skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a feedback loop between use and ranking quality so that the more people that use google search, the better the ranking will be. I believe they used to use information about which item in the results people clicked on to revise rankings e.g. if 90% of people on pick on result 7 for the same query, this indicates it should probably be no. 1. Whether they still use this or it "got gamed", I have no idea.

One network effect I am particularly bothered by is that developers are forced to design pages to suit Google's crawler & ranking whims less they be penalised to page 2 oblivion. The more people that use Google, the more important it is to design for Google and the better Google search will be with the side-effect of compromising actual content and the needs of the real audience.

This is why monopolies suck, because in practice, I don't have a choice but do this.
You missed out all of the actual services he provides, such as all of the ones the law stipulates.
TBH they may be skipping certain parts because they're afraid of the legal departments of the companies whose stuff they're reverse-engineering - iirc Sony wanted to sue everyone after the PS3 encryption key was found and published.
Hmm. The your ?author=\d+ trick doesn't seem to do anything on any of my WordPress websites, just get a 404.
How to Become the MacGuyver of Website Speed
> Why and in what way is thinking about sensations and one's body different from thinking about past or future?

The sensations are actually happening, right here, right now. Thoughts about the past or future are just mental constructs and have no reality beyond that. It's all about being present right here, right now, in this moment.
Why is this submission still up? 9 obviously shill comments and counting.
That's interesting stuff, thanks for sharing
Im 24 and think he brings up good points. So maybe age is not a thing?
Right now I work for a large European bank with Java EE and Wicket. I only touch an xml every 2 months or so. I'm not saying it's better than RoR for example in this regard, but Java EE has come a long way since people here used it, and even if it's still not your cup of tea, you should check out Play framework. I've had personal projects in .NET and I can say that there is a lot more boilerplate and spaghetti code there.
If you don't like them you don't attend them it is as simple. For me hackathons are great place to meet people with familiar interests and share experience.
Nice! I've been using python to augment my 6502 assembly. I haven't programmed the NES, but I've read that acommon way to wait for a particular raster line on it without using fancy mapper hardware is to use sprite-to-background collision interrupts. Collisions aren't triggered until they happen "on screen" with respect to the monitor beam position (same on C64 or Atari 2600), so you can effectively use it to get a line- or even a pixel interrupt.
call us when the honeymoon is over.
The text reminded me of the foreword to Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire. Gibbon complains about esteemed historians who quote other esteemed historians, but never go to the original sources or collect raw data.

A few hunter-gatherer peoples still exist and have been observed by anthropoligists. Are those peoples actually healthier and and have lower mortality than modern Andorrans? (I'm just picking a country at random here.) Or is there some reason to believe that they would have been healthier, if the modern world did not exist?
So did you.
I have, mostly. All my code, minus the directly-applicable shadow-password-hack thing ((to thwart script kiddies, if you're a bit knowledgable ytou should be able to re-implement it yourself) can be gotten from http://spritesmods.com/hddhack/hddhack.tgz
Agreed. Google is big because they are good, not the other way around.
Amen.

I am 20 years old and I share almost every single point as in the article. If not every single one honestly.. :P
A New Dawn for the Podcast – Serialized Audio Content Returns
The language of the future is Omega (https://code.google.com/p/omega/)
How long until the "free" email clients of the ad giants require payment for visibility of promotional emails?

The promotions tab in gmail basically a page 4 of google search. How convenient that a recent "Google Cloud Platform" advert hit my inbox and not the promotions tab...
Just in case someone wants to check "their own" wordpress deployments, there is a free, friendly wordpress security scanner here: https://suite.websecurify.com/market/wpscanner
You'd have a network effect if the presence of third parties (the "network") coerces you to choose one product over another. Say, Facebook over Diaspora because your peers are all in the former but not the latter (ignoring the other, quite material, differences for this example), or the monopolist's telephone network over another (that the monopolist refuses to peer with at reasonable rates). Possibly ad-networks, too (tons of ad spaces spread over the entire web with good payout rates) - which is why the FTC requested some changes to the AdSense ToS (regarding the use of multiple ad networks) and got them.

IMHO the attempt (by several european telcos) to force open messenger networks for interoperability might get more traction than attacking search engines for "network effects". I just hope that (should this ever happen) it will be a poisoned gift in that instead of giving telcos preferential treatment, they (Facebook/WhatsApp, Google, MS) simply provide fully open interfaces - and users continue to route around the failure that is telco messaging.
We are working on a language that has no scoping, no data structures and no control flow (incidentalcomplexity.com). There is definitely still a ton of unexplored ground.

