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The difference is that Google is not media.

Google disagrees. In fact, that disagreement was the reason why Google's IPO modeled the voting stock structure on that of publicly-owned newspapers and other media companies. The danger is that public ownership may drive the company to push perspectives that the shareholders want, so voting rights are retained in a small group whose editorial integrity is trusted. Google's founders demanded that the IPO be set up as it was specifically so that they couldn't be forced by shareholders to manipulate search results, because they felt that it was critical for Google's sake that it continue to be an honest index of web content. It has now become big enough that it is important not just to Google but to the integrity of the world's political processes.

As others have pointed out, this may represent an improvement over the status quo ante, in which the available political news was decided by media which were overtly political. On the other hand, the new world of automatically-personalized search engines exacerbate the risk of the filter bubble. Search engines don't create this risk, because it has always been possible for people to choose to subscribe to news sources that confirm their own biases (and many, many people have), but in that case at least people know they're choosing one source over another, even if they may not recognize why they're doing it.

On the other hand, it's possible for Google et al to counter the filter bubble effect by occasionally inserting high-quality counter-preference results. The interesting thing about that approach is that it can be argued that it is a case of deliberate manipulation, while selecting for preference is just a logical way to better serve the user by giving them what they're looking for.

FYI, Matt Cutts (one of the leaders of Google's Web Search team) responded to filter bubble questions on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/i.... Among other things, he says Google does do some things to increase diversity in results. He also mentions that you can easily disable web personalization if you don't want it.

Over at 'the other place' the guy who did some of the computer modelling for the project has chipped in with some insights that are a bit more interesting than those (dare I say it) here (there, I did).
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
eg Here's a thread from there:

T-A 18 hours ago | link

So the Economist's point is that a "research" project exploring an idea about the universe which has been known to be incorrect for centuries somehow proves the value of the humanities? Really?

14113 15 hours ago | link

Yes. It provides a lot of information about the history of science. Most importantly, Grosseteste was one of the first to use what we now think of as the scientific method, and (I believe) the first to suggest a 'big bang like' start to the universe.

He's essential in the history of science for introducing aristotalean traditions and ideas, to the scientific discourse at the time, as well as being one of the early founders of science. For that reason at least he's well worth studying, and especially his ideas, which are very close to what we have now. What the science researchers are doing is helping the historians formalise his ideas in todays language and notations so that their similarities can be seen with todays ideas.

Source: I worked on this project over last summer as a computer science student visualising his explanation for the start of the universe.

Use Rust. It's not at version 1.0 yet but it's promising. See some comments on Rust's benefits for security. And some blog posts by Andrew Ruef and Patrick Walton.

There may be some backlash, such as RareBits pulling their app from the Firefox Marketplace, due to Brendan Eich's support of the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 initiative in CA. Eich publicly responded back in 2012. The issue is being discussed on Hacker News as well.

I'm against gay marriage. I think it's ridiculous that people who aren't religious want to engage in a religious institution. That said, the type of attitude you have is much much worse than anything you could possibly ascribe to me. You wish not to discriminate against gays, fine, but then turn around and want to discriminate against people like Eich and myself.

You're a hypocrite of the worst kind. Eich is free to disagree with gay marriage all he likes. If he breaks a law then you can kick and scream and stamp your feet like a fucking child, until then piss off.

There may be some backlash, such as RareBits pulling their app from the Firefox Marketplace, due to Brendan Eich's support of the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 initiative in CA. Eich publicly responded back in 2012. The issue is being discussed on Hacker News as well.

See my comments a couple months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

You bitcoin guys think you can push buttons on your computer and code around the system. So naive.
Sorry to be a pessimist, but they can just say anyone transferring bitcoin to another party without going through a KYC compliant intermediary is money laundering and then send the swat team out to whatever ip they can track down via NSA whatever. Game. Set. Match. Banks win as usual, all done. They'll take it down just like Pirate Bay, etc.
Can someone tell me how people think the cryptonerds can win here? I'll be over here munching on my popcorn thank you.

