skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google seems less and less connected to reality the bigger they grow.

It's a shame that the search engine market share isn't split evenly by several different engines. I think it would be beneficent both to the users and website owners. Right now everyone tries to court Google and they seem to do whatever the fuck they want.
The content they do provide is often so bad it is almost embarrassing. Search for "Russia" and you get a completely useless map and a list of random facts. It may be useful to a child researching geography but for me it is just annoying.

I want content that is curated by people who actually understand the subject. I would pay for a search engine designed by someone who understands my industry. The Google algorithm only manages to grab at the low hanging fruit. I am a professional working on real stuff, I want something better than coffee shop suggestions.
That's one way of looking at it, on the other hand, they link to the original URL, passing traffic back to the original source. Most "scraper" sites take the content, wrap it in their own similar outer layer, and try to take ad revenue. E.g. I've seen my own StackOverflow answers copied, word for word, to a scraper site and presented under a made-up name.
Talent on the Move Feb 28, 2014
they still have not said how much of the BTC was stolen and how much was just "lost" by technical incompetence, right

Unfortunately, they are known liars. Right up until days before bankruptcy filing they were telling people they were working to resume withdrawals. It doesn't matter what they say at this point or anything they've said in the past because their words do not in any way reflect reality.

The only thing left is to investigate and if the facts show fraud has occurred, then prosecute.
Thanks for the great reply!
Governments like this should just fuck off and let people take their own risks. Jesus. If you're worried about people getting ripped off, why don't you just run a campaign giving advice on how to choose to spot scams? Why not treat people intelligently? Oh no, sorry, something scary and different that you don't understand? Kill it!

Old dinosaurs.
He's talking about outranking the true original source of the content in search results. You most certainly cannot create your own site that consists only of excerpts from Wikipedia, if you wish to remain on Google's search results. Copyrights are irrelevant to this.

What's bad though, is that Google isn't just lowering the rankings of non-original content pages now (including any kind of legitimate curation sites.) They're marking the entire domains of new curation sites as "pure spam" and de-listing them from Google entirely, and punishing anyone who's linked to them.

This is having the effect of sending a clear message to developers -- stay far away from Google's territory of recommending third party content to people, no matter how you do it.
> IMO, better would be a coding convention to skip curly braces but if and only if...

IMHO, even better and simpler would be a coding convention to not skip curly braces. The end.

(as per last time this was raised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7283767 )

Otherwise, the OP is right on the money; there are multiple levels that would have caught this bug - a layout convention, a linter, a code review, pairing, a unit test, an integration test. Or just a refactor of the big old method for clarity.
previous discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6886834
It would be interesting to know how the whitespace (tabs vs spaces) before the extra goto compares to that on the other goto lines. This might provide a clue as to whether copy/paste was involved.

On the subject of how the extra line appeared in the first place, my take on possible causes are, in order of likelihood:

1. Line added during developer testing to force a fail and not removed.

2. Copy/paste error during construction.

3. Artefact from a bad code merge.

4. Deliberately introduced by NSA mole.

Presumably, one someone goes through the version control history, the who and when will be known - though maybe not publicly. I'm not sure we'll ever know why, though.
Your expectation is common among westerners. It typically goes away within a few days of beginning to work with large amounts of CJK content.

When someone says they accept UTF-8, UCS-2, or any other encoding, my first question is always "Are characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane supported?". There is a long history quite apart from MySQL of the answer to that question being "no", particularly if the project in question originated in the 90s (or even early 2000s).
360 million accounts, 1.25 billion email addresses hacked
Who is deemed to be the scraper? The site that get crawled and indexed first, and ranks better, or the site that ranks well but has sites with scraped content that doesn't rank as well?

Matt is looking for scapers that rank better than the original, basically meaning that they have higher PageRank and more links.
Do yourself a favor and get of town more. Leave the phone behind!
I was thinking throughout the whole thing that it was written by someone whose first language is definitely not English. Beyond that, it was poorly proof-read, poorly laid-out and not coherent.
Answered in the article.
Do you have a source on more info on that?
By having a tl;dr about the actual Wikipedia page, there is no need for the user to click on the link. Following what you're saying, Google as wrapped it in their own layer, and trying to take ad revenue.
Perhaps naïve question but can't see any info on this one. So, the Bitcoin ledger is still intact. 750,000 is quite a lot of Bitcoins to be stolen. Mt.Gox may have been shitty built but they must have kept some logs, account databases, etc. What are the odds of recovering the coins/exchange money that was lost? Technically sounds like pretty good odds? No?
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Activity on GOV.UK
Ah - I see, thanks. I guess that's how they can focus the signal so narrowly to 1 cm or so. Looking at the numbers the wavelengths used for 4G are of the order of 1 ft so you wouldn't get much focus from a single aerial of similar dimensions.
Their goal isn't to turn a profit. Almost all of the profits that they do get go to the federal government.