The last few decades of PLT research feel like a huge depth-first search. Our notions of what programming is settled down in the 80s and haven't changed too much since. I suspect that PLT could do with a little more explore and a little less exploit.
Or N-to-1. You still don't need load balancing, if it truly scales linearly, just configuration.
Does anyone have any experience with meditation and RSI? I've been having RSI(like) problems for almost 3 years now. Recently I've read the Mindbody Prescription book[0] after finding this HN thread[1]. I must say it did help somewhat but I think I'm still in the process of healing myself. The bit I'm struggling is uncovering suppressed feelings and emotions. So I'm wondering wether meditation would help here. Any thoughts?

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindbody-Prescription-Healing-Body-P...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1269951
I use Login Security Solution plugin and IQ geo block plugin. I block all users from problem countries like China, Russia and Ukraine (to name but a few). I whitelist my own country and IPs to access the backend. Has worked well for me so far. I also use Cloudflare.
Have you at all been paying attention? PHP 5.6 has namespaces, closures, lambdas, generators, autoloaders, traits, function argument splats, sane array literals - basically everything the authors ever saw in good use, anywhere.

There is hardly any difference between PHP 4 and 5, except internals. The only real big difference between PHP 3 and PHP 4 is a different class syntax.
In this thread I saw no mention of Freebasic. It has some good features and is comparable to C. TerraLang is another interesting approach (for system programming languages).

But the fundamental flaw is that in many cases a DSl that compiles to something lower level is the way to Go.
I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for the last 14 months - 30 minutes, everyday and I have to say that it has been virtually the most important skill that I have picked up.
Because it's essentailly that - a skill. I was very stressed and the anxiety started to affect virtually every aspect of my life. My family wanted me to seek professional help (take pills), but I decided to try to take care of it myself so I started reading books... a lot of books about the brain, how it works, etc. and this is how I was introduced to mindfulness.
Now, 14 months later the effects are so profound that I have hard time imagining what my mind looked like before.
The biggest change I have noticed is the ability to not act on thoughts and easily let them go by accepting them.
Things that used to trigger me before are just thoughts now: the thought comes, I notice it and it passes. The best word that comes to mind when trying to describe the feeling is ... grounded.
I feel grounded, calm.

I know it sounds cliche, but now I realize that it's true that the moment you stop fighing your thoughts and urges, they lose their power. I remember reading things again and aain and could not wrap my head about this concept before.

- Does the anxiety go away? No, but my relationship with the anxiety and stress changed.

IMHO Self-reflection and emotional intelligence are the most important skills one can develop.
Because if you develop them, you stop being in your own way and sabotaging yourself and it leads to generally happier life.

This is what I did i nthe last 14 months:
- Lay down, close my eyes and observe the sensetion of breathing in my belly.
- In the beginning my mind was immediately distracted with thoughts. It took me sometimes a few minutes until I was able to realize that I have been distracted all along. Then I had to force myself to ignore the distrating thought and pay attention to my breathing. It was really hard in the beginning and my sessions lasted usually 15 minutes max.
- But as I got better it became easier...now I have no problems to let go of a thought ... even a very emotiaonally charged one. It's like I have a switch in my head.

I have recommended mindfulness to all my friends and relatives and virtually none of them have made more than a few sessions. That makes me sad, because I can see what effects it can have, but there's nothing more than recommending that I can do - it's really a personal commitment.
Internet Explorer had greater than 90% market share at the peak, and Microsoft was vigorously arguing that it was such an integrated part of the operating system that having a choice was impossible. The whole problem with monopolies is that it doesn't matter if their product sucks because you don't really have any other options. People can only move on if they have a choice.
Per car, and also they are tied to the car, not the driver. So divers rent them for the day, or by the hour.

It's basically a government sanctioned monopoly. It doesn't even have the pretense of being about safety or anything like that.
I had always heard it as thirty years. The ten year estimate seems to be a newer development! (My guess is that fusion is becoming less theoretical and shifting into an engineering problem; still hard, but a bit more deterministic.)
Or set up a VPN to your home address, probably safer than trying to log in via a possibly unsecured channel (most WP installations don't have HTTPS enabled, or maybe that's just mine)
Edward Lucas to become Estonia's first e-resident
That's great, looks really slick! I know you've posted what you'd consider for 2.0, if you are taking suggestions my ideal non-emacs org would be iOS compatible and sync with webDAV/Dropbox.
I usually change the 'admin' username to something different, so the dumb bots that try to bruteforce their way in would give up altogether.

I'm not sure about WordPress revealing whether it's the username or password that's incorrect though. It's a compromise between security and UX that should be left to the admin (of course, there are plugins to remedy this).
Yeah that should be possible. In addition to that, change the default username to something nonstandard, and if you have SSH run it on a non-standard / random port too.
Back to the Future II – The Film’s Somewhat Misguided Predictions
Alan Watts - The Art of Meditation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u10aHEfcEQY
the \d+ is regular expression that means, use:
?author=1
?author=2
?author=3
?author=4
...
Thanks a lot for the pointer Peter.