Consider these Mt. Gox loses:

• - June 2011: seller's administrator account was hacked by an unknown process. The priveleges were then abused to generate humungous quantities of BTC. None of the BTC, however, was backed by Mt. Gox. The attackers sold the BTC generated, driving Mt. Gox BTC prices down to cents. They then purchased the cheap BTC with their own accounts and withdrew the money. ... Many customers claim they have lost money from this reversion, but Mt. Gox claims it has reimbursed all customers fully for this theft. After the incident, Mt. Gox shut down for several days.
• - June 2011: Users with weak passwords on MyBitcoin who used the same password on Mt. Gox were in for a surprise after the June 2011 Mt. Gox Incident allowed weakly-salted hashes of all Mt. Gox user passwords to be leaked. These passwords were then hacked on MyBitcoin and a significant amount of money lost.
• - October 2011: Mt. Gox accidentally destroyed 2609.36304319 bitcoins.
• - July 2012: A hacker infiltrated the Mt. Gox account used by Bitcoin Syndicate, sold off the USD owned, and withdrew all balances.
• - July 2012: On July 13, 2012, a thief compromised the Bitcoinica Mt. Gox account. The thief made off with around 30% of Bitcoinica's bitcoin assets.

But for any programmer, none of this is a surprise given he hacked up an ssh server in PHP, then deployed it on a production server.

OOXML and the FAT/exFAT patents are some of them. There is this HN comment thread BTW: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Uhhh...or a heart attack at work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Reddit is good for low brow stuff - too much noise there and repeated jokes.

Try Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/

While the Beta mess is sorted out (I hope it is!), why not cool down your nerves and relax at Hacker News. That's most close to Slashdot of the sites I can think. Comes with a premium no-frills UI that is great with all devices, and HTTPS out of the box. Pair that with newsyc20 Twitter feed and you're all set.

as another wave of people decide the downsides of (say) Reddit

At this point, https://news.ycombinator.com/ starts to look appealing to me.

Just submitted a story to the Firehose: Once Slashdot beta has been foisted on me, what site should I use?

https://news.ycombinator.com/n...

For what it's worth, "millions of dollars" is a pretty low bar. A million dollars in the US will get you _maybe_ 5 person-years worth of work from anyone at all competent (using the normal rule of thumb that an employees cost to the employer is about 2x salary once you take into account benefits, employer taxes, equipment, office space, etc).

So 10 million dollars will get you a 10 years worth of work from 5 developers. As an example, the PyPy project is 10 years old....

For JS, between the various browser vendors, the right number is probably closer to 300-500 person-years (see https://news.ycombinator.com/i... for an attempted breakdown). Figure $100 million as a low estimate. Chances are, the people involved are being paid more than $100k a year, so adjust the estimate up accordingly...

Care to share what those news sources are?

Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/
(I'm a different AC to the OP BTW)

Google builds DRM into their browser:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7055403

Boycott them until they remove it. Mozilla is one of the few browser vendors that can be trusted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6900762

This indicates that Google actually pulled code out. They could have just re-hidden it. Instead, it is now completely unavailable.

Why are you making excuses for them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6900762

If that is true, it means Google actually yanked the calls, instead of just hiding them.

Here's one discussion, FWIW:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200206

This post (found in the comments of TFA) contains more details. The bundling only happens if the project owner requests it. And the user can reject installing anything other than the application they came for.

I still think it's a bad idea though: apparently some projects did accept this (they get a cut of the revenue) and as a result users might become wary of downloading things from SourceForge. Trust is easier lost than gained. In fact, some users are so paranoid about installers that we've been releasing our Windows build of openMSX as a ZIP file in addition to an installer for several years now.

...which is exactly why some folks are flocking to CLANG. Sure, not everyone wants to extend/modify his compiler, but actively preventing people from reusing your code isn't exactly what you should do if you want to keep a community thriving.

Their analysis that the linux rng is insecure under this (rather contrived) model rests on an _incorrect_ assumption that Linux stops adding to the entropy pool when the estimator concludes that the entropy pool is full.

