this being discussed anywhere. What about the idea of only storing one image for any and all recipients? Yes I know that the file name is changed based on recipient to try and track the users viewing of the image. But a simple md5sum of the file will indicate that it is potentially the same file as others being cached. Google would only need to store the references and the one file. Thus, the first person to view the file (per maximum cached time-frame) would indicate a viewing of the file, but subsequent users would never be identified as having viewed the file.

I recognize that there are a couple potential downfalls to this thought.
1) The time/processing it takes to determine the md5 could be problematic on such a large scale.
2) I have no idea how easy it is to change an image to be unique for each user.
LOL, wow, I generally keep up with the memes but this one is new to me.
The amount of money in "blue collar" work is staggering. The guys who game yelp and adwords and who aren't complete nightmares to work with are up to their necks in work. Its easier for me to find a decent pediatrician than a decent plumber in my town.
> In construction there is nothing more valuable than a network of dependable skilled tradesman. General contractors will pay for good help.

Being a software developer who just completed a substantial project (200 metres squared house on a difficult site) this was the most powerful thing I learned on the job. And now I apply it to my own code related problems. Who's in my crew? Where can I get new good crew? How do I manage dealing with cognitive overload by delegating back to other team members etc. I find the similarities/differences between software and construction crews fascinating.
Ask HN: What are cool christmas gifts for work?
We have about 50 to 100 euro's per person to spend on Christmas gifts per person. What do you guys think are cool gifts?
What if google just immediately fetches images for all received messages, regardless of deliverability? They can dedupe wherever possible, but the sender still ends up with no information about whether the message was delivered, much less read.
Just because it's through a proxy doesn't mean identifying information can't be embedded in the URL.... This is used as a "customer read email" callback.
Bricklayer B now takes 2 weeks as well.
Pirate Bay founder is being held in solitary confinement without a warrant
And even if marketers do start customizing images, hasn't Google gotten pretty good at comparing very similar files?

For image tracking pixels, I'd just start returning PNGs of random dimensions with completely random pixel data. Ta-da, unique images that aren't similar at all (unless they wanna start doing wavelet transforms or something).
You send random things in SnapChat since you know it won't clutter your receiver's phone. It enables a whole new type of conversation and I'm sorry if you don't understand that. Fad or not SnapChat is a big part of me and my friends' life right now.
"early tests indicate that they don't actually do that, waiting for the user to click the email to make the request."
Historically, a doge is the ruler of one of a number of Italian city-states. More recently, it has become an Internet meme centering around the Shiba Inu dog breed.
Excellent and what a timing. We have built something more like reddit for data science / analytics. It's a closed beta (we're paranoid not to embarrass ourselves yet). If you guys are interested, please shoot me an email to include you in our, still private, system. No strings attached. We need more testers :)
Sorry, it changed since I last looked. They used to offer a regular subscription with both digital and print, or a cheaper digital only. As you say, now they offer the regular option with both, or a cheaper option with either digital or print.
Even if what they commit does not solve the customer's problem?

I'd rather have a coder spend 3 days thinking and 10 minutes coding with one commit than spend ten minutes thinking and three days coding with 300 commits.

Coder productivity to me is "is the user of the software more effective in their job?"