I also was sceptical at first but apparently achieving 60 fps witch this approach is possible and has the interactivity advantages you mentioned.
Damn, and I was so proud of my best score.
Jackie Chan Blu-ray disc boosts solar panel efficiency by a massive 22%
I concur.

I Landed my last job by meeting someone at a hackathon.
I found my current mid/long-term project doing another hackathon
with the same person where we had the opportunity to develop a prototype
and see that it worked.

I like hackathons because it's the only way for me to have two full days
to actually _make_ something.
I don't follow any brands or business on Facebook - it seems incredibly counter productive, but I can understand that people have different opinions/need from me.

How about letting people see the ads from corporations/business they choose to follow, but prevent them from sharing those ads with their own friends? If you are interested in Nike shoes, more power to you, but I really, really don't want to hear about it.
A Nation of Smartphone Junkies
Butterfly Player – Open-source music player for Windows
DO NOT automatically IP blacklist offenders. I ended up with a .htaccess list of 3,000 banned IPs which took my site down.

Use the highly loved, 5 star rated, 5+ million downloaded "iThemes Security Plugin" for Wordpress (formerly Better Wordpress Security). https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/

● Use the "Change Admin" feature to change your admin username to anything other than "admin".

● Hide your backend so that "yoursite.com/wp-admin" doesn't even lead to the login screen

● Use "Away Mode" so the backend is completely disabled during certain days or times of day. (10pm - 8am overnight)

● Enable "Brute Force" protection for logins, after 3 bad password attempts the host should be locked out.

● DO NOT enable "Blacklist Offenders" feature. If you do, this will add the IP address of offenders to your .htaccess file and eventually take your site offline when the list reaches thousands of IPs. It doesn't scale and you can quickly reach thousands of IPs in just a few days depending on the popularity of your blog.

● Use "Immediately ban host who tries to log in as Admin"

Personally this is what I've found to work for me and my blog. Some days I get 220 hacking attempts and other days it dies down.
This is just dirty playing at it's finest, trying to dissolve a company that actually does work and instil it with even more bureaucracy.

I don't complain that google uses it search to improve it's own products, it's awesome actually. From knowing what kind of food I prefer to show me recommendations, to targeting me with ads that actually interest me. I'd rather pay 10$ for a gadget I saw on an ad than for a penis enlargement pill or give my credit card number because I am a millionth visitor.

What do you believe could be hidden motives behind Axel Springer trying to push google out? More money for them from ads?
> Thanks to the trifecta of ubiquitous smartphones, pervasive Internet and no-holds-barred data mining, I'd argue that the tech landscape we inhabit today is very different from anything we've ever encountered.

Say a startup does create a better product than Google or Facebook, it can't charge for it, because everything is free. It certainly can't monetize it better than Google or Facebook because they have infinitely more data on users than any startup can even fathom. It has to go through Google's and Facebook's "gates" to find and retain customers.

Those precious few that do manage to pull off the impossible, like Whatsapp, will be quickly bought over by Google or Facebook. Thus closing off any gaps that existed in their defense and reducing the possibility of independent competition even more.

I feel like you just described the exact circumstances in which Google and Facebook came up in the world. Competing against huge entrenched interests, couldn't charge for their products, and remember that Brin and Page tried to get acquired and Zuckerberg refused many offers. If history had gone a little differently and had Zuckerberg changed his mind, both companies would be little more than footnotes today, absorbed into some existing behemoth. Meanwhile computing infrastructure today is far far cheaper at gigantic scales.

I don't think we can conclude much from the fact that very few companies become hugely successful these days; that's always been true.

> Merely that we need to do a comprehensive forward-looking analysis of Google's dominance, extrapolating from present data and trends. Using past data alone strikes me as lazy or self-serving

present data and trends are a direct result of the past, and while things do change, it's not clear that today is fundamentally different than 10 years ago and those aren't all still instructive examples (while remembering we're hopelessly under the foot of biased sampling here)
I've never heard of this kind of hackaton. These sound like startup-thons. All those I've attended have been more in the spirit "come and hack on whatever you want, discuss ideas, show of your work" which I think has been great.
Yesbut: these are features of the language(s) of the past, or at best the present.

I hadn't seen this c2 entry yet and was pleasantly surprised how many of those boxes my own Objective-Smalltalk[1] ticks:

- Borrows from Smalltalk but is not a direct descendant (LISP is also there, but less visibly)

- Dynamic typing as default with static typing as an addition (optional most of the time, not optional when interfacing with C). So far, there is only a rudimentary implementation, but more sophisticated static conversions are planned.

- Suitable for large and small applications. Yep, it does scripting and it does software architecture.

- Open Source. Well, yes.

- OO/Actors + FP. Currently, mostly OO. Higher Order Messaging gives a lot of the HOF/FP flavor, messages will be similar to generic functions (with a few crucial differences). Local vars will be immutable by default.

