skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content."

"As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. "

Looks like 2011 is the year that Google kills the scrapers. Look for an uptick in the sensitivity of the duplicate content penalty.
The source code the guy links to comes from Apache Harmony, so if anyone actually has committed copyright infringement it could well be the ASF as the source of the infringement. I wonder if Oracle would go after Apache as well.
Happened to me not ten minutes ago with the search string "pass json body to spring mvc"

The efreedom answer at the 5th position is actually the most relevant - the stackoverflow question from which it was copied doesn't even show up on the first page. There is one stackoverflow result on the first page, but it deals with a more complex related issue, not the simple question I was looking for.
And it's a good thing for us that this is the case. Every time we say we wish a company dominated a field (like many of us say regarding Apple or Google) we basically say we wish it to be a monopoly, or close to it. For the most part, Google has grown in search, maybe not as fast as it did in it's beginnings, but grown none-the-less. It's competitors have grown as well, and maybe that's one of the reasons it doesn't seem like it's doing such a good job : competition is stronger and the difference between search results is not the way it used to be. Again, for me, this is a good thing, and we should be so lucky, to have globally, 5 or 10 companies duking it out in each major technology field, where we currently have 2 or 3 evolving incrementally.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_...

'I stand by my prediction that, by the end of 2015, Apple will not sell any computing devices with root access available.

'Here's what it will sound like:
"iOS has been a runaway success. With 1 million apps now available in the App Store, blah blah blah. We've heard from countless people that their iPad is now their primary computer. And we've heard from developers that they use their iPad for everything except... developing iPad applications! ... Introducing XCode for iOS. With a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, you can now write AND TEST your apps directly on your own iPad. It's free, and it's available right now in the new Developers sections of the iOS App Store."'

You can write an entire Mac application and run it without having root access. In fact you can write an iPad web app inside the ECMAScript sandbox now. For more http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1285-ipad-friendly-browser-...

I'm an embedded guy, but it seems like most of Hacker News's readers are just the kind of very-high-level-language (and framework) people who could bring a Commodore 64-style safe intro to computing environment to MobileSafari and Chrome OS. If you want (your kids) to go further like PEEK and POKE let you do on Ataris and Commodores, you can go native and do crazy things like extend the WebView like PhoneGap does.

Remember: you don't need Apple's permission to do perverse things to the JavaScript interpreter. You can even run interpreters on that interpreter.
Did you read past the first paragraph? They mention some recent changes they've made:

To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. ... We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

And they are saying pretty clearly they think they can do a better job on content-farms:

Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. ... The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.
I've always said that it is the best piece of software ever created :)

Does the ios version browse your local network for shares? If it does, it will be the best ios software ever created.
Make Diffs Readable - free, fast git diff viewer
Your comment leaks quite a bit of bias against Oracle. You'd be just as frustrated if someone violated licensing on a tiny part of your software, then relicensed it and gave it to OEMs for worldwide distribution. In fact, I'd wager that you'd be more frustrated, because you don't have the legal resources that Oracle does to go after it.

Sure, whatever opinion you have about Oracle might be valid, particularly with the way they're handling the JCP and OpenSolaris. Whatever. However, there is an underlying issue that is a bit bigger here, and the blog author is pointing that out in a reasonable fashion. It doesn't matter who is suing and who is sued; copyright infringement is copyright infringement.

You could make the argument that this isn't any of Oracle's business, but they absorbed everything about Sun: their IP, their liabilities, and so on. Sun was perhaps considering this action before Oracle bought them, and we'll never know.

What if the companies were reversed? Would you make the same remarks?
> I think that the author is coming from the Java world, in

> which case the comparison he likely had in mind is not

> Rails or django, but the plethora of Java web frameworks.

if thats the case i think he's misrepresenting himself with statements like

"the most powerful, most secure web framework available today" and "The best Web Framework".
Now you just need some people to actually buy WP7 phones.
"Enterprise" anything. Call it what it almost always is: Glue.

One of the few truly enterprise developments has been environmental virtualization. And it's been going on longer than most people realize.

EDIT: Perhaps this should be disqualified as a buzzword. But too often, it's treated -- if ignorantly -- as "a technology".
Good work! What are you doing next? :)
has anyone tried using it, and benchmarked it ... curious to know how it compares to other PHP frameworks.
RVM is not beginner friendly because it has dependencies, it compiles stuff on your machine and there are dozens of problems waiting to happen because of that.

