skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results.

But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones?

Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own.

I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.
Big list of http static server one-liners
For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness.

For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article.

Also, the title of this article is so messed up...
You are just plain wrong and the advice you're giving is dangerous. Please stop.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101693679

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/health/policy/25bankruptcy...
Cracking them is so fast these days that they don't offer much in terms of security. For example, take a look at this post:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/06/our-password-hashing-has-no-...

Then note that it was posted two years ago. GPUs surely haven't gotten any slower since then.
Being overly concerned about having your email sniffed as its passed along internet peer is just misplaced anxiety. Anyone who can successfully sniff your password from your email in transit can already own if they chose to. The convenience factor of having your password emailed and having a record of it in many cases trumps this concern.

"But what if someone hacks your email, they know all your passwords!"

What if someone hacks your 1password account? It's the same exact scenario. Having a single point of failure that one can be extra vigilant with guarding is much better than the alternative of having a hundred unique passwords one must remember.
They mean it was ran+domly inserted+in weird places. I think.
Disaster. I was relying on them for keeping my Windows 7 FOSS installation updated. I did not use proprietary except windows (of course) and ccleaner / skype. Simply disaster.
I have to rely now on SF feeds/Filehippo and QT-apps.org
That also speaks to the standard of who qualifies as an acceptable political candidate, these days. There used to be more elite offices, for which one required a good-old boys network, and more populist ones, for which qualifications were more open. Nowadays, the media rage-circus gets set off by so many different things that even the so-called "populist" offices only support the electability of a very narrow, conformist range of candidates.

See, for example, the electoral loss of Eric Cantor.
FWIW, Google Cache can serve you HTML for these Dynamic Views blogs; just prefix the URL with https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:

e.g. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

Incidentally, it's the only place you can get HTML for these blogs, and I suspect that Blogspot has special-cased Googlebot to give it HTML instead a pile of JavaScript.

For convenience, I have this bookmarklet bound to my 'c' keyword in Firefox:

javascript:(function(){window.open('https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:'+(''+window.location));})();
Even at the first listens I could make out "at the next stop", but hearing the real one seemed to made no difference. The beginning still sounds like gibberish. Maybe we have brain damage?
Interesting that all the examples were monads. There is another level of abstractions waiting behind the abstractions in Underscore.js.
And no information if the correctly used pluses were inserted by humans, deliberately, and were useful.

Still, I am surprised that Google has made search so poor for so many people in some situations. Although I understand they've done some work on making programming code easier to search for?
I think that's the better way to to it (at least compared to ansible/chef/puppet/etc). I additionally use GNU Stow for doing the symlinking.
You may want to check out Lo-Dash too (http://lodash.com/). It's a drop-in replacement for Underscore with some extra capabilities and claims to be faster and more reliable. It's become a major project in its own right now.
> Is there value in code that's readable by non-experts? Sometimes yes, more often no.

Often for me yes, I've been programming a long time and these days I do mostly back end development so I write all front end code to be readable by a non-expert (me) so that in 6 months when I come back to it I will understand what the hell is going on.

I'm not confident in the language (javascript) to be sure I will understand my own code so I deliberately lean towards explicitness.
Several months ago, I became pretty interested in the idea of a unified computer setup. Between my home computers and work computers, it began weighing on me mentally to have to switch contexts all the time. I'd forget which machine had `wget`, which `fish` functions were installed on which host, etc. The most tedious thing was the process of setting up a new computer: painstakingly finding each and every little configuration I had on my other machines, and copying them over. I'd spend half a day just setting up a new machine. I wanted something better.

I first tried Ira's [mackup](https://github.com/lra/mackup), which syncs files to Dropbox. Its catch-all approach scared me, though, as it backs up `fish` history by default. I decided to move to something different.

I ended up basing my dotfiles setup on the GNU [stow](https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/) utility. Here's how it works:

- In `~`, I have a git-managed directory `dotfiles`

- For every new app I use, I make a new directory in `dotfiles`. For example, `vim`, `fish`, etc.

- I run `stow` on all these directories, and it symlinks everything into place

I ended up rolling my own update script, but it's pretty trivial. I also made heavy use of Homebrew brewfiles, which can be used to define what commands you would like to run through Homebrew. I also use [Homebrew Cask](http://caskroom.io/) to install apps.

In the end, I now have the exact same configuration on all my machines. For work, I have a separate branch, which has other fish functions / utilities. I recently got a new computer, and I ran the `update.sh` script while I went to lunch. When I came back, my machine was ready to go.

