cbr

"Will someone pay you to publish your work" is a much stronger filter than "do you put your work on your website".

(I write this as someone who has written a lot on my website for free and not published anything in a paid forum.)

Should Google just kill it and suggest people move to GitHub?

Github is a great alternative for Google Code.

Nothing currently out there is as good as Google Code Search was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search

    The old Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia had different
    facts for different countries. In the US edition, Thomas
    Edison invented the light bulb, while the British version
    said it was Sir Joseph Swan.

If you search for "lightbulb inventor" on Google [1] it currently shows three "lightbulb inventors": Thomas Edison, Hiram Maxim, and Joseph Swan.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=lightbulb%20inventor

I'll say again: I really like T-Mobile's $30/month prepaid unlimited data plan. Combine with Hangouts for voice and Voice for text (who names these?) and it's about the cheapest you can get for a smartphone.

(Tradeoff? Poor service outside cities.)

    The sample is only searches where DDG fails; inevitably,
    every other search engine will provide better results.

That's not guaranteed. You could try the search on Google in an incognito tab and decide you think the results are actually worse.

(But yes, it is a skewed sample.)

When you start using these apps there's generally a popup like this one:

    When you use voice activation commands like
    "OK Google" or touching a microphone icon, a
    recording of the next thing you say, plus a
    few seconds before, may be used and stored
    by Google and associated with your Google
    Account to help recognize your voice and
    improve speech recognition. [1]

Wiretapping is when someone records you secretly, so I don't see how the laws would apply here. It's just like you can record your phone calls if you answer them with "hi, this is SilasX, and this call is being recorded."

[1] http://cdn3.pcadvisor.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3535224/OK_Goog...

Newspapers digitizing their archives is great; it's their rejection of the initial removal request that should have been challenged. Removing things from indexes makes much less sense than removing them at their source.

Disclaimer: I work for Google as an engineer on open source software.

I like that my wages are high, but I don't like that lots of other people don't have good economic options. If my wages go down because more people learn to code and it becomes less of a sellers market, I'd consider that a good outcome.

Organizing to keep new coders out would just help existing coders relative to everyone else, and as a whole we're a group that's relatively well off.

This is also how ngx_pagespeed gets back onto nginx's event loop after finishing some work in a background thread.

My favorite are the comments like:

    1:12pm   line 33: Why are you doing this?
    1:13pm   line 33: I see, sorry, ignore my earlier comment.

A system that lets you draft comments and then send them out in a batch can avoid a bunch of noise. On the other hand, though, people who aren't expecting it can get stuck with draft comments they don't send out.

Some cases are ambiguous, as fuzzy definitions change over time. In this case, however, a name that once applied only to relatively severe cases has been intentionally expanded:

    The term "Asperger's disorder" will not appear in the
    DSM-5, the latest revision of the manual, and instead
    its symptoms will come under the newly added "autism
    spectrum disorder", which is already used widely. That
    umbrella diagnosis will include children with severe
    autism, who often do not talk or interact, as well as
    those with milder forms.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/02/aspergers-syn...

    Though the data we have is under constant scrutiny for
    its accuracy, methodology, and usefulness, the Centers
    for Disease Control reports that the current rate of
    autism diagnosis in the United States is 1 in 68. This
    is a continuation of a trend identified by the
    Environmental Protection Agency that started between
    1988 and 1992, when the worldwide diagnosis of autism
    spiked from 6 in 10,000 kids to 24 in 10,000. 

The main problem with this data is that the definition of autism has expanded over time. The category of "aspergers", a relatively limited form, was eliminated and folded into "autism", making historical numbers hard to work with.

This article is mostly talking about the most low-functioning forms of autism, for which the numbers are far far lower than 1 in 68.

Significantly less, but still impressive for its purpose.

