skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, they aren't. Google is using FUD to scare sites into requesting links be removed that they never built on legitimate sites. No one can possibly guess which links an individual Googler will think "might" be paid. I assure you they guess wrong most of the time.

As Google penalizes the best writers and blogs, one of two things happens:

1) Entire sites are being nofollowed - removing links to deserving sites.

2) The site refused to nofollow, so they stay penalized with PR0 no matter how good the site may be or how high the PR once was.

The end result will be that even more black hat spammy MFA sites will rank. Sites that deserved to be written about and linked to will drop and be invisible.

It is high time people stop defending Google when they are destroying small businesses and costing much needed jobs. Now Cutts has declared war on bloggers who often make a living writing.

Google wants to destroy any site that enables advertisers and businesses to connect with sites where their target audience already is by forcing publishers to decide whether they want to risk losing organic traffic and being branded with a scarlet PR0 or to nofollow everything they ever write.

Nofollow = NOT TRUSTED. We do not invest time writing about anything we do not trust. (On the VERY rare occasion we do we do not link to them.) We do not publish content that does not fit our audience.

Every link is a potential risk. Nofollowing links may damage the sites we link to so what is a writer who already cares about what they write about supposed to do?

Google has a monopoly on search because the wealthy elite who own the media handed it to them. People use it because in many cases they do not even know there is an alternative. Many use whatever is installed on their computers without even having any idea what it even is.

People who are trying to clean up unnatural links penalties are not SEO experts. They rely on tools to tell them what links to remove. These tools are not very accurate. I've had them flag DMOZ, Best of the Web, and Business2Community as "toxic". Finally many remove and/or disavow every link in desperation.

How does all that disavowing affect search results and individual sites? How many verify that requests to remove organically given links are from the actual site and not their unethical competitor. (Hint: almost none.)

Many businesses fail waiting for recovery. Others get penalties lifted, but having removed links they no longer get any traffic.

"Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop." YES, they most certainly DID!
And let's not even get started with Tokyo.
On a tangent line, one thing I dislike about Go is the error handling. I find it really annoying to have to check for errors at every single step. Erlang has probably the most elegant error handling mechanism. Just let if fail, and then restart the whole process/subsystem.
Linux is the only modern OS I've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers

Red Hat's abrt does that: https://github.com/abrt/abrt/

Using kdump, it can also report kernel panics. Kdump acts as
a kernel that is executed after the main kernel panics. The fresh kernel has a clean state and can store the dump in a file system.

the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible/irreparably damaged

It's worse because it's not an automatic process. It's also better, because it doesn't require external dependencies like abrt and kdump -- it's part of the kernel.
I was surprised to hear that the hardest program he had to write was a simulator for MMIX. This seems to have the scoop: http://mmix.cs.hm.edu/doc/mmix-pipe.pdf
Nest for Windowed/Split-ductless A/C units
While central thermostats have advanced remarkably in the last few years, standalone units (very common outside the US) are still stuck in the ston e age.

How is it possible that Nest/Google have invested $3bn, but aren't attacking this huge market?
> So if you allow file uploads or printing arbitrary user data in your service, you should always verify the contents as well as sending a Content-Disposition header where applicable.

The idea that you can "verify the contents" is pretty much just wrong. You actually have to parse the files and write out your own known-safe version. It's a real pain in the butt to do that correctly and securely across a wide variety of file types.

Even parsing arbitrary user uploads with something like ImageMagick is probably exploitable, simply because those libraries weren't designed to handle hostile input.
DDG has horrible results because it barely scratches the surface of Google's magnitude of results. Sorry Chuck, it's an inferior product
If you work insane hours for over a year, your company is broken. That is a problem of time allocation and unrealistic expectations, and has no bearing on the quality or usefulness of the work being done.

As for "capable of doing amazing things", this is stuff that Flash was able to do better 10 years ago. If people hadn't forgotten where we came from, and browser makers hadn't ridden the CSS train to performance hell, Famous wouldn't even be necessary.

So far, all I've seen is a) huge, hyped up promises and b) janky demos that feel like some interaction design student's wild experiments. You don't need to be Apple to do this right, you just have to be able to be honest about the output of your own work.
Ok, thank you, Dang. We'll take care.
"Gold Rush: Alaska" and "Yukon Gold" are both filmed in my local area (Dawson, Yukon, Canada), and both companies strap GoPros onto every piece of heavy equipment they can. If they fall off and get run over, they're out $300, which is a negligible amount of money for productions of their scale.
Agreed. The "X considered harmful" meme has really got to stop. There are a couple of articles/essays in which that expression really makes sense, but they are few and far between. This one is not one of them. The ones I've read that actually resonated with me have all been written by authorities within their field and regarding subjects of importance for software development as a whole, not niche subjects such as "CSS drop shadows considered harmful", etc.