Exactly. The maintainer of the /dev/random driver explained this and a lot more about this paper here.

I'm in IT myself, and I know how difficult it is to come up with good test-data for your testing...so what's better than production data?

I'm not saying it is so, but it could very well be that the testers have loaded into it this years candidates, made up some likely result, and run the software to see that it works...

And apparently it did! ;)

Yup. Generally people doing election-related software have to test with data that is as similar to what will be in the live election as possible, including names of candidates and parties. See this comment in the HN discussion of this, from a developer of election reporting software that has been used in the US and other countries, for details on why and how this sort of thing can happen.

In fact, this same thing happened in the US in the 2012 Illinois Republican primary. The reporting company providing the data to many news organizations accidentally marked the test feed as live for a couple hours the day before the election, and a couple of TV station websites, which were set up to automatically publish updates from the live feed, published this.

The problem in the present case is that it took place in Azerbaijan, which has a long history of widespread corruption and election fraud. It is quite believable that someone has in fact pre-generated the actual election results, and those accidentally got pushed early.

Yes, gl4ss I'm of the same opinion... that the best design was the simple original... The more this moves away from simple and toward candy, big graphics and open sidebars, the more time I will spend at http://news.ycombinator.com/

The person who did much of the conversion work has commented in the Hacker News discussion of this, and explains why tools like latex2html were not good enough.

The sad thing is that there is no way to ever put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The U.S. just permanently lost any position as a leading internet innovator.

And because having worked for NSA or NSA-linked contractors is seen as a black mark on one's academic career, NSA has also jeopardized its own ability to recruit the next generation of cryptographers.

There's give and take between the SIGINT and COMSEC missions, and nobody here (or within the IC) is privy to all the information. I fear that by the time it's all declassified in 25 years and can be analyzed in context, the decisions made over the past 12 years will have proven to be gross strategic errors that did far more harm than any harm they prevented.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6222691

Chrome's security tech lead gives a pretty good answer here:

Consider the case of someone malicious getting access to your account. Said bad guy can dump all your session cookies, grab your history, install malicious extension to intercept all your browsing activity, or install OS user account level monitoring software.

Chrome's security tech lead is lying to you. According to this logic, every windows machine should include a button to click and display your Windows User Login Password or Administrative Password in plain text. I dont run Windows, so I dont know if it does that... but it sure would be stupid if it did that. Stupid like chrome. Basically, that logic implies that if your computer is left unattended for one moment that it should instantly give up all your privacy and secrets quickly and easily as possible.

Everyone knows that Google is lying. They are trying actively implementing insecure browser passwords, because they dont want you to use them. They would prefer that everyone use their google account for login to 3rd party sights and use their Two-Factor authentication plugins.

Google is creating a "false flag senario". They are creating a problem that does not need to exist, bringing fear to the users and then they are offering a solution to the problem they just created. Once Google owns all your passwords, it will be profitable for them to sell this information... possibly to those who need to verify that you are not committing crimes.

The thing to get here is that there are basically two kinds of OOP, so to speak.

Here's a short discussion that covers it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2336444

In Alan Kay land objects are sub-computers that receive messages from other sub-computers. In Barbara Liskov world objects are abstract data with operators and a hidden representation.

Kay OOP is closely related to the actor model by Carl Hewitt and others.

Liskov had her own idea of OOP, and she was not aware of Smalltalk (Kay, Ingalls) at the time. She started work on her own language, CLU, at the same time as Smalltalk was developed.

Chrome's security tech lead gives a pretty good answer here:

Consider the case of someone malicious getting access to your account. Said bad guy can dump all your session cookies, grab your history, install malicious extension to intercept all your browsing activity, or install OS user account level monitoring software. My point is that once the bad guy got access to your account the game was lost, because there are just too many vectors for him to get what he wants.