The member banks earn a 6% dividend on the amount of stock that they own in their regional Federal Reserve Bank. That amount of stock is determined by the member bank's balance sheet. They have to invest that money in the Federal Reserve.
My take: If the money was stolen this year, it was theft by a third party and they were maybe incompetent, however, this is not punishable, see politics.

If it was stolen last year, they made all existing (and even worse: new) costumers since the time of the theft believe that they would get their money back. This is fraud.
Thanks.

I could not find what was new witouth explanation.
Because most of that people will come running to the government institutions when they get ripped off, will complain in the newspapers that the government has allowed this to continue for far too long, etc, etc, etc.

To follow HN's mandatory analogy policy, it's like when PCs had too many options and users were shooting themselves in the foot and then Apple came along and simplified things by removing those options. Some are mad to this day, others love how they aren't caught in difficult situations.
What makes BTC a better investment opportunity for you than, say, some stock in Tesla or Amazon?
Thanks for the info! Seems like a neat system.

Really curious to hear how it's focusing into a 1 cm ball frequencies for which 1/4 wave is significantly larger than that.
Where Time Comes From
This is a good question...I've long since surmised that Google has a set of heuristics for every site that has an API that allows for easy domain-specific ranking. With Wikipedia, you have number of page edits, frequency of page edits, and (to an extent) quality of recent page edits. StackOverflow provides an even easier metric for what's considered high quality, and Google appears to apply its own layer on top of that (and in my non-scientific perception, looking something up by Google is almost always more fruitful on the first search than by going directly to SO)
These are very interesting reads if only for the facts they lay out in detail.
The boneheaded copyright ruling that will unite Hollywood and Silicon Valley
Open your wallet file with a text editor and type in some gibberish and pretend I gave you some. That's probably more worth than bitcoins.
The Sex Pistols as political philosophy!
Curious - Which site is that?
Bitcoin is much more like a speculative bubble than a Ponzi scheme.
At the same time it's quite easy for it to all be gone forever due to good old fashioned incompetence.
Learn your lessons and move on.

Money, bitcoin, value, economy. Its like a game, like chess, sometimes you loose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUcXI2BIUOQ&feature=kp

Aint got no, ive got life, by nina simone.
Update -- wow, a lot of you out there want to help with healthcare.gov, or the government more generally! That's awesome.

I'm trying to reply to each person, but it may take a couple of days. :)

If, for whatever reason, you haven't heard back from me by Monday, please email again!

(The discussion on the 1 in 1000 fact has also been interesting, and I've personally learned a few new facts about the original study and what is controlled for. I'd rather have rigorous analysis of impact for everything, including and especially "good causes," than to give us a free pass.)
Bitcoin hasn't suffered any loss; the exchange rate has been relatively flat all year. People who let a third party hold their assets lost those assets due to that entity's negligence. That can happen to shovels in a storage unit -- the underlying asset is irrelevant to this particular risk.
The issue here isn't that the code is confusing or somehow not "obvious" in function: the issue is that there are numerous ways we can mistype it, especially as we (apparently) are prone to copy/pasting it because it involves typing an additional 30 keystrokes (in this case, assuming "err" and "0"). The goal isn't to "hide complexity", the goal is to "remove things the developer can do wrong".

Trust me: I glance at that code, and it is 100% clear to me in that moment what it is doing and why it is doing it--I have been programming primarily in C/C++ now for almost 20 years--but I simply do not believe you that an experienced C/C++ programmer glances at this code and knows 100% for certain that it is correct. If nothing else, clearly the person who wrote this code screwed it up ;P.

This pattern just lends itself to silly mistakes: you might check the error using the wrong constant (!= 0 when you need == -1; this could even work temporarily!) or think that a function can't return an error when it actually can (the setuid mistake that burned Android, see Rage Against the Cage); by using structured error handling you aren't just "hiding" complexity: you are removing it.

Now, I happily admit (and already did in my original comment) that the macro doesn't solve all of these problems as well as "use a language that provides better abstractions (even C++!)"; however, it does mean that you can't accidentally miss the set of parentheses (assigning the comparison result), double up the equal sign (comparing instead of assigning), add an extra semicolon (breaking the comparison, so as to always "goto fail;"), copy/paste the boilerplate incorrectly (which you might have even done in a misguided attempt to avoid the previous errors ;P) leaving you with a second copy of "goto fail;" (as the developer here probably did; it might also have been a merge failure: thankfully, that also becomes impossible, as the error check now is naturally part of the same line as the code being checked), or otherwise make any silly "it still compiles, it looks almost identical, but now it doesn't work" errors. That's valuable :/.
How Capitaine Train Is Disrupting Train Ticket Booking Through Engineering
> This is even true for Germany. To form a GmbH here you need to invest at least 25.000 Euros and wait weeks until the paper work gets done.