(A well written article none the less!)
> by creating a public policy around municipally owned Layer 1 infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a contractor (or two). Creating a new "ISP" would involve installing equipment in the City Exchange(s), providing compatible customer premises equipment to subscribers, and then patching their 'port' at the City Exchange to the ISP's gear.

This is precisely what we're attempting to do in Australia with the National Broadband Network—with the delays, technical changes and cost estimating issues you'd expect from a project that's survived across two federal governments.

NBNCo installs the fibre, the termination devices, the optical splitters, and brings it back to a POI where ISPs then bring in their own transit or purchase backhaul capacity from NBNCo (as needed).

It also, in my view, makes the critical process of engaging local councils, utilities, and ripping up roads, footpaths and driveways much more 'palatable' to the average householder, because it's seen as a public infrastructure project and not as a private organisation expanding their 'own' reach (even if it would achieve the same end goal).
Wow DDG, you guys are on fiyah! I just rebooted Firefox and saw the new new look; love it. What I noticed:

* Someone looking to search immediately may be confused/frustrated as the text entry field is currently not visible until the slideshow ends.

* Consider relocating the "press" button away from bottom right; I almost missed it and only saw it because I'd been on the page for a few minutes, finished the slideshow and was looking for more.

* Also, when I saw that button, I thought it meant "press this to see something cool", so I was disappointed when it only took me to the company press page.

* I really like the background colour scheme on the front page but you might consider switching it off as it doesn't carry over to other pages. I.e I found the visual discontinuity a bit jarring when the search and press pages didn't reflect it; that's when I realized that the biggest message I got unconsciously was that my default DDG pages would now be in this colour (with ability to change it). I see now that the pages depicted on "inner" screen were the usual white, but I honestly didn't see/process that against the bolder background.
I love the argument that "because there're even worse public transportation systems, its okay for the SF transportation system to be shit".

But hey, as long as were busy dealing with our shit transportation system it means we have less time to complain about the other shit the government is slipping up on.
Irrelevant. Google has an index reds of times bigger than DuckDuckGo. Therefore it's results can be much more accurate. You can't debate that DDG is an inferior engine, it's fact.
There's a famous essay about exactly that called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". We discussed it about two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611
Can someone explain why on earth do busses and Muni trains need to stop on every single block? I get that this is convenient and there's probably some disability law behind it but it makes public transportation even slower in SF.
Crunchbase api has investment totals, but not valuations, as far as I know.

https://developer.crunchbase.com/
What lawsuits would you have seen? I don't see how it would be illegal to do that in the US in any way.
Have you considered using Parse.com? Or some other back end as a service?
Body Language Hacks for Teachers and Trainers
The fact that you seriously say "our website is not the product" shows how utterly misguided you are in your marketing. I am not trying to be mean, this is simple and logical advice.

You make a platform for making websites. Your website is a huge turn-off that reminds everyone of every shitty over designed web brochure / 'experience' they've ever seen. And you think this is just a problem because people are picky.

Amazing.
> But even then, NYC is more well-organized.

NYC is a single political entity and the primary metropolitan region of the state in which the city is located. The former is true of the City and County of San Francisco -- but that's, by itself, not even a particular big city -- but not the 9-county Bay Area which is smaller, in population, than NYC despite having more than 20 times the land area. And the latter isn't true of SF at all.)

> SF separates its bus system from its train system (at least in labeling), and there's more than one train service within the city alone.

San Francisco's bus and train service are both labelled "Muni".

BART also has stops in San Francisco but is a separate multicounty agency (the Bay Area Rapid Transit District) of which SF happens to be a member, it isn't SF's.
I don't see GPS anywhere mentioned in the article or the specs on Microsoft site[1]. Is this taken for granted or did they really not included a GPS sensor with this?

It even mentions the digital compass and gyroscope sensors. I'm having a bad feeling about this.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro-...
Yes and no. Having design N written up decently might make designing N+1 easier / faster. I also agree with the article that readme-driven-development can make dev (of N) smoother.

I've found the hardest thing is really deciding what to build. And figuring that out can be helped by writing a lot of docs early. [edit: or prototyping, of course, but they aren't mutually exclusive and depending on how you divide roles that might not be an option]
You think people who tear up the street to put in sewers have never thought "hey, while we are at it, let's build some conduit down here and then sell that?"