People worried about the security of this are worried over the wrong things. Firefox's master password would do absolutely nothing to stop a dropped-in extension from monitoring webpages for when passwords are filled, grabbing the filled form-data, and storing it in the extensions own preferences; and that wouldnt even take a background process, admin privileges, or really anything more than the ability to drop a file in the firefox profile.

I would be willing to place a large bet that in any scenario that would allow me to recover Chrome or Safari passwords, I would also be able to recover firefox passwords that are locked with a master password, within a reasonable amount of time. As has been said many many times, anything that tries to protect against a malicious user with access to your user session is pure security theatre.

You are both missing the point entirely. The issue is to have the default security bar set high enough to at least stop casual information theft. Your definition of a "Malicious person" only accounts for an incredibly tiny percentage of people with such skill sets and doesn't even consider the majority of people. As it is now chrome is practically begging average people to steal that info if even the slightest opportunity arises.

Most kids or people in general likely don't know enough or aren't motivated enough to bother setting up some kind of exploit on a usb stick or website to do the kind of things you are talking about. However; if you make it as incredibly easy as chrome does to grab that info without having even necessarily pre-planned to do it then those same people will be highly tempted to do it, and enough will.

It's the same principle as locking your home or your car. Sure, someone could pick the lock or break it, does that mean you give up and don't bother locking it and just count on the "security" offered by the police force? Does that make locking your door "Security Theater"? No, because for the most part the lock is more than enough of a barrier to block "casual" entry and most people won't pick it or break it. However; leave your car & home unlocked all the time when you are gone with a sign on them saying they are unlocked (equivalent of using chrome while logged in but stepped away for even a short time) and eventually some otherwise "honest" citizen or lazy crook will not be able to resist the temptation. The percentage of illegal activity will shoot way up. There is a solid case for locking your door, as well as keeping password lists locked under a separate Master password.

Again; Why not just allow a separate Master password like Thunderbird does? It's clearly not difficult to implement or use.

Chrome's security tech lead gives a pretty good answer here:

Consider the case of someone malicious getting access to your account. Said bad guy can dump all your session cookies, grab your history, install malicious extension to intercept all your browsing activity, or install OS user account level monitoring software. My point is that once the bad guy got access to your account the game was lost, because there are just too many vectors for him to get what he wants.

People worried about the security of this are worried over the wrong things. Firefox's master password would do absolutely nothing to stop a dropped-in extension from monitoring webpages for when passwords are filled, grabbing the filled form-data, and storing it in the extensions own preferences; and that wouldnt even take a background process, admin privileges, or really anything more than the ability to drop a file in the firefox profile.

I would be willing to place a large bet that in any scenario that would allow me to recover Chrome or Safari passwords, I would also be able to recover firefox passwords that are locked with a master password, within a reasonable amount of time. As has been said many many times, anything that tries to protect against a malicious user with access to your user session is pure security theatre.

Best I have found is news.ycombinator.com. It's like slashdot was 10 years ago. It's got a slight hipster/startup twist to it, but it sure beats wading through reddit.

mod parent up

more:

"I am under surveillance by Canadian agents, my computer has been backdoored (nadim.cc)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5194489

"Addendum (added Feb. 10, 1:50PM EST): Iâ(TM)ve decided that the way Iâ(TM)m going to deal with this is by doing disk forensics on my computer and moving on, continuing my life as normal. I am not going to slip into total paranoia because of this incident. I have a history of attempted entrapments, of border interrogations and of surveillance, and with this incident, hereâ(TM)s what Iâ(TM)ll say:

If any agency is continuing to monitor me because of Cryptocat, you are invited to meet me under honest pretenses and have a cup of coffee with me. Just donâ(TM)t lure me in with lies and donâ(TM)t backdoor my computers. Be honest with me and I will have no problem discussing my work with you. I am not a criminal, I am an upstanding citizen. If you want answers, then contact me and be honest about it. You have nothing to fear from me.