- Theorem Proving system. No, too big. But yes, you will be able to build one yourself and integrated it into the language as if it were built-in. A big part of making this possible are the flexible scheme handlers that support Polymorphic Identifiers[2], meaning you can define storage variables, while flexible messaging lets you implement sophisticated control structures.

- Scheme handlers + PIs also decouple storage definition from implementation, so you can have multiple implementations of the same schema. Automatic conversion is not built-in, but should be easy enough to build using the extensive meta-programming facilities.

- Simple syntax: yes, first thing I stole from Smalltalk, though it needs extending/adapting here and there to deal with the software architecture aspects.

- Easy to build DSLs. With Polymorphic Identifiers and flexible messaging, this is largely covered (also: the ability to define your own software-architectural connectors is largely isomorphic to being able to build your own language primitives).

- First class relations. Not full there yet, but first class references/variables + connectors means you have all the tools to build these.

- A later comment says 'I'm not sure the future of programming languages is even a "language." I imagine that we'll be connecting components on a bus architecture.'. Again, yes, ObjST's central theme is allowing language users to define architectural styles and then hook up the components.

- Graphical: once you have made your software architecture explicit using custom connectors and components, you will often be able to diagram substantial parts of applications.

[1] http://objective.st/

[2] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...
The Inner Workings of Antique Calculators Dramatically Photographed
Is that book the same as this free one? http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Does your book contain exercises?
I think many people are trying to solve this including the ex Light Table guys:

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/
What you're talking about requires deep packet inspection. I don't see why AWS would do that on a platform that has the potencial to generate an enormous amount of HTTP traffic.

The costs of operating something like this would have to be passed on to the client making them less competitive. No way AWS would do this.
I agree with some of these points and I understand why some folks don't like hackathons. I especially understand why some don't like company hackathons or PR hackathons.

I go to about one or two of them per year, am 36 years old, and here's what I DO like about 'generic' hackathons - that have no single sponsor:

- It's a break from my daily routine (I work from home, so its good to mingle)
- It's a lot of fun and I meet smart like-minded people.
- I get to laser focus on learning new tech without any emotional commitment.
- I know it's all for naught so I have no problem starting something and then not feeling 'guilty' about throwing it away afterwards.
- Its a serious mental challenge. I do it more for the personal competition (like golf) rather than competing against others

There are several other reasons, but those are the top for me. I never going in expecting to win (and I never do), so treating it like a weekend of nonsense probably helps.
Thanks. I've been a Forth fan, but recently, looking at the advances in the static code analysis, I'd suspect that the higher level languages have a chance to become very useful in the mcu limited resources environment too. Rust is a nice attempt, and there is also a possibility that something doing a proper region analysis can kick in (looking at languages like Harlan, I would not say it's impossible).
I only was at one Hackathon, yet, and the article pretty much summarizes my thoughts. Instead of working on the Hackathon I did some pull requests to actual FOSS projects. One guy actually presented the thing he did for a FOSS project.

Aren't there hackathons from like Mozilla, Django, Rails communities who just meet to get some specific set of features, bugs or tests out of the way?
I worked with a professional who helped decap and extract firmware from various DSPs. It was enthralling. He succeeded, too. I've also read at lengths the attempts at the hobbyist level. While also very fun, these attempts were not successful even at '90s process scales.

At the hobbyist level, you'll be dealing with fumes from nitric acid to decap chips, and getting blurry, dirty scans that only give you a basic idea on function. Go back to '80s tech and before, and you'll possibly be able to painstakingly read NAND ROM sections by hand.

At the professional level, you'll be spending up to millions of dollars on the equipment necessary to do live probing of chips at this process scale. Here you'll be able to advance the clock on your own, probe and hijack address and data bus lines and log their data constantly.

On the extreme end of security, these chips are countless layers deep and have complicated wire mesh overlays that are used to detect intrusions and self-destruct. They can be beaten, but not by anything you can do with affordable hobbyist equipment.

Contact these guys for a quote; expect it to be at least five figures to work on a single chip.
Actually very reasonable
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Bio-Fuel Powered Electric Triplane Launches on Kickstarter
The writing was on the wall, it spelled "GPS and mobile connected apps".
> The more popular Google is as a traffic source, the more people pay attention to getting that traffic. Website owners put effort into specifically making Google search results good

I see this a lot and while it's true, it's also true that it's not all that difficult to keep the googlebot happy, you'd still be trying to keep crawlers happy if Google wasn't the most popular search engine, and, in fact, what you have to do for the google crawler is basically exactly the same as what you have to do for everyone else[1] (and not in the sense that everyone else just follows Google's lead in what they require because it's all pretty straightforward and generic advice and is, again, not all that difficult to follow).

[1] http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fb...