skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should I unblock Bing? (They keep asking me)
This is why I blocked Bing's crawlers: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2009/11/23/4651/this-ones-for-free-bingcom

And this is their form letter that they keep sending:

Hi,

I am contacting you from the Microsoft Corporation and its Internet search engine Bing (http://www.bing.com) in regards to your robots.txt file at http://poorbuthappy.com/robots.txt. Our customers have alerted us that your site was not visible in our results and we have discovered that you are hiding your site to our search engine crawler, named msnbot, via your robots.txt file.

We would be pleased if you edit your robots.txt file to allow our search engine to index your content which additionally will increase traffic to your site via our search results. The only step needed on your part is to remove the following restriction for msnbot within the robots.txt file.

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Note: In October and November we transitioned our crawler name from msnbot to bingbot. You can edit your robots.txt using msnbot or bingbot as we will still honor all applicable robots.txt directives, including those specific to msnbot. http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2010/09/03/bingbot-is-coming-to-town.aspx

If you feel that msnbot is crawling your site too frequently, you can use the crawl-delay directive in robots.txt
http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/08/10/crawl-delay-and-the-bing-crawler-msnbot.aspx

For more information about robots.txt please go to http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2008/06/03/robots-exclusion-protocol-joining-together-to-provide-better-documentation.aspx

Our Webmaster Central website (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/ ) can assist you further in obtaining the best results possible for your business or website.

If you have further questions please let me know.

Best regards,
Name

So my question: should I let them back in?
linky http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2009/11/23/4651/this-o...
Yep. And if you use something like Thrift ( http://wiki.apache.org/thrift/ ) building a SOA that includes PHP service components is fairly simple.
You can deploy a php app just as easily on dotcloud :) http://dotcloud.com

(Disclaimer: I work there)
Why is it that macs always get so loud when their fan turns on? Other laptops that I've used with the same hardware are orders of magnitude quieter.
Unless the US government has secretly made revolutionary advances in the field of cryptography, modern encryption algorithms cannot be cracked, no matter how much money or hardware you throw at the problem.
Thank you. It never ceases to amaze me how many people fail to realize that you need to correct for dividends (One time, and otherwise) when calculating market cap.
Why's it silly? He's buying a commodity business (thats what VOIP is) for 32x earnings.

There's a reason M&A is often referred to as a winner's curse -- because winning the bidding typically means overpaying. The synergies execs often talk about almost -always- fail to be realized.

Shareholders of Microsoft would have been much better off if the company just bought back $8.5bn in stock. A dividend would have been out of the question due to tax repatriation issues.
That's like telling a brain surgeon their skills are useless elsewhere in medicine. True, perhaps, but still a pretty stupid argument. You can make a pretty good living (and be perfectly happy and fulfilled) as a brain surgeon even if your skills won't let you become a radiologist.

I'd love to hear why Python and Ruby are going to prepare you to solve all sorts of problems but PHP isn't. The particular syntax isn't the important bit of coding - the problem solving mentality is.
Amazing, a free service needs to sell your photos in order to make money in order to keep providing you a free service.
Ignore SEO, GoogleBot Will Sort it All Out for You
Even without things like dotcloud, setting up a PHP app takes about 15 minutes on Linode/Slicehost. `apt-get install php5 apache2 mysql-server` and you're about 75% of the way there.
Fucking cops.
Compare New York's approved tutoring companies (http://www.p12.nysed.gov/nclb/ses/ApprovedProviders/AlphaLis...) with Khan Academy which is not approved (khanacademy.org).
I'm afraid there are no shortcuts in this business. Programmers/developers are hugely undervalued because people without similar skills have no idea just how difficult it is to build systems.

You should hire someone smart to do this work for you, instead of trying to do it by yourself. Given that your requirements are vague, I would recommend you pay someone a few hundred quid/dollars to talk to you for a day and figure out what technology you're going to need to use. Then you will be in a good position to hire.

If you try and do this by yourself there is a very high chance you will do it wrong. Worst case scenario is that you don't even know it's wrong and it just keeps giving you the wrong data forever.