Take a look at my setup [here](https://github.com/peterhajas/dotfiles).
I am a native Spanish speaker and the only thing that I hear is what the caller said. I get the joke that the song is saying something else, but I can't figure out what it is.
Let me shamelessly post this again: https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/04/02/breaking-half-of...

Even if you'd consider their protocol secure enough (which I don't), this third-party app was written by someone who thought rand48 was good enough for long-term crypto keys. I'd stay far, far away from this.
Thanks for the tip. I'm using NoScript/HTTPSwitchboard and have long been frustrated by javascript being required to show even simple posts on blogspot.
Although underscore.js is more widely-used, I think sugarjs.com is an improvement and makes the syntax much nicer.
Thankfully password managers and software like iCloud makes this extremely easy. There's no excuse to not do it!
There are ads and then there are ads. One of the things that the company I work for, Qubit, does is to validate that the tracking tags that vendors put on people's websites drive an uplift. We talk about one of our clients doing it here [1]

While blindly targeting people using search engine "promoted searches" may not work for every impression, this does not take into account the ads that you see on other 3rd party sites - which is probably what people think of when they talk about "ads". Google's version of this is AdSense (as opposed to AdWords).

This is something that is quite easy to test, and we have seen that some really do work and some not so much.

But driving someone back to a website with an offer on something that they have added to their basket but not purchased, is one way to be sure that you are getting people buying after seeing your content. The problem then is to make sure you aren't cutting into your margins too much...

[1] http://www.qubitproducts.com/content/video/arcadia-video-cas...
A 130 slide presentation. No thanks
A guy behind it is/was a founder of Russian LinkedIn. He's just basically filthy rich and has a thing for sticking it to the authorities.
I was also using a simple bootstrap script and I too felt I was "killing mosquitos with a bazooka" using Ansible.

But I wanted to symlink my Sublime settings. That meant tinkering with shell code and separating the files in different dirs. Then I wanted to preinstall my Brew apps, but only for Mac.

So these tasks pilled up in shell scripts and became ugly. So Ansible, with it's easy YAML configs, is the perfect tool for a dev like me that wants to setup machines and maintain the configurations synced.
ELF isn't really an organization, there aren't really members and non-members. People did actions in the name of the organization, but I don't think there was much broader coordination.
Do you live in New York?

1. New York taxis are hailed from the street. AFAIK, you can't call a medallion taxi to your home for pickup. So that makes impractical the idea of a single-family home (which is pretty damn rare in New York) being narrowed as the sole user of a particular taxi.

2. Um, no, again. First of all, are you fucking kidding me? A barista, taking a taxi on a daily, or even weekly basis, in a city with U.S. most comprehensive subway and bus system? A barista.

But I'm not being nit-picky here, taking taxis on a regular basis is within the means of the rich, only. And how many rich people do you think live in non-dense areas (i.e. areas in which 100-500 people could be within a certain lat/long)? And how many people in that income bracket would not take a private car? Do you really imagine there to be a significant number of New Yorkers who take taxis at a regular time, to a regular place, from a residence in which there aren't dozens, if not hundreds of people, within a 50m radius?

Again, you realize gay bars are in densely populated areas, and a taxi right in front of a gay bar could be determined to come from a large number of bars, nevermind that it is not always the case that you call for a taxi in front of the place you just stepped out. Sometimes you call it from a cross-street, or up-street to better your chances.

And of course there's the detail of the delayed release time of these records.

It's as if you took all the stock privacy-violation concerns with surveillance and applied them to a situation in which the real-world details don't make any sense.
That's pretty cool. Nice work :)
TextSecure or anything using OTR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Clien...
Bill and Melinda Gates' 2014 Stanford Commencement Speech
On the one hand, 'Yo' was created in a day. Though maybe the author should've spent say a week on it.

On the other, it's been proven possible to ignore or botch security until you have to make a minor show of apologizing for it, without fear of consequence, if you've already gotten enough traction. Unfortunately, this only seems to prove to businesses that security is a fruitless endeavor, and a waste of effort better spent making sure the UI is shinier. On the third, i've had to explain to people and their startups that SQL injection and XSS even exists, much less that it's a problem worth dealing with now so there might also be an education issue.

