softdev12

TLDR: This is digital identity obfuscation for web privacy. Advertising and marketing networks have gotten exceptionally good at tracking people across the web. For example, if you have a Google account, you can go into your Settings for Google Ads to see your Age/Gender inference.[1]

[1] https://www.google.com/ads/preferences

Two weeks ago my clickbait blocker was posted on Hacker News and people were kind and thought it was okay. So now I'm posting an enhancement to google and bing searches that I just built. It allows you to do things like sort your results by fewest ads or to see what frameworks the website behind the result uses, etc. The code is open source so if you have any issues or feature requests, you can submit them on my github repo.

This was definitely a consideration. It was why there is a blacklist feature and why only links of a certain length and certain type are analyzed. Any suggestions can be made on github via a pull request.

Good point. There is some consideration for building an option to limit the number of links analyzed. So if you set it to 5 or 10, then the tool would stop at that limit. Feel free to open an issue on github.

Thanks for the comment. There is a new version under development that will use a different approach. Most likely a neural network.

Thanks. This was built because someone posted an ASK HN a few weeks ago. They wanted to know if there was a way to stop clickbait. The text frequency approach seemed like the simplest and cleanest approach to build this in a short timeframe.

Firefox addon is in the works. If you want to contribute code, go to github and make a pull request.

Thanks for the comment. There have been a lot of studies done using the general TF-IDF approach. You can read about it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

There is also a new version planned using a different approach.

Thanks for the suggestion. The code is open sourced on github. Feel free to do a pull request with your approach and I'll take a look at it.

This is an experiment in React Native to see how far its performance could be stretched versus pure native code. Don't expect super fine grained motion control. It just hooks the accelerometer and gyroscope into an 8 octave sax pad. There are 4 different types of sax. Feedback is welcome.

React Native experience was really quite nice. The android and ios versions have almost the exact identical logic and about 50 percent of the same codebase. I imagine as the android framework evolves, the shared code will increase.

interesting. i was under the impression you could just create a snapshot (before destroying the environment) and then restore as needed. am i missing something?

Edit: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_R...

There can be several logical reasons for this. 1, investors expect the company to merge to other verticals (outside of business file-sharing). 2, their current business is already outside business sharing (with consumers). 3, the number is just for a time period (like $904 million per year) and their valuation is over a much longer period (e.g. decades). Any many other reasons...

The solution is for the official Google (et al) text to include a message about the real reason the code was sent, making it clear that the hacker's first text was malicious.

You only need 1 investor - so long as they have enough cash for your needs and fall under the "good/adds value" category. To me, that should equal a hurrah rather than a sigh.

It would be interesting if Y Combinator attempted to convert to an entity that was able to publicly list on a stock exchange and sell shares to the average investor - much like private equity shops Blackstone and Carlyle have done by going public.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/06/blac-j25.html

http://www.carlyle.com/news-room/news-release-archive/carlyl...

If there is a bubble valuation in the public-to-private market, YC could potentially arbitrage the valuation difference into cash for its LPs.

This looks nice. I'd definitely recommend porting it to an app. It seems straightforward enough to implement. Good job.

The essay uses "and" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html), but the book uses the ampersand. Both seem correct.

I highly recommend reading Hatching Twitter (http://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Betr...) which talks about the behind the scenes CEO transitions between first Jack Dorsey, then Ev Williams, then Dick Costolo. Both Jack and Ev were said to be forced out by the board against their will (per the book) - event though the press spin was that they left voluntarily.

I'm hoping that Nick Bilton writes a follow-up with this new Costolo to Dorsey transition. I wouldn't be surprised if Jack ends up removing the interim title and stays full time.

Food, housing, and cars aren't the only annual expenses to consider. The biggest one you're missing is health (even with insurance). One major acute health problem that lands you in the ER or the need to see a doctor could easily adds thousands to annual expenses. This happens all the time. You'd be surprised how many people get put into collections for unanticipated health expenditures.

I also find it extremely misleading when the stores quote statistics such as "over 93 percent of all ios apps have been downloaded every month" as proof that people are finding the apps they want. What they don't disclose is that the majority of these downloads are probably just 1 time downloads by the app creator on their own device.

http://www.padgadget.com/2013/06/10/50-billion-apps-download...