If wanting an easier way to install Rails for beginners makes me an idiot, then I'm proud of it ;)
Detailed notes from StartupLessonsLearned conference 2010
But it's not. Period.
As an application dataset grows and presumptions of yesterday blow through sane limits, you will re-visit this topic. It happens again and again.

Hypothetical example: Boss asks if you can fit several millions of products into the database. Keep them up-to date by setting related prices on them. Each synchronization task needs to be aware of product deltas: is it available, sold out, on sale and so on. Oh and there are many suppliers, catalogs. All the while you're running set intersect, difference and so on on multi-million count objects, you still need to be aware that access to this data needs to be consistent and sane. Access times of several hundreds of milliseconds are not acceptable.

Obvious solutions is to distribute the load, counting and updating amongst machines. Load publicly available data from high performance memory tables. At some point, it all comes unravelled when you get a request for custom sub-sets where each one can live queries by price, text, brand ...

Memory bound problems are just that. At some point you hit the wall. I think planning for that impact is the best insurance a shop can make.
Holy crap i have a pile of passwords to change now.
Where’s The Beef? Defining Food+Tech Connect’s Value Proposition
A Short-Circuit to Distracted Driving
You could subscribe to the project's mailing list or join the IRC channel and answer any questions that newbies have. This is probably a softer introduction to contributing to an open source project than committing code.

For example, I know the Django mailing list is pretty active and there are a lot of questions that can be answered.
Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch-the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We don't delay your search results in order to show you ads.

It just wouldn't make sense for Google to suddenly abandon that (very successful) strategy and say "let's keep spammy/low-quality sites around and send users there because we make money off the ads." We make more money long-term when our users get great results. That makes them more happy and thus more loyal.
one thing to say:

docs or it didn't happen.
Larry Page on How To Change the World With Computer Science [video]
Why do we need an accelerator which operates across Europe?
Official Status Blog Post: http://status.heroku.com/incident/115
It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad".

Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/technology/21distracted.ht...
I'd understand this if they were charging for it, but it's free shit. It was nice enough that they took the time to put the video together and post it online. Come on.
Our Stance on 'Open'
to be completely fair, the very first link (from the official springsource blog) also appears to answer your question.
The History of Oregon Trail
Yes but it sucks Stack Overflow had to add that to the title to fight the spammers because it is often distracting to see it the search results.
It would be great to have the JIT and Stackless features together.
It works with some images, but not others. At first glance, it looks like maybe it just doesnt support PNG.
Our policy in search-quality is not to pre-announce things, but we did give some pretty strong hints about planned improvements to search quality in that post (e.g. talking about scraper sites). I'll be happy to talk more about them soon when they launch.
Virtual machine dispute matters more for survivability of Android, that goes without saying.

However, to me, copyright infringement matters a lot more... If someone is getting free code then at least they could respect the LICENSE.
It matters in the context of scaling the enterprise and not individual. A lone wolf programmer could use whatever rig and be productive.

In a large team environment, meetings have to be scheduled ( Outlook+ Exchange), SRS documents have to be changed and tracked ( Word), shared ( dropbox/ sharepoint) etc. etc. Having a PC enables everyone to work well in a large groups without management thinking very hard about issues like systemes integration etc. You could say that individual choice is sacrificed for the greater good --- team productivity.

With VMware , everyone can get their own Linux or Solaris based test environment.
Unless you supply specific links to code that you're sure is from Apache, you may want to read this:

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/read_beyond_the_he...

There was confusion about this when the first bits of code that were obviously Sun's implementations were found in Android code... However, according to Apache, Google slapped the Apache Harmony license into the headers themselves and the files were never really part of Harmony.
I believe you misread the essay.

His major point is this: "There is no discrete self".

He isn't making an argument to discredit any potential religious 'truth' (in fact, he is using the existence of certain religious 'truths' as evidence for his argument). His comment about 'clearly false' religion was not his main point (although for some of us, extreme lack of evidence and verifiability is enough).

