Month: January 2017

Block unwanted advertisements with /etc/hosts file on Linux

Back in the old days, before the browsers even had extensions like Adblock Plus, many of us – tech-savvy web surfers – used to block unwanted advertising, SPAM sites, and other non-sense using the /etc/hosts file.  The technology behind is very simple – you overwrite the IP address to which the unwanted website’s domain name resolves with a loopback IP address (127.0.0.1).  Whether you do it on your own machine or at a home/office proxy server is irrelevant.  And it worked magic!

Turns out, people still use this technique today.   I came across this article, which shows how to use a rather extensive list of domains for all sorts of online madness, collected and maintained by kind folks at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/.

I tried it out of pure curiosity and sure enough it does what it says.  I’ve reverted back to Adblock Plus a couple of days later though, as random sites were breaking here and there.  I think this might be related to different adblock-detectors that many sites employ these days.  Also, some of the ads use things like embedded scripts or buttons, which might render JavaScript errors, preventing the rest of the page from loading.

But if you’ve never tried it, I strongly recommend giving it a go.

WordPress Theme Developer Handbook

WordPress Theme Developer Handbook:

The Theme Developer Handbook is a repository for all things WordPress themes. Whether you’re new to WordPress themes, or you’re an experienced theme developer, you should be able to find the answer to many of your theme-related questions right here.

Finally, there is a more organized resources that WordPress Codex!

10,000 most common English words

This GitHub repository contains a list of the 10,000 most common English words, sorted by frequency, as seen by the Google Machine Translation Team.

Here at Google Research we have been using word n-gram models for a variety of R&D projects, such as statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, entity detection, information extraction, and others. While such models have usually been estimated from training corpora containing at most a few billion words, we have been harnessing the vast power of Google’s datacenters and distributed processing infrastructure to process larger and larger training corpora. We found that there’s no data like more data, and scaled up the size of our data by one order of magnitude, and then another, and then one more – resulting in a training corpus of one trillion words from public Web pages.

We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That’s why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,588,391 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.

There are a few variations of the list – with and without the swear words and such.  I took a quick look at it and was surprised to find that “cyprus” is at position 4,993 (pretty high), immediately after the word “emails“.  Weird!

(found via the link from this article)

Engineers Salary Data

Amitj Aggarwal, former Staff Engineer at Google (2008-2012), has collected a whole bunch of data in regards to engineers salaries, in USA and worldwide.  His points seem to be overly optimistic at times, but I don’t have any links handy to contradict his research.

Here are a few points to get you started:

  • Zoho, Salesforce pay 40% more than Oracle, Cisco, GE!!!
  • Top 7% or so engineers at Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook are paid more than $1.4M per year. Next 10% make $700K on average.
  • Facebook has lost relevance to Slack, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest and Quora. If you are working at Facebook ask for a 50% raise else move to a startup.
  • Oracle is loosing to cloud startups. If you are working at Oracle ask for a 60% raise else move to a startup.
  • ENGINEERS DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON AN MBA. You will make 2X more on average as an engineer.
  • Tableau, Splunk, Slack, Airbnb, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Google pay more than $320K salary to their top hires. Definitely interview at these fine places. Uber top engineer salaries are $190-340K per year.
  • Starting salaries for fresh software engineering graduates is now $130K-160K. Ask shamelessly. For the best ones its ~$180K.
  • Apple pays 60% more than Samsung.