Clever. Proper email validation can be tricky at the edge cases, but parsing out sub-addresses shouldn't be too hard.

I'm curious as to why the OP disclosed this hack - given there are surely more contests to win. I wonder if the target companies have gotten savvy to this technique and it suddenly became ineffective.

If you really go back and do some digging into the roots of facebook, you'll be amazed at how much press he got early on. He supposedly offered to do computer support work for the Harvard Crimson and in return he got press connections. Even before he launched thefacebook, he was getting write ups with facemash.

I'm guessing this isn't a technical limitation. It's probably related to getting the results back in a reasonable amount of time. When I did a speakoff on android, 60 seconds of speech took about 2 minutes to give me results. So I'm guessing the larger the payload, the greater the wait-time. But I may be wrong.

This looks nice. I just downloaded and installed the android version, so I can't really comment on the ios version. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1) the phone call analysis is a really nice hack. i've never seen this before and I like being able to just talk and get the results when the call is over.

2) when i did the speakoff, the results took a really long time to process. I'm not sure if this is a technical limitation or it's something related to network traffic. But this was why I liked the phone call analysis, because the processing happened in the background. if there is a way to speed up the processing of results that would be an improvement.

3) it would be probably be useful to have a history of results - where a person can keep their wins and losses in a speakoff.

4) of course, bringing this to multiple languages is an obvious extension (not just english).

5) i read somewhere that pg is quite tough on YC founders speaking too fast and not clearly enough on Demo Day. Perhaps someone using this might escape his wrath?

Anyway, good luck.

This is nice. I could see it with some sort of ranking system that people can vote on (like HN) to push the best tips to the top. Also, you might want to think about adding 1 field to the email subscribe with an interest parameter - because developers might have a specific tip-set they only care about (like ios, android, react native, etc). Good luck.

With inflation running so low in the U.S. for so many years, it's easy to try to extrapolate this trend as the new norm. And, yes, there are technology pressures that push costs down (i.e machines replacing workers, Moore's law, etc.)

However, there are two big factors that argue against long term deflation:

1) Employee wages: Built into the compensation system is a review process that rewards workers for their work. To date, this process includes a wage increase in the form of a "raise". In an era of full employment, periodic raises push costs up, which leads to increases in prices, which leads to inflation. To change this, the compensation system would need to be changed or employment severely reduced.

2) Central Banks: Most central bankers will use all their tools (in the form of monetary fiscal policy) to prevent long-term deflation. So, there will likely be a major counter-acting force from large governments over time.

This looks nice. It seems to have much of the same functionality as jquery coupled with jquery-ui, right? Or am I missing something? I've used jquery to do all sorts of slide animations and it's cross browser (which may help you with the Chrome only issue - if you decide to port as a jquery plugin).

I do really like the sidebar pop-out. I've never seen that in jquery before - or perhaps missed it in the docs. Good job.

This is a really good article and I agree with a majority of the thesis. Basically, if you try to build a service on one of the major players platforms, you are susceptible to being cut off or damaged in one way or another. This occurred with Meerkat-Twitter, Zynga-Facebook, Demand Media-Google and many others.

However, it is possible to succeed. And the counterpoint is paypal and ebay. Most people don't remember that paypal was building their service inside of ebay and ebay was not at all friendly about it. In fact, ebay bought a rival payment company and tried to offer incentives to their sellers to switch from paypal. But paypal still won out. They key is to get major support from the platform's own users - like paypal did with ebay's sellers.

So it is possible to succeed on someone else's "p"latform.

Don't forget that they have a stored credit card with payment information as well (via Stripe). That's another barrier to entry - especially considering the effort in building up enough trust to hand over payment details.

I really enjoyed Ghost in the Wires (basically Mitnick's bio). I had first read Takedown by Tsutomo Shimomura which told of Mitnick's pursuit by the guy who ended up help to catch him. "Wires" was the other side - what Mitnick did when he was on the run - and his side of how he was finally caught. Really interesting stuff. It was like the Rashomon effect[1].

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Takedown-Pursuit-Capture-Americas-Comp...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect