skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I call bullshit.

That's cool with me.

> Have you actually ever had someone clone your site or tried to protect against it this way?

Yes, otherwise I wouldn't have written that, now wouldn't I?

> I am all ears for your story... I have never heard of anything like that.

That you haven't heard of something is not a reason to assume that it doesn't exist, there are actually more things that you probably haven't heard about that aren't bullshit either.

In fact, there are probably lots of those things.

I recently did a fairly large project, well documented here on HN and in the press where I did just that. Some less than honorable characters were cloning the data as fast as it hit the server and turning it into 'mfa' fodder, so at some point I shut that down and submitted the site to google which then crawled it at it's leisure.

Even today that crawl isn't 100% complete yet, and the only way you can reach those pages right now is by going through the google index.

Long term I expect plenty of those pages to be linked again, both internally by linking pages that are related as well as externally by people that link to their content.

I get about 50 emails daily confirming that the strategy worked, those people have lost their content and find it again through google and this is the only copy of it on the web, in spite of active attempts at making clones.

The ip blocklist for that site is close to 10,000 IPs.

> Even submitting a page in a sitemap doesn't ensure it gets crawled, and it certainly won't get crawled if you have a large site and don't set up your sitemap just right.

No, if you don't set it up right then of course, it won't work, but that goes for most things in the technology world.

Right now there are 197,000 pages indexed on that site according to google so I really can't complain, it seems to have worked very well.
It seems Arrington enjoys writing inflammatory articles to foment comments from his readership. Based on his responses to comments it seems he's not really interested in feedback, debate or facts.
You know every fiber of his being is lousy and watching him makes you a worse person, but his outrageous suits keep your eyes glued.

Kinda harsh, no?
> Sell it at a loss, make it up in volume? Right.

Or diversify. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. This is the games business, the entertainment industry, where the audience is fickle and diverse in their interests. When it comes to volume, avoid repackaging the same game; you want to hit other player interests.

If your ROI for a game is particularly low, that should be an interesting clue into what players like (and it may not have anything to do with the game itself). "Piracy" is a convenient scapegoat.

> That's exactly what I DON'T want.

Dragon Age is an interesting example with its own history as to why this bit of content was silly. Better comparisons would be to in-game sales for several FPSes. They work for DDO and other MMOs. Let's also recognize that these do not account for 100% of the sales; that would be a bit narrow.

> Estimates at the piracy rates

Strangely, this does not lead to good estimates of potential sales loss, as we have learned from the ridiculous figures RIAA has presented. Pirates are not the problem. We are selling air. Know your customers. If you want to make money, sell something people are willing to pay for.
Court Awards Bullied Michigan Student $800,000
My wife is a lecturer and had a related experience with a student.

Sometime early in the semester after the course outline had been presented to her students, my wife received an email in which a student put forward his plan on how he was going to game the course to get a pass with the minimum amount of work. It went something like this:

According to the course outline, I plan to just read the poetry and one of the books. If I do essays 1 on the poetry, essays 3 and 4 comparing the book to the poetry, skip essay 3 and get 50% on the exam then, by my calculations I should get a pass. Could you tell me if this plan will work?

I've heard of time management but I'd never seen such a blatant disregard for actually wanting to learn anything in a course before. It didn't occur to the student that telling a lecturer that her course was just an obstacle course to be rushed through as efficiently as possible was a little disrespectful?
Russ Roberts: Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?
Last.fm has (or had) something similar and quite sexy as well:
http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control
"People were sharing programs long before p2p became popular. Only difference in recent years to accessibility to the copying mechanisms. Blame it on the Internet taking off and creating a world where bits are no longer a scarcity,"

The bits were never a scarcity. The creative work and thousands of man-hours that it takes to place those bits in a specific order is the scarcity. If this were not the case, anybody could create (not copy) an application like Photoshop.

"where purchasing a physical media containing those bits is becoming legacy. With the Internet making it easy for anyone to copy anything suddenly those that made those physical copies weren't needed as much. Certainly their value has been questioned."

A dollar bill is just ink and paper. But it's worth much more than that. Paintings are worth much more than the sum of the items used to create them. There are many more examples like this. I know you aren't this dense.

"DRM became widespread as a way for the content distributors to maintain their status quo without having to change their business model in any way."

How are they going to make money? A service? We see how well people like that with assassin's creed 2. Advertising? works very well with all of the adblockers out there.

Companies aren't going to change their business model because they don't need to. The games are still just as good, people are playing them, they just aren't paying for them.