I know they literally work on sewers, but they aren't dumb. They understand their business better than random people on the Internet do.
I really like Jeremy Kun's Math Intersect Programming (http://jeremykun.com/). This past HN thread might also be worth checking out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928762
I don't think that says much about email itself. He has a secretary to deal with his paper mail. There's no reason a secretary-curated email inbox wouldn't be similar.
Maybe that's where you hit the wrong note then. Most of your writing here seems to be directed at Levinson particularly, not in the general sense as a cautionary tale aimed at the potential users of such a service.
Because car use in Europe is more convenient? I don't get the argument, cars are even more expensive to use in much of Europe than even NYC.
Would you kindly stop spamming me?
I agree that Levison left out important details from his timeline but I feel you have done the same. Consider his issues in finding legal counsel, the short timeline, and inability to discuss the issue with experts. Consider the distant court venue and his inability to obtain court transcripts for months even while the proceedings hurry along.

How is an ordinary citizen supposed to understand the legal issues at play or alternatively be able to obtain specialty counsel in a matter of days? If one should only speak to the FBI in the presence of legal counsel isn't it understandable that he was quiet while searching for a lawyer?

Also, why is it so wrong of him to stage a legal challenge to an order that contradicts his own moral/political beliefs? Your point is that the end-game was always clear but to a legal layperson I don't think that's true.
Data-binding Revolutions with Object.observe()
The BERIpad Tablet: Open-Source Construction, CPU, OS, Applications (2013) [pdf]
I think federal level is definitely at fault but it shouldn't be.

We should have more understanding of our local governments, more insight and voting power. We put so much authority and responsibility at the federal level that by the time the system reaches to the local governments its just a mindfuck of bureaucracies that no one can deal with.
> As was noticed in some other thread (possibly by you) courts are not in the business of finding the truth. So any kind of defence is fair game, including stalling, misdirection and so on.

I don't see the logical connection between these two sentences. Could you expand?
Public transportation is bad within San Francisco for historical reasons. In the late 1940's, the voters passed an initiative to save the streetcars, but what happened was that Muni used revenue bonds to purchases buses in a sweetheart deal with the motorbus companies. As a result, the there was a voter backlash, and Muni lost the ability to issue revenue bonds.

Since the agency was now cash strapped, without a modern way to raise money, it could only do so through the general fund and fares. Being a public agency, it also became under the whim of the political motivations of whoever was mayor or in the board of supervisors. To help modernize the system, Muni put a parcel bond measure on the 1967 ballot. It failed.

In the 70's, Muni wanted to exit the streetcar business completely. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system was to replace Muni, and run nearly where all the light rail goes today. Again, politics and public backlash killed a planned system, and we have the strange Bart/Muni/Caltrain/SamTrans/Golden Gate/AC Transit fragmentation you see today. To further complicate things, all of these agencies battle each other for state and federal grants.

Things are changing. Under 2007's Prop A, the voters granted the SFMTA, or Muni as it was called before Prop K, to issue revenue bonds once again. At the end of this year, there will be a bond measure, which at no expense to parcel tax payers, will begin to reverse the nearly 80 years of deferred maintenance across the agency's infrastructure. Further, a ballot measure to increase the VLF (vehicle license fee) will be on the ballot, which will create a sustained revenue source to purchase new vehicles over time.

There is still billions of dollars of deferred maintenance and a legacy of poor planning, but with the boom and growth in the city, we'll see our public transportation system improve, at least in the city. Not too far from now, we'll have electric Caltrain. Is it too little too late? Certainly, but you can call and write your public representatives and let them know if they don't do anything, you'll vote them out for sure.
Scientists discover how to turn light into matter
A Goodbye Letter To: San Francisco. From: your Deputy Innovation Officer
The comment was deleted due to filthy language in a comment. We'll add links as soon as possible. No panic, please.
Imagine what we'd have said if the keys had been compromised with Heartbleed.
That's all bandwidth, not total data usage. I'm talking about price per actual megabit transmitted by the ISPs. It's not like you actually do 35/5 mbps every second of the day for the entire month.

I'm in an east coast city in the US. I remember having had maybe 5/1 mbps 10 years ago. I wasn't paying the bills but I'm pretty sure it was like $50 per month from the TV commercials. Now I've got 25/10 for closer to $70 per month. Bandwidth wise it's risen a bit, but not really that much. Course I'm pulling down a lot more megabits per month in streaming content (though I was big into Napster/Torrents back then).