I think the answer would probably be more things which are secure out of the box. In particular, frameworks and the languages themselves (I'm looking at you PHP) which interface with the web should default to secure as much as possible.
It is harder than with plain text, yes, but it can show through at times. For example, a while back I was looking through my profile settings on a forum I have an account on, and saw a "check password security" link on it. Out of curiosity, I clicked it, and was greeted with "if a Google search for [unsalted MD5 hash of your password] returns results, your password is not secure." I reported it to the site and turns out it was a leftover from their old system, and it got removed shortly after (along with the MD5 password hashes).

You could also always ask too. I was reading through the forums of another site and stumbled upon a thread of someone asking HTTPS support for the site. The staff was pretty reluctant about the idea, which made me wonder about other security concerns. Looking around a bit, I noticed that the site cookies contain a "pass" value that looks very much like an MD5 hash. I got someone who used to be staff to ask the current staff how passwords are hashed, and the answer was "salted MD5".

Also, why is my initial post getting downvoted? Generic hashing algorithms are built for speed, which is bad for passwords. Key derivation functions exist for a reason. Hell, just a while back there was a user database leak from a site called MangaTraders, and they used unsalted MD5 for password hashing. It didn't take long before the vast majority of passwords had been cracked.
If core is small then such language should provide a way to extend it outside. Like macros.
No, I don't know of any research although it may exist. My personal definition of readability is very simple: the time it takes to understand a particular piece of code. I think there's a balance between overly dense code and code that requires me to scroll through several pages or jump between files.

It takes me longer to parse dense Ruby or Python code because I'm not very familiar with the languages but I'm aware that those languages give us ways to write more expressive code with less syntax overhead. The trick is to write compact code that is still easy to understand for someone other than the author.
Sorry, I don’t know the details, but I’ll make a few comments about a random link in a Google search: http://mum-master.blogspot.com.ar/2009/01/be-carefull-of-mah... (don’t believe everything that is in the Internet, but be careful)

>> [from a promotional email] You will earn an MSCS degree from a highly respected, accredited university that integrates the study of computer science with a scientifically proven technology for awakening your total brain potential.

I never heard before about this university. Apparently, this is an accredited university, but I don’t understand the details of the accreditation system. From the Wikipedia page, it looks like CS is not the main area.

I really don’t like “with a scientifically proven technology for awakening your total brain potential” (But this is a alleged quote from a link. Did you get a similar promotional material?)

> They attract people from outside the US by saying that they are going to be hired which is 100% false, you will never get job due to many factors such as student visa limitations by employers who seek H1B or residency.

USA’s visas are a very difficult topic. To work you need the right visa. I think that it’s not so easy to get an internship with a student visa.
> XMPP is terrible protocol nowadays because of XML nature, it costly to parse, big overhead for text and awful for binary data

[citation needed] I assume you also want us to move away from html and towards a simpler, ascii-based protocol?

AFAIK xmpp is already pretty simple for what it does[1].

> I heard that recently XMPP require SSL mandatory, but it wasn't from the start, as in Telegram

First, so you claim XMPP has evolved to be (more/as) secure, and still think that's an argument against XMPP? Second, SSL is generally only client-server (without authentication of the client) -- IMNHO you're better off layering OTR on top of XMPP. That said, SSL, VPN, IPSEC or other trusted transport is nice to have.

XMPP already has a standard for link-local messaging[2], supports other extensions, has many open and free servers and clients... I'm not saying it can't be improved on -- but you'd have to show some improvement before it made sense considering a different transport...

[1] http://www.adarshr.com/papers/xmpp

[2] http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0174.html
Oh my god. You really think there are poor people in Brooklyn or the Bronx who, nevermind being able to afford a place in which they are the only people within 50m of 10 other families, can regularly go into the city at a given time in a taxi? The commute traffic into Manhattan is hellish -- who in their right mind would use it to get to work? A taxi is not a replacement for a car, it is a luxury, and it is expensive.

Another poor assumption: that people get dropped off right in front of their homes. Uh, no. I take taxis several times a month to get home. I'm never, never able to get dropped off right in front of my apartment because traffic is dense enough and the one-way streets add another 0.50 to $1 when I can just hop off and take a pleasant two minute walk up the corner.

edit: And another poor assumption: that there is one easily locatable gay bar within a vicinity of where people hail a taxi (again, it won't always, or even mostly, be in front of the exact place they just walked out of) or that, after leaving a bar, people go straight to their own home.
Just 1 in 600... and that's how many tens of million of queries? Or hundreds?