If the community really wants to change the business, they need to actually compete. This means developing real applications and games that are better than the ones already out there. But this will never happen because it's easier to just copy games and tell everyone why you deserve to get it for free.
Ah, yes - now that you've clarified it, that makes more sense
Yes, you are perfectly right about Apple and its track record. We do not have that. Anyway i am not pre-selling anything, the device is currently produced and i can ship you 500 hundreds of pieces to you in a week. Anyway, you are perfectly right. I will send soon some prototypes to influentials tech blogs, and you will see the real thing soon. Thanks a lot for your feedback. Alberto
I would love to move out there as long as there is a powerful internet connection and easy access to vegetarian food. Though I'm out in Hong Kong ;) How about simply telecommuting - if it is software development.
It is also useful to have an extra set of keys to the left other than tab/caps/shift
Thanks for your reply. It is precious. We will fix that asap. Alberto
The "filter" version was deleted and the correct version added, after I wrote my comment.
In defense of Larry Wall's moustache, it's awesome in a way that either Sonny Bono or Thomas Magnum could be proud of.
Venture Capital Firms Caught in a Shakeout
The Beast File: Google [video]
CA appears to be imploding. I went to a college in LA in the early 90s. I recall it with the warm fuzzy lens time provides, particularly in the winter, but the property values need to be heavily discounted by the government's debt, built-in long-term deficits, and basic insanity of being run by contradictory mandates. And they have not been, at least not yet.
Some people don't know about the opportunities.

Some people value being near family.

Some people are just afraid of change.

The entire discussion is making me want to finish an essay I started five months ago, when I left LA. But in short, there are up sides and down sides of relocating to an area with high demand; there's usually a reason for the demand.
"respecting institutions"

This I have never understood. What does it mean to respect an institution? Is this sort of like corporate personhood (which I am not taking a stance on)? Does Harvard demand more respect than the local community college?

The word "respect" is as loaded as the word "fair." One interpretation is simply, "Don't be rude." But, that's not all that the word commonly encompasses. Implicit in most definitions is the difference in social status between two parties. When is it properly "respectful" to call John Smith by his first name instead of "Mister Smith"? When the person addressing John is socially beneath him?
Multitasking on the iPad
Three Rings (the guys behind Puzzle Pirates) have something, too.

My favorite feature was hooking it up to loudspeakers and playing a particular sound from their game every time the business made money, with the sound corresponding to how much money they made.

They eventually disabled it, because the constant interruptions were starting to annoy people. This is a nice problem to have.
I generally prefer to get my reports by e-mail because I already have a filtering system in place for critical/urgent/useful/noise. It stops me sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats every 45 seconds.

If you are using Django you can get your daily/hourly reports that way pretty easily - set up a cron job to call something based on this...

#!/usr/bin/python

from django.core.management import setup_environ

from datasvcs import settings

setup_environ(settings)

from django.core.mail import send_mail

from django.contrib.auth.models import User,Group

from yourapp import models

# Do model query magic here - compile report as a string.

send_mail('Daily report',report-text,'reports@domain.com',['reportdestination1@domain.com'])
Cheers, thanks for the clarification.
Is there some way to make the app not suck up all the bandwidth on my teeny weeny cable modem?
Reminds me of a scene from the TV series "Cheers". Norm is at the bar.

"Jesus. Socrates. Plato. What did they have?"

The bartender shrugs.

"I'll tell you. Sandals, that's what. Most all your great thinkers had great footwear."

Beards and sandals? Could be the basis for the next programming evolution.
Panic's blog is just so beautifully designed. Scroll down to the comment form.
Awwwww..this is so cute, Jason!

I have a mental picture of you and your engineers trying hard for months in vain to add no-index to all those pages.

Don't worry any more. I am here. Here is the code. Copy paste and everything will be fine:

if(content.length < 100){
content.setNoIndex(True);
}

Let me know if there is anything that needs to be explained. (I can talk to your engineers if needed)

Peace and Love
>One possible explanation is that in San Francisco, men who aren't gay, married, or damaged by a previous owner are decidedly cagey when it comes to dating and relationships.

Wow...that's over the top. "Owner"? It's not even a quote from an interviewee -- it's directly in the article.
Founder's receive equity, not options. So, once you sign the papers, you get x% of the company every y months. I'm not quite sure I understand your question, but I guess what you're saying is what happens if one of the co-founders leaves before their equity vests? Then the company (or another shareholder) buys it back from them and it can go into the option pool for employees.
Ok, well maybe bullshit is a strong term, so I apologize.

Still, it seems really odd to be using a sitemap like that. That's certainly not the intended purpose, and if that were a reasonable defense, what's to stop the spammers from employing it as an offense?

As far as I can tell, you use a sitemap if your site doesn't map in the normal way. Even then, it's not nearly as effective as a text site with any in-links - so much so that I wouldn't hinge any SEO strategy on a sitemap, and I wouldn't recommend setting one up to any new start-up founder. Even if your observations on this are correct, then you are a very special case.