Most of those products locally recognize an activation command: "hey siri", "ok google", "alexa", ... and then send the next phase to the cloud for interpretation. With Samsung's Smart-TV, however, it sounds like everything you say is uploaded so that they can recognize "Channel Up", "Smart Hub" etc.

In MA you need two-party consent for audio recordings, but not for text or audioless video. CA may be similar.

To figure the "cost" of learning a language in school you need to count what else you could have been learning with that time.

Lets say you're hiring a freelancer and you take bids. The lowest bid is from a member of a historically disadvantaged minority, and the reason their bid is lower is because as a member of that group discrimination makes it harder for them to find work. A good, well-meaning person might still accept the bid.

A fixed wing drone could turn off its engine to glide over the border. Very hard to hear, very hard to spot.

Like in DOS blocking? I'd expect that too. But this doesn't sound like the kind of thing rasz_pl would object to?

    associate a fresh newly installed system / browser / ip
    with a trace of crumbs you usually leave on the network

Again, I totally agree this is possible, but I haven't seen any evidence that they're doing it. If they were doing this they'd be using it for something, but it's not visible in any of the public products. For example, the company in the article you linked to, Drawbridge, talks about cross-device tracking as something they could sell to advertisers.

    Everyone is doing it, Google, FB, Amazon all have acres
    of server farms grinding such data.

"Everyone is doing it" is very different from "everyone is in a position to do it". If you have some evidence that a big reputable company, like the three you mention here, actually is "identifying you even when you are not logged in and browse in private mode with no cookies" I would love to see it.

    Google even offers free DNS servers just to
    collect more of it.

The privacy policy for Google's DNS [1] says "Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information." Do you think they're not following the policy?

    Amazon will give you different price depending on who
    it 'thinks' you are.

Really? Some looking turns up Bezos saying "We've never tested and we never will test prices based on customer demographics." [2] (Even then, dynamic pricing is way less invasive than trying to connect User-A to User-A-In-Incognito-Mode.)

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy [2] http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119399

I agree that it's possible. I would be extremely surprised if Google were doing this, however, so I'm interested in why rasz_pl thinks they are.

    Google cluster identifies you even when you are not
    logged in and browse in private mode with no cookies

Source?

Detailed link: http://streetswithoutcars.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-hambu...

    Comments include "They're probably lying," "This is
    like a parent posting their kindergartener's first
    crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out into
    blogs," etc. And most of those comments were heavily
    endorsed by this community

Hmm; I remember that thread as much more positive. Let's look back over top level comments and look at ratios?

     [1] supportive: I did this kind of thing too!
     [2] dismissive: this sound suspicious
     [3] supportive: nostalgic
     [4] supportive: modern stuff shouldn't be harder to use
     [5] supportive: I did something similar
     [6] supportive: astonishing story
     [7] dismissive: nitpicking remembered memory sizes
     [8] supportive: fascinating story
     [9] supportive: we should be talking about the op, not ourselves
    [10] supportive: I did similar stuff too
    [11] dismissive: win2x > win98
    [12] supportive: similar experience; would love to talk
    [13] dismissive: not an os, it's a shell
    ...

Seems largely positive? And I'm not seeing either of the two quotes you reference.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747260 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747255 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747247 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747523 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747278 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747624 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747248 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747244 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748571 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751978 [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747364 [12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747228 [13] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747712

ngx_pagespeed would be another way of serving WebP to supporting browsers and JPEG to others.

Actual link? I don't remember reading this in any of the leaked documents and I can't find it now, though I could have missed it.

The patent was abandoned after being rejected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780445

In the case of drinking water, desalination is already cheap enough that we're talking pennies a day. Even a typical American usage of 100 gal/day is around $0.15 at market energy rates [1] and is still under $0.50/day with solar.

[1] http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/water/gamechangers/... gives $489 per acre-foot.

You can already do this with a timing attack. Use js to add a script tag with http://facebook.com/js/somefakefile.js to the page, and time how long it takes to load. If it's in cache it will be much faster.