You only need to pay in half of that though (until your GmbH goes bust with debts, that is). And since 2008 there's a mini-GmbH for 1 euro: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unternehmergesellschaft_%28haf...
yes I meant used cars. I'm the sort of cheap-ass who wouldn't even consider buying a car new.
Indeed. Google is constantly doing things they punish other people for.

A happy DDG user, who still uses !g too often though.
Two questions:

To those who are color blind, how do you overcome color blind in software? Do you guys have software to help changing color on your computer? Should and will Firefox address that kind of problem?

Nightly defaults to the dark theme. I like old white theme. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=947242 why do we choose the dark theme over the white theme? I am not color blind but I use computer typically between 12-18 hours. Who made that decision? Can we make the white theme default again? I honestly don't think the dark theme helps reading. If anything, the dark theme hurts me viewing.
In Spain, if you want to have a side business, you need to register as a sole trader. That also means... guess what... you have to pay for the common sole trader's health insurance, 200€/month. Even if your income from the side project is below 200€. Even if you have no other job and you don't make 200€/month.

With one single rule, they've killed most chances of growing businesses locally.
US Tax Plan Singles Out Makers Of ‘Violent Videogames’
Yep, talk to a CPA. One key issue is you may not have a capital loss, but rather a casualty, which by my read of the flowchart becomes a miscellaneous itemized deduction. Those are limited to 2% of MAGI and I don't believe they carry over. Also, there is a hard cap at $20k for lost deposits. See publication 547. It may be to your advantage to file it under a loss to personal property (form 4648) - the math isn't straightforward for me to work out.

Talk to a CPA. This is the sort of thing they live for.
I'm experimenting with paying someone to do a bit of research for me.

To give some idea I've asked for a list of URLs to documents covering best current practice for suicide prevention in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire; to include national level NHS and NICE guidance, DoH guidance, anything from Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, and anything recognised as excellent from anywhere else in the country. If possible I also want a list of protocols used in schools, care homes, etc.

It's probably something you could risk on MTurk. Perhaps Bountify.com could expand to this kind of simple websearching.

Obvious drawbacks include delay between starting the search and getting the results, and cost, and having to trust some random person to not miss stuff.

I don't know if there's anything similar to "clippings services" either where you'd provide them with list of types of stories you'd want, and they'd read all the newspapers and clip any relevant stories and post them to you.
A currency is only as good as it's exchanges, AFAIK Mtgok was the biggest and most trusted, for me this is a death blow to bitcoin.
In your analogy, there's still competition between Linux and Apple. It's not like a designers union passed a law that no more than 3 parameters per app should be available to users.
I am not clear with taxes, but I will go and consult with a CPA.

Fortunately I did not keep everything in MtGox. If it turns out that I do owe $250k in taxes, I won't be in trouble.

Thanks.
One man's "scrapper" is another man's "aggregator".

How do you think Google would view my site if I wrapped Wikipedia's content, with back link and ran my own ads alongside that content? I would imagine not very positively.

Also, is it okay that a bigger entity scrapes my content just because they send me traffic? You might not want to bite the hand that feeds you, but it still doesn't make it right.
Trello clone on HTML5 localStorage.

But without a way to share a board with someone and have them see it live-update, I don't think it's cloned the most useful part of Trello yet.

Jhey, have you considered rebasing the app on top of Meteor (or even somehow adding Meteor as an optional server-side component, if you care a lot about the JS client-side-only feature)? It would get you all the way to a Trello clone with regard to persistence without much extra work.

Thanks for working on this -- the atom.io launch has made me realize how important it is that our core tools are open source and able to be improved, and Trello is on its way to being one of those core tools.
Somebody said it. There are literally zero reasons for a programming language to not be case insensitive by default. Unicode shouldn't be a problem either, as long as there is a predetermined method of upcasing/downcasing everything.
I would've preferred to let the banks fail in 2008, short-term economic consequences be damned. That experiment is now playing out in the unregulated crypto-economy. (I've got my popcorn.)
I don't code in Comic Sans. I code in whatever the default font is for my editor.

As an experiment, I just tried shifting the editor's font to Comic Sans and writing some code. Did really feel any different to me. Obviously it didn't change any unit tests, but I didn't feel any subjective differences, either.