It's also worth pointing out that it seems your site map was no defense until you took other measures, which wasn't clear from your original post:

"so at some point I shut that down and submitted the site to google"

Responding to some of your points:

"I get about 50 emails daily confirming that the strategy worked..."

* This confirms that your site is indexed, but it doesn't confirm your strategy beat the spammers. It may be more of Google's algorithms deciding you are best, no? I can't say for sure obviously, but you might have fared better if you hadn't done this at all.

"Even today that crawl isn't 100% complete yet"

* Part of the reason for this is because your pages have a low-priority to be crawled, because they are submitted via a site map.
Their idea of hooking up an analog meter to measure the average website response time is really nice.
You could not possibly be more wrong.

The student pays the university. The university pays the professor. This is not a small detail. Professors (and other teachers more generally) are not personal employees of their students.

Beyond that, the student is paying for an education and - in the case of an MBA - an entrance into a professional world. He or she just got both. I would say this semester, he or she already got value for the investment.
Book Review - 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form
Google improves its Translation Tool
Did I miss anything (a poem about teachers and students by Tom Wayman)
I had to post this after reading the Scott Galloway email (http://gildedlimits.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/nyu-professor-scott-galloway-ouch/)
Infosecurity: Westin is latest hotel to be hit by hackers
Reports of America's demise are grossly exaggerated
Afraid I only agree with one thing above:

"If HN wants to filter out "calacanis" and "mahalo" from HN i'm all for it."

Hear Hear!
By a similar token, it can also be naive to expect the truth to be plain at the outset, or even for a sizable period of time afterwards. This is doubly (trebly) so for political matters (c.f. Gulf of Tonkin). What's sought is honesty.

To quote an old Murakami novel: "Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of the ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously."
That is a $2500 monitor. If you were wondering.
The guys at Robocat (developed Outside for the iPhone) have a similar tool for tracking sales. They developed an internal only iPhone app that you shake to update the total sales of Outside - clever play on Shake your money maker.

I'm always interested to get glimpses into these internal status pages / apps,
Get Ready To Live Past 100
I was just about to buy a SmartQ v5, or a Ramos w7, for precisely this purpose. Well done.

Now, before you get my $189, tell me more about this "external USB 3G" business. Does this device come with a 3G radio, or not? That's like saying my laptop "has 3G" because it has a USB port.
Google does something like $18Bn per year in revenue and of that about $750MM-$1Bn is from ads on non-Google-run sites.

So, I think they care about Mahalo as a source of revenue about >< that much. They're probably more worried about possible anti-trust actions if they just drop Mahalo -- I bet that would shave more off their market cap than losing Mahalo as a customer.
CBSE board exam datesheet 2010, CBSE exam timetable 2010 - OyIndia
And what makes you think you aren't lumped in with your neighbor?

Every rational form of insurance relies on distributing risk over groups of independent risks to obtain the benefits of the central limit theorem. There are some very specialized policies, and the Lloyd's syndicate, but anyone wishing to avoid ruin will diversify their risk.
> Ok, well maybe bullshit is a strong term, so I apologize.

no problem.

> Still, it seems really odd to be using a sitemap like that. That's certainly not the intended purpose,

Agreed, but that's what we're hackers for right ?

> and if that were a reasonable defense, what's to stop the spammers from employing it as an offense?

That they didn't have the URL, but the google bot did.

> As far as I can tell, you use a sitemap if your site doesn't map in the normal way.

Or if your site has crappy navigation, or if you want to comply with some countries' accessibility rules.

> Even then, it's not nearly as effective as a text site with any in-links - so much so that I wouldn't hinge any SEO strategy on a sitemap, and I wouldn't recommend setting one up to any new start-up founder.

Agreed, but we're not all just start-up founders, and even if we are we're not all above using the occasional trick to get an edge.

> Even if your observations on this are correct, then you are a very special case.

That's possible.

> It's also worth pointing out that it seems your site map was no defense until you took other measures, which wasn't clear from your original post:

"so at some point I shut that down and submitted the site to google"

The thing I shut down was the publicly accessible version of the map, so only google had access to the real thing.

> Responding to some of your points:

"I get about 50 emails daily confirming that the strategy worked..."

* This confirms that your site is indexed, but it doesn't confirm your strategy beat the spammers. It may be more of Google's algorithms deciding you are best, no? I can't say for sure obviously, but you might have fared better if you hadn't done this at all.

Google keeps something called a 'quad' list if I'm not mistaken, which contains a series of word ids in sets of four for every page that exists in their index. If certain sets of 'quads' are unique to your page then those are used to judge your page as original for that bit of content. I gather that quite a few of the 'random keywords spam pages' are built on that predicate. I'm not sure if that is outdated or even plainly wrong but it would explain the pattern in clone sites sometimes ranking higher than the originals simply because they got crawled earlier.