The annihilation of the self is an idea/concept/experience that occurs in many religious traditions, and also when exposed to certain drugs (hallucinogenics, I think). It is also a common theme in literature dating back to antiquity. The Bacchus is an example. Enlightenment in Buddhism is about annihilation of the self. Not that I am an expert on either.

By annihilation of the self, I mean the elimination of the concept of the self, not suicide. The thought being that the concept of the self is actually an absurdity. "Can a man step in the same river twice." This is what he is referring to when he talks about the flow of thoughts.

The concept of self leads to a lot of problems, selfishness, fear of death, things like that.
Oh, god, not ANOTHER one.
Somehow I think this lawsuit will cost Google somewhat less then the 8 billion dollars it would have required to buy Sun outright.

This is bad, but I still don't yet believe buying Sun would have been the better option.
The Hunt for Elusive 'Dumb' Rules
Google's Q4 earnings showed smooth transition to eCommerce & mobile
Google’s strong fourth-quarter earnings proved that it is now firmly ensconced in e-commerce, and also showed that, with its Android operating system and related apps, it is smoothly transitioning to the mobile world.
Good point, Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun, Google could have afforded that, they just offered $6 billion for Groupon. OTOH, that seems like a lot of money to pay just for Java.
You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love them. My 2 cents. Entrepreneurs take note.
The machine I use as my workstation has 64GB of RAM.

Of course, it also has 32 cores... It's not exactly your standard i7 workstation.
As much as I like transparency, I think it's appropriate for Google to keep the details of their search-algorithms secret. Maybe they could do something like "de-classify" the algorithms from a few years ago (this would be cool!) but, in the interest of staying ahead of the spammers, I think it's totally appropriate for them to keep quiet.
not cool, but figures.
Yea, that's definitely something I have to figure out. Need a good balance of security and ease of sharing.
Does this also entail developing the rpython translator/compiler? Statically typed python is something I'm really interested in.
Sun cost 5.6 billion after accounting for Sun's cash.
There are ten thousand answers to your question, but here's the most drab and pedantic of them: No, I absolutely cannot walk out onto the street and see a scene from the 1960s.

There was a fun essay once where someone pointed out the value of photographing everyday objects. Tools, cars, clothes. These are the things that you'll most wish you'd photographed, because they are the most ephemeral. The Grand Canyon looks much as it did in Ansel Adams' day. People look only a bit different than they used to. But the objects are gone. The streets and the buildings are gone.
I think that's a bad example. AFAIK you can't legitimately buy Viagra online, so what results should Google be returning? Where are the awesome web pages about Viagra that you want to see? They don't exist, so the query comes back with spam.
Ask a VC, starring George Zachary of CRV
Ted Williams, homeless man with the golden voice, goes viral again
Seems in direct conflict with the "Don't be evil" company motto... unless google employees think IP theft isn't evil.
For what it's worth, this still at least looks like it's mostly code from test frameworks, which doesn't necessarily even run on an Android device itself. So it could likely be dropped from the source distributions without compromising the functionality of any device. (Distributing it would still have been infringement --- but a lot more easily remedied than it might have been otherwise.)

Specifically, if we look at the PDFs from the original source here:

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-evidence-supports-oracles-case.html

six of the seven Android files are in subpackages of "org.apache.harmony.security.tests". The Android version of Mueller's example number six, strangely, has no package declaration at all, but the name of the class (PolicyNodeImpl) at least is the same as one that has been identified as unit test code the last time it came up in this connection.

(BTW, the "org.apache.harmony" package prefix doesn't necessarily mean that the ASF ever distributed the particular file in question; that PolicyNodeImpl.java file was distributed by Google with an Apache Harmony package declaration, but had never been distributed by the ASF itself.)
Not necessarily technical, but possibly still of interest:

Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner Podcasts:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
What good is a baby?
Seeing without eyes
3 non-vague rules to make your Web videos' camerawork better
People can make tens of thousands of dollars a month if they rank highly for certain phrases, so tons of SEOs (and spammers) are trying to rank for phrases like that. Other search engines might hard-code the results for [buy viagra], but Google's first instinct is to use algorithms in these cases, and if you pay attention, the results for queries like that can fluctuate a lot.