Anyway, losing mindshare among power users is very dangerous in the IT business. Even when you really just care about the average Joe.
Ant battles offer insights to gene expression
And be sure to destroy the token immediately after the user resets, and also after a reasonable time period regardless if it was used (24hrs seems fine to me).

Otherwise the email could be found later and used to gain access.
A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961
The "would you really read through the code" argument against open source is old and tired. There is no good reason to trust crypto-related software with secret source. You may not personally audit the code, but if there is no source, nobody will, and you basically have to take the publisher at their word. The promise of crypto is that you can manage who you trust, but you can't do that with unauditable code.
Content hidden behind a login. Care to elaborate?
Unfortunately, STARTTLS is subject to service degradation attacks and it is very common for email servers to use unsigned keys. Simply enabling STARTTLS protects against passive attacks, but until email servers refuse connections that do not create a TLS session with proper certs, email will remain subject to MITM attacks. Meanwhile, this failure mode is a usability problem for email. My experience with notifying companies about insecure email practices has been extremely disappointing, even among those that should know better (like national labs and financial institutions).
Home garden
> Some aspects are quite promising, one is to JIT compile away most of the FFI glue, another is interaction with Numpy/Scipy code.

As a note, both of these things are available in Julia. The built-in `ccall` allows FFI calls without glue code and at the same cost as a shared library function call from C (no ctypes/libffi overhead). The PyCall package provides (damn-near magical) interoperation with any Python library.
It took 5 minutes for me to read, its actually really short.
or libraries... like underscore...
But it would be at the start in many cases. How would it know if you want to go to the Google+ site of YouTube or just search all the pages that contain the exact phrase "YouTube"?
Readability is important but it's also important to remember that judging readability by a small fragment in isolation is misleading. Yes, for that small fragment on first encounter, the verbose version was more readable. But by the time you're looking at a hundred lines of code, let alone a hundred thousand, the compact version becomes more readable.
Interesting. So what if the program presents the user a window saying "do you agree to be bound by <company X's EULA> which explicitly forbids third-party use of their API and thus agreeing to it will constitute breaking the law?" and pass that as a parameter. Or if you distribute it in source code only with the parameter settable via a configure param and asking the user to build a version that works? Or make a shim library that hooks to the API then distribute your product with a different shim library that passes false in this particular parameter, but leave notes on which bit to flip with a hex editor in the compiled binary to enable the functionality.

This obviously gets less and less user-friendly the more we abstract it, but I'm wondering what its legal standing is.
It certainly works out to the benefit of the advertising companies, the media companies, and Google, though...
http://vimeo.com/98639067
When you speak of a 'coerced' choice, it's not coerced in the normal sense (coerced by a person), it's coerced by nature. If the person doesn't get work, doesn't find some means of acquiring goods produced by other people, they'll starve; this is not the result of anybody threatening to starve them, it's simply the result of there not being enough food lying around to eat.

To state or imply that the starving person has some form of right to the food produced by others, one must make a moral judgement. It hence becomes an issue of moral philosophy as to whether the fact that a person "just can't do without" the job has any bearing on the situation.

If one assumes people owe others things by virtue of having those things (or by virtue of the others not having those things), then one can say it's coercion to refuse to give someone food one owns unless they perform work. If however one assumes that people owe others nothing apart from what they've specifically agreed to give them, then there's no coercion taking place.

The pro-market position is that assuming people owe others things they haven't promised them necessarily entails coercion. If society things Joe Rich owes something to Bob Poor, but Joe Rich doesn't want to give it, then making him give it anyway necessarily requires violence or the threat thereof against Joe Rich. Through this lens, if Bob Poor starves then this doesn't necessarily imply anyone's committed violence or coercion against him, instead it's a simple result of the combination of nature's scarcity and his inability or unwillingness to do something for others in exchange for food or the purchasing power to acquire it.
I understand the point he is making, and I agree that the importance of advertising is declining. However, I wouldn't be able to explain Samsung's success without looking at advertising.
Universidade do Minho Recebe 9ª Conferência Internacional de Alvenaria
Discuss advertising with anybody and you'll come to the conclusion that apparently advertising works on other people.

Who those "other people" are, no idea. I strongly suspect some people really are just statistics.
Sounds interesting. Could you explain a bit more how this works, briefly? I find the GNU stow page not really good to understand and lack some example of how it would be used...
The IRS Had a Contract With an Email Backup Company