> "Even today that crawl isn't 100% complete yet"

* Part of the reason for this is because your pages have a low-priority to be crawled, because they are submitted via a site map.

That's quite possible, but I'm not in a hurry. The project was huge and if it takes a year to get it indexed I'm perfectly content with that.

The 197,000 pages result in about 7000 unique visitors daily, the total number of pages is in the millions.
The bits were never a scarcity.

Software sellers have attempted to make them so with the use of legal wording, sternly-worded threats, and excellent politics. Before it was easy to transmit things electronically, we had to pass around physical media that held them if we wanted to share with others.

Excepting people trying to inch out that extra cent out of people, nobody thinks there is something wrong with this sharing. You can borrow a car, borrow a book, borrow an NES cartridge, even borrow a whole computer, and this is seen as socially acceptable (we learned the value of sharing in Kindergarten). Sometimes you determine that you want this item for yourself, so you buy it, and you might not have bought it at all had it not been for your exposure to and enjoyment of it.

The problem with PC software is that unlike these other works of art, it is trivial to copy. That should be a warning flag that a business model around software needs to approach things a little differently. Sure, a good percentage of people will look for something for nothing and feel no guilt over it, will not try to compensate for it; in this medium, they will often succeed, too. This is a fact of the technology.

The creative work and thousands of man-hours

This is noble, but do you really expect customers to offer up money for software because of the actions of somebody behind the scenes of that software? I know when I browse games on the shelves, I am not thinking about the programmers, the artists, the voice actors, the publishers, or anyone else involved. I am thinking of how fun I expect that game to be and if I can afford it this month. I am also thinking of the brand of that game; for example, Ubisoft has disappointed me enough times with their MMOs that I refuse to be fooled again, no matter how cool it looks. On the other hand, I am a consistent sucker for games by Square and Bioware. Your average consumer does not place the same value on the workers as the workers place on themselves.

Companies aren't going to change their business model because they don't need to. The games are still just as good, people are playing them, they just aren't paying for them.

This is a contradiction. Admittedly, DRM is one way to change the business model. It is working for some companies in the way it is implemented. As you mention later, competition can demonstrate this model's weaknesses, but that is also the nature of business: you must keep evolving to meet the challenges of the times.
I have this rule when reading blogs.

When I read "well-informed little birdies" or "inside sources" or "people I trust," I replace that with "based on a random email I got from an anonymous source." If I read a lot of these types of statements on a blog, then I stop reading the blog.

This was usually reserved for DailyKOS and other crazy political media, but tech sites are now getting to be bad about it too, especially ones that cover Apple.
Creating a touch-screen kiosk with Chrome
I hate people.

Seriously.

I really wish I hadn't read the comments on the blog post and the "discussion" here. Sigh. What a waste of time.
Amazon warned California affiliates that if such a law passed in California, it would be forced to sever its relationship with them; I find it hard to believe that it did not similarly warn Colorado residents prior to the passage of this legislation.
Retailer acknowledges shipping fake Intel chips
Getting Real About Office Hours
He's not being an asshole, he's just trying to help. Perhaps if you were a bit more forthcoming about what you do want (or why you don't want X), his comments might be a bit more on target.
You would be wrong - reserves are there to pay for liabilities already incurred. Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme without the deception. You're right about the "Social Security Trust Fund" - can you imagine a state allowing a private insurer to buy its own bonds as assets?
In a similar vein but meant to be public: http://culturedcode.com/status/
I think the line gets a bit blurred when you charge as much for tuition as some of these MBA programs.

(The value proposition is actually a bit puzzling given you could lock yourself in a cheap apartment somewhere for ~18 months and try out different business ideas without having to work for the same amount as a years tuition).
$2,500 for the machine, $7,500 for the fully loaded cost of the developer who spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right. (Ahh, Mac developers. "The world needs all kinds.")

Still, even at $10k it is absurdly cheap relative to the value generated.
In electronics it is a well known fact that it is impossible to measure a system without influencing it.

I think is no way you could ever build a successful search engine ranking algorithm that will not influence the web to the point where that algorithm will lose a lot of its initial edge.
Lava Lamp Centrifuge
If the placements of the accelerator and brakes are too close , then perhaps that too is an engineering challenge...perhaps more of a user interface one than a "does it work" problem. But an interesting engineering challenge nonetheless.

I've driven a few cars where I did notice the placement was a bit tight, but it just made me extra cautious. However, I could totally see accidentally hitting the wrong pedal if you wore the wrong shoes or panicked or something in those cars. I don't think the Toyota cars under discussion suffer from this design flaw.
Whilst I agree with your comments in most circumstances, Gruber has an excellent track record with Apple rumours.
Customer Feedback is Easy and Free