With a billion searches a day, I won't claim that we'll get every query right. But just because we don't "solve" one query to your satisfaction doesn't mean we're not working really hard on the problem. It's not an easy problem. :)
Aside: although Lifehacker's day to day quality seems to have declined, I've found searching their archives for common tech problems like this to be extremely good at returning results. How To Geek (frequently linked from LH) also has a lot of similar solutions. Any other recommendations?
Deleted. I'll have a look at photo removal. - Thanks!
It's safe to say that many Googlers read what people write on the web and talk about it internally, even if we don't always respond. We're power users too, so if a search result bothers you, it almost certainly bothers us too. :)
Here is my advice. Review all the planner systems and make a list pro/con and how it fits with how you think/work. Pick one and stick to it for the whole semester. At the end it won't matter as long as you have some kind of system to keep tabs on your goals, plans and values. Once you are acclimated to using a planning system only then should you consider switching or trying other systems.
It's both. You need to personally believe it's important for it to stick, and you have to train yourself to keep it in mind. It has to become like a demanding girlfriend you have to remember to txt or call. You can't dump her because she's loaded and you work for her dad.

The right system is totally secondary. It can be as simple as a note in your front pocket. In fact, a written note is good because you have to continually rewrite it, and that makes the tasks stick in your head. It also becomes a huge hassle to keep writing down the same things instead of getting them off the list. When I have to kill my list I do this.

Day to day I use google tasks (iphone-dock and firefox-sidebar) and it stays in my face all day between those two.

A long list is good. There's nothing that guarantees failure in todo world like having tasks like: "Profit". You have to break everything down to the smallest particle you can, then you knock off more things more often and you get used to using your system.

Determination is the most valuable skill in the world, stick with whatever you do and it will pay off in every aspect of your life.
NoSQL at Twitter (infoq)
While I have extreme doubts, I really hope, for humanity's sake, that this is true. If it all pans out, this would likely be the greatest invention of the 21st century.
Money in / Money out is the smaller picture. Having control over the Java IP, future direction, security from anybody suing you - that is priceless.
What are people's thoughts on companies who do create content farms? From the perspective as being a successful company rather than "I hate the spam and I hope they all DIAF".

Personally I think any type of "scheming" in technology will eventually get caught and then all of a sudden there goes your business model.
Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass.
HN Users: It's Time To Relax
Take a break from work for a little while and listen to the relaxing music on the site.
Yes, one of them is NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com). It's actually an acronym for "Not One Line Of HTML". You can of course use HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but you never have to, and if you do there's extensive handling to allow you to do things you wouldn't be able to normally do in straight up JavaScript, such as handling race conditions, dynamic instantiations, and related situations.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH
True, it does... I just noticed this because I've actually got in the habit of scanning for stackoverflow results, first - they almost always are right on the money, and it's less cognitive overhead to read a site format I'm familiar with, with extraneous discussion well tucked-away.

It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater time investment to read through to find the relevant sections.

I guess that's a tribute to how well stackoverflow works, most the time. And also to how lazy I am.
Congrats on the sale Mark,
if you disclose the price, please make sure you do that on HN :)
David E. Chen: Discovering the Heroku Vulnerability
How long did it take Java to reach its niche?
No problem :) I think it's great that you guys are building up the brand and network. We were talking with Alex Farcet this summer about doing a cooperation with AaltoVG. I think this kinda stuff is needed, especially in terms of collaboration.

Did you follow what we did with Garage48?
Ask HN: Anyone used a vendor for creating your mobile site?
The most obvious one is usablenet, but I've never seen it work quite right. Are there any competitors I should know about? Any success stories people can share? I want something I can just drop in for the whole site rather than spend my time optimizing all the pages.
Makes me feel like getting my profile up there. Oh wait.
"What if the companies were reversed? Would you make the same remarks"

Given google's reputation for being open, they're not likely to pursue a law suit like oracle just because there's money in it. The media outrage will hurt their reputation more than the monetary gain.
Good catch. Furthermore:

curl -v http://google.com/404

results in this HTTP header:

Server:sffe

Whereas:

curl -v http://google.com/offers

results in:

Server: GSE

So they're obviously proxying from a totally different subsystem.
Why in the world would they support a 10+ year old technology that's been replaced by a technology (ASP.NET WebForms) that's now also widely considered outdated?
It's no different that installing RVM bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head ) or NPM curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh. If you run something without knowing what it does first and brick your system there's no one to blame but yourself :)