But my point was that most people have upgraded to broadband from dial-up even if they don't really use it that much. Only the ISPs would really have the data, but I'd be surprised if the cost per megabit transmitted for them has gone up dramatically.
I highly doubt Snowden would be in Russia Today (pun intended) if he had had confidence in the American legal system not being out to enact revenge rather than punishment. Snowden is in most of the rest of the world and good part of the United States considered to be more of a hero than a traitor, and he only became a temporary resident of Russia after the fact. If not for some political manoeuvring he would likely be somewhere else, such as Latin America.
Against "Innovation"
This is normal for any city I've lived in (London, UK and Dublin, IE). Doesn't make it any less annoying though. I noticed in London that the expected travel time by bus was reliably 2x walking speed and 1/2 driving speed.
Agreed. The "americans should feel great about where they live because, hey, at least its not as bad as Sudan" argument.
Certainly you can do this with Go by letting it panic and having your preferred supervisor (eg. supervisord) supervise the process?
I've had trouble falling asleep every night for as long as I can remember, and marijuana is the only thing I've tried that has worked consistently for me. So I smoke every night; frequently at higher-than-therapeutic doses. The only detrimental effect I've experienced over the past 8 years of smoking has been a mild psychological dependence, which in my case can easily be mitigated with a few months' detox when necessary.
I don't find that it interferes with my ability to work or pursue my interests outside of work, but that is definitely a concern worth keeping in mind if you smoke regularly. I know several very creative, productive people who really haven't been able to accomplish anything interesting since they started getting high every day. Ultimately, I think that mileage varies from one person to the next, and while I am an enthusiastic smoker myself, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't completely familiar with the risks they'd be taking.
It seems clear that the batteries caught fire. The question is whether they exploded.
This image was the first time I've found it handy to have it installed. It's not as useful in day-to-day browsing as you might think.
I don't understand. Levison did something objectionable. Who am I supposed to direct my complaint at?

Are you suggesting that I should instead reserve my complaints for the users of these services? That empirically does not work; there are millions of users, and none of them research the tools they use to communicate privately.
He prefers a tiling windows manager at the application level rather than within tmux.

People make a big deal out of tmux's split screens, but my workflow is much more flexible with xmonad and GNU screen (with the caveat that it requires more upfront).
Share your music library on the network (A Ruby Script)
this script uses sinatra to share your media files from your songs library the script will enable users to play music on page using a streaming url
this script is part of a larger one to create a media library on the network with upload capability, play list, favorite, commenting...etc
something like grooveshark.com but on the local network.
if you want to participate please fork this project, enhance teh script and commit it.

Full script with docs : https://github.com/blazeeboy/RubyScripts/tree/master/05-21-2014
Billions of dollars of "studies" and such, I'm sure. NIMBYs hate cut and cover, so we end up digging absurdly expensive deep tunnels that are just worse to use once finished (they take forever to get into, compare deep stations in Washington Heights to Astor Place).
A question for DDG or anyone who might know: How does DDG plan to monetize this without storing any data?
The justice system seems to have become an instrument of revenge in some cases, bringing little or no reason to the way offenders are charged and punished. With a system that far off the rails it is perfectly ok for defendants to stop playing by the rules as well. That, I suspect is a good part of why Snowden is now living in Russia rather than taking his chances with the judicial arm of the USA, not because he's a coward. Cowards don't take action in the first place.
The hyperfocus I experience while mildly stoned leads to some incredible breakthroughs, and many happy hours of progress. I find it allows me to keep a much larger amount of state in my mind at any given time, and makes my state memory more resilient to distractions like Facebook notifications and emails. It also dramatically improves my patience (a quality I normally lack), so I can hack away at a difficult problem for hours at a time.

Many of my favorite personal projects come from (or at least start during) a marijuana session.
I'm really skeptical about "we'll see our public transportation system improve, at least in the city".

Specially if I have the New York public system to look forward to. Its not exactly a success.
I think the MBTA is better than Muni + BART, the percentage of proper heavy rail rapid transit is much higher in Boston (just the meh Green Line, compared to every meh Muni line).
Problem is that many tend to use S3 but bind a subdomain to it. S3 does not validate the content of those files, so combined with a [wildcard].domain.com crossdomain.xml and you're still as vulnerable as per above.

Some also restricts so that different filetypes on S3 will be served as Inline content, but that will just save you from XSS, and not the CSRF leakage. It's still suprisingly common with a crossdomain.xml restricted to [wildcard].domain.com.
DevOps objective is not to reduce costs. DevOps does nothing to reduce the head count of developers/operations. This is a dangerous misconception.

The objective of DevOps is to make working trasversally between all groups involved with development/deployment/management/etc. of a software better and faster.

Management loses badly when backups restores start failing.
Another thing to consider (for software engineers at least) is hours per day, vs days per week.

It can take a few hours to ramp up productivity and get in the zone. On the other hand, in a well organized team if a few people take a day or two off, not much would be lost.