Oddly enough, since I didn't write down what the default font was, I'll probably be coding in Comic Sans for the foreseeable future. If this becomes an issue, I guess that I'll switch fonts, but, at the moment, I still don't understand what the big deal is.

For the record, I'm not trying to be snarky. I was really hoping that switching my editor to comic sans would enlighten me on the difference between using a "good" font and a "bad" font, but I still don't see it.
Which was my point...
> But they were also dumb enough not to realize they were getting mugged, or so they claim.

This is what I don't get, and which makes it hard to trust that they indeed "lost" this many coins. At the very least one would expect that for a company like this, they would regularly reconcile what the blockchain states the content of the wallets they control is, and what their internal customer records says should be there.

That's the very barest minimum I'd expect anyone to do. And the moment they found a discrepancy they should have suspended everything until they'd figured out why there was a discrepancy.

If they've truly managed to keep losing coins over years, it means they had no effective audit mechanisms in place at all.

Whoever took these coins certainly also is to blame, but if they've managed to lose the coins that way, this ought to be criminal levels of negligence.
Here's my little bit of interaction with Coding Horror:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/62hzb/why_codin...

http://blog.codinghorror.com/on-the-meaning-of-coding-horror...
Look, I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was, 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah'.
I would also add:

* For critical code, enable as many compiler warnings as you can while remaining sane. This would definitely include unreachable code warnings.

* Consider using static analysis

* Initialise your error variable in the "error" state not in the "everything is ok" state
The Board of Governor's of the Federal Reserve System is part of government. It's an independent federal agency, with about 2,000 employees

The system also includes 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, which are quasi-private. There's a mixture of public and private control of them. The member banks in each region get to elect 6 of the 9 directors. Each member bank gets two votes and the vote is divided by bank size, so the big banks in each region choose two directors, the medium banks two, and the small banks two.

The remaining 3 directors are appointed by the Board of Governors (the federal agency).

The Federal Reserve Banks are considered federal entities for some purposes, but private entities for others.

The member banks in each region are required to own a certain amount of stock in their Federal Reserve Bank. They get paid a 6% annual dividend of the amount that they have invested in the Federal Reserve. All remaining profits (the vast majority) go to the federal government.
It's a funny quip but it's getting more attention than the important piece of news it highlights. Google is finally doing something about scraping sites doing better in search results than original creators. Good.

Many people don't write for money, to put ads on their website, or as part of some "content marketing" campaign. All they want is a little recognition. A boost in positioning on the SERP means we will be getting useful stuff at no cost.

And there are genuine replies there. Ryan Jones[1] even got the scrapers to confess their sins[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/RyanJones/status/439123533349015553

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%20%22istwfn%22+%22stole+thi...
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That's a shame. All the enterprise places I've worked so far have used Subversion (whether officially or not).
Google's page wouldn't get indexed in a search engine to try to drive traffic to itself.
The signs were there, we all knew that. It's just that hindsight makes you believe the signs meant 100% probability Gox will go down. But back then with the limited information everyone had, that was definitely not the case. At some point Gox's bitcoin price had a 20% premium over the rest of the exchanges. So, if he wanted to get out of Gox immediately, he'd have to buy BTC, withdraw and sell at another exchange. Which means 20% loss or $100K. At that point he'd have ask himself if the probability of Gox being completely insolvent is really that great to be worth taking such a hit. And I don't think it was - the loss of 700K BTC came as a surprise even to the biggest Gox critics.
Yes, a failure of a single financial institution proves the currency is a completely failure. I mean, it's not like the USD and EUR markets had any institutions that failed or needed bailouts - well, except for Northern Rock, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Citigroup, and AIG.
I believe you've got it backwards. The EU countries that don't tax lottery winnings are actually members of a pretty small club. Most of the world does tax lottery winnings.
Open data inventories, ready for human consumption
yeah, if you are starting a business that targets enterprise, you need to get a native English speaker writing things for you.
No, because nobody knows for sure. The most common theories are stupidity, fraud, and theft (or some combination thereof).
Come to France.

You file on the web. You declare your monthly income and pay 24.5% tax, all inclusive of your income taxes. Even if you make no turnover the first months, you benefit fromthe health insurance, and you could even get the €400 survival allowance ("RSA"). If you reach 30k€/yr, you must file a proper company and you'll get the normal 75% tax rate.

I think we have a good system to let people start companies. Website is ugly and we live at the Cobol & Paper age, but we got this little part right. That was brought by Sarkozy.
A trip of over 8,000 miles
What was your point? All I said was that they could prove it. If allowing sideloading is required, so what?