In order not to cause unnecessary drama, to protect my privacy and to lessen my stress levels, Iâ(TM)m removing this blog post until further notice and investigation. This attracted way more attention that I wanted it to. I just wanted to protect myself, not cause a media uproar. Thank you everyone for your support. This is already a stressful situation and the huge level of attention to this blog post is just making everything more stressful to deal with."

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=2187386

First, what people get paid often has very little connection with productivity. On top of that, it may even dis-incentivize them -- see Dan Pink on that. So, the assumptions implicit in your post are problematical.
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Also, never before have we been automating intelligence to such a degree. The US GDP in the first decade of the 21st century grew by about 33% without adding any net new jobs, even as the population grew. That is the new reality that you and many mainstream economists are ignoring. Paul Krugman is starting to get itt, as discussed here:
"Sympathy for the Luddites"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5882422

Agriculture went from 90% of workers to 2% over 200 years. Manufacturing went from 35% to 15% or so over the past 50 years and continue to drop. Working hours per person have also dropped over that time, especially for children who used to be a big part of the labor force. Why should "services" not go the same way via AI and other automation and better design? Why employ a human if you don't have to?

Based on what you write, wouldn't you automate anything the first chance you get to maximize your profits? If everyone does that, who are your customers? Well, when there is 90% unemployment (possible in 20 years or so as AI really proliferates?), it may be too late to do anything about it, so it will mean little if you say "oops"... See also Martin Ford's book, "The Lights in the Tunnel".
http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/

Anyway, you're assuming that we need most people to work to make the stuff we need. We don't. See Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work" for example.

Yes, family is important. But so is community and related non-profit charities. (Although charity just papers over a deep issue in our society about "human rights" in an age of 21st century technology.) So is good government. So is individual effort.

But in a capitalist consumer-oriented society it all comes to naught if you have no capital for whatever reasons and there are no jobs for you and the charities are exhausted. Your entire extended family can then be out of work and starving. Already the US food banks are overwhelmed. Food stamps you might say. But then why not a basic income instead for all, to be fairer?

Crank up unemployment further and stuff will really start to collapse. Much of the current collapse is in the USA us now so common as to not be newsworthy anymore, where decaying infrastructure or domestic violence or rising abortions or poor child nutrition or deferred medical care and so on. So, those in the USA who don't find a way to survive just die, either right away, or through some downward spiral of self-medication via drugs or via bad nutrition and disease, and that is hardly newsworthy. (Not to say the wealthy in the USA don't eat poorly too often.) And in any case, it does not account for all the needless suffering in a land overflowing with food and material goods... Why worry about trying to get everyone to be materially productive when there is so much? And also when the other sectors of our society like the voluntary gift economy or democratically planned economy or even local subsistence skills are let wither through lack of time to engage in those areas?

A basic income replaces a social safety net for the destitute or disabled with a human right for all to draw a small amount regularly from the productive commons. Then we don't have to have any needs based programs on things like minimum wage or SSI. It could also replace public schooling and so on with a free market for education. Already in the USA, the government (at all levels) spend an average of about US$600 a month per citizen between public schooling, health programs, and social security. Why not increase that a bit

What's your take on this thread on Hacker News where the commenter tried to cast complete blame on Microsoft for this? Is he right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5974130

Ask those who have "nothing to hide":

Questions for people with nothing to hide:

1. Have you ever had an abortion?

2. Have you ever cheated on your husband / wife?

3. Are you currently looking for a new job?

4. Have you ever being diagnosed with a mental illness?

5. Are you currently on anti-depressants?

6. Were you ever sexually abused as a child?

7. Have you ever fancied someone of the same sex?

8. Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex?

9. Have you ever criticised your current employer or boss to anyone else?

10. Do you love all of your children equally?

11. Have you ever fantasized about...

12. Are you planning to get pregnant in the next two years?

13. Have you ever lied on a cv/resume?

14. Are you mean to your wife / husband on a regular or semi-regular basis?

15. Do you have trouble acquiring or maintaining an erection?

16. Are you one of those women who’ve never had an orgasm?

17. What prescription drugs are you currently taking?

18. Have you ever cut yourself?

19. Have you ever attempted suicide?

20. Have you contemplated suicide in the past 2 weeks?

21. Would you be happy with your answers to these questions being made public? Or being read by your employer, local 23 year old policeman, or nosey neighbour?

(Source.)

Please join in the discussion of this at Hacker News as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5699457

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667391

In the above HN comment, basically it explains the linode hack, saying they got access to linodes registrar and were going to use it to steal passwords from linode customers. But they ended up finding the Coldfusion hole made it possible to break directly into linode, so they used that instead.

Another typical short sighted anti-MS karmawhoring Slashdot post while whoring Google Docs which Google controls and can take away at moment's notice.
http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-04-13/how-i-lost-access-my-google-account-today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799
Meanwhile, in the real world, Office is making record revenues.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/20/technology/microsoft_earnings/index.htm

I've never actually done a comment like this, where I go "Oh come on Slashdot, what is this and why is it here?"

But come on Slashdot, why is this here?

News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.

Y combinator Hacker News are a good alternative site with no lame drug stories.

https://news.ycombinator.com/

'Anonymous' submitter undoubtedly the author himself currently doing the publicity rounds.

Chromium and WebKit have divergent goals and it has become increasingly burdensome trying to reconcile them.

Except that Apple said they would have been perfectly happy to have Google contribute the changes Google wanted to make, except Google refused:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242

Smells like Embrace and Extinguish to me.

Hacker News might be good for you. They're in general a little more intelligent and a little less crazy.

Hopefully either your post or mine, further down, will be modded up.

That's not free software according to the FSF because it is BSD licensed rather than GPL. Also it was 'written solely to undermine freedom'.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100806143457345

36:50
What we are entering in upon then is our maturity. It isn't that GNU is finished. GNU, fortunately, is renewed all the time and is becoming renewable. In the same way that there was a moment a few years back when I talked to Leon, and I realized that there were a bunch of young hackers in their late teens who were getting into apps and that's going to have an enormous effect in renewing what was there. We are gonna have a flood of people towards GNU, and that's going to make an immense difference.

It's going to happen everywhere. But Mr. Jobs is investing heavily in LLVM solely so he can stop using GCC, lest the patents somehow leak across the GPLv3 barrier, and we become able to use his claims. Nobody has ever tried before, to build a multi-platform C compiler solely in order to undermine freedom. [laughter] A hardware manufacturer or two has done something here and there -- we had a little bit of BSD interest in non-copyleft compilation -- but here's the man whose selfishness surpasses any recorded selfishness. [laughter/applause]

38:26
It's unfortunate. But writing software is what we do best. And catching GCC with LLVM isn't going to be easy. [?] you know, there's lots to do.

Basically the FSF's objection to LLVM is that it duplicates functionality in GCC and that they don't control it so they can't put it under GPVv6 when an angel reads that out to Stallman in a toejam inspired hallucination.

The strange thing is that bad mouthing competing projects because you don't control them is the sort of thing Jobs or Ballmer would do.

only one comment was sexual in nature. the dongle one. the other one was about forking being a form of flattery, which adria misconstrued as sexual. just as the dongle comment was inappropriate, it was equally inappropriate to post their picture to twitter w/o even confronting them.

Posting their picture publically without their explicit consent might also very well be *illegal*, which I, apparently wrongly, thought might actually be more serious than *offensive*.

only one comment was sexual in nature. the dongle one. the other one was about forking being a form of flattery, which adria misconstrued as sexual. just as the dongle comment was inappropriate, it was equally inappropriate to post their picture to twitter w/o even confronting them.

At best I consider this a workaround, not a fix. I have considered legacy PR obsolete for a while now. Reminds me of this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717449

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352969

Reminds me of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2536186

Of course they're being hoarded.

On the contrary, all the economic indicators point to the fact that, globally, Bitcoin spending is increasing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5296889 Perhaps people are uncertain about Bitcoin's future, or are plainly irrational, hence they still spend bitcoins despite knowing about deflation.