I worked with an insurance client once who had been overpaying bonuses for years without knowing. You don't want to be that person - hire a programmer. They are cheap, all things considered!
Where can I get some of that kool-aid?
And sending a plain-text email discussing terrorist plots is somehow less conspicuous?
One of the more interesting sections, IMO, is the part titled "Google's Noble Respect for Copyright"
>the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business

There's no reason to jump to that conclusion. We don't make ranking changes to improve adsense revenue, and don't use it as a metric to evaluate ranking algorithms. We don't even have a mechanism to collect the data.
In effect he was using a proxy, just one that he knew he could trust
The PHP Drupal community alone is quite a mess. I know - I'm using it every day. It's not that the developers are bad, but documentation and testing are not tenets of the platform.

Security updates routinely break functionality with no warning or knowledge on core and modules, and the community is architected to make it far more difficult to contribute new modules than necessary (not to mention submitting patches). I won't even update the Date module - ever (http://drupal.org/project/date); I can't count the number of times an update has introduced more bugs than it fixed. It's irresponsible.

PHP is a great language, and there are a lot of great tools, frameworks and websites written with it, but it doesn't mean it's the only game in town. What is most important is using the right tool for job, whatever it may be. Sometimes it's Drupal/Wordpress, sometimes it's Rails. Github's language page illustrates that pretty well: https://github.com/languages

Size doesn't matter. Utility does. Lots of good languages exist, but they're all just tools to be used by the programmer. I use Ruby because the community is rapidly developing fantastic, useful gems and tools that meet my needs and make my life as a developer easier. PHP does not meet my needs in the same way. Thankfully, the existence and usefulness of one language/platform does not negate the existence and usefulness of many others.
You can limit the amount of instances. If you set it to 1, your site will be slower, not completely down. Just like a normal hosting box.
nice to hear that. parallel computing is the reason i choose scala.
Are they still paying sites? If not, unblock. I know people sometimes turn to Bing now because Google has become spamtastic.
In my experience, people seem to think that the government can break any encryption, just because they're the government. I don't understand why people have this impression.
FWIW, they don't look "awesome" to me. They look usable and relatively clutter free though, which is better than many sites. Someone with a sense of typography could probably fix the layout and colors with minimal effort.
This is a bicycle shop. They think about bicycles, not SEO.

Are you arguing they would be better off with no webpage? Or that they need to hire a webmaster? Do you even know that they get significant web traffic? Perhaps it's all word of mouth.
In a conversation with a couple FB devs a few weeks back they mentioned that their codebase is now less than 50% PHP.
Dimming the job posting text is weird, since there are no comments. Actually, dimming the initial post in general is pretty weird. Is that just so the focus is on the comments?
There's no evidence that the majority of HFTs consistently make a profit. It may just look that way due to survivorship bias. The HFTs that do make a profit are harvesting their gains from other active traders, not from long-term investors.
I got that literally from a recent presentation from a FB engineer. Here it is: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Evolution-of-Code-Design-...
As long as your talking about your own code, that's fine. However, a lot of people have found that the majority of code they encounter in the wild is really, really ugly.

So if you look at it from that angle, it makes sense to code in a language that tends to have pretty code, rather than one that doesn't.
Agreed, Microsoft didn't over pay for the software, they over paid for the user-base. The user base is what you want.
It's a cultural thing and a library thing. I'm not well tapped into the Python community (which seems to have a healthy breadth of work going on), but with JRuby you have full access to the Java ecosystem which (needless to say) puts you in the position to solve all kinds of problems beyond web applications.

Your analogy is flawed since people go to school to become brain surgeons with the expectation of a life-long specialized career. This isn't the case with most web application engineers, who usually have a more general computer science background. You'd be hard pressed to find a PhD, our version of specialization, whose dissertation focused on the types of problems PHP is generally used to solve.
Thank you, much appreciated! Is there a process for asking to have a site re-reviewed following Panda? Other than the one epically long forum thread (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=...)?
You use encryption every day already, you just don't think about it.

For all of HTTPS's faults, it's so transparent that you don't even think of it as encrypted communication. If PKI apps and MUAs didn't suck so much, we'd probably all treat email the same way.
cobbled together a quick "what's this" page and added there as a tab - that, by the way, proved itself an incredibly difficult task, as there don't seem to be any facebook app to do just that. Wow!
You're right. I added an underline to the map link. Thanks!
I think you're putting words in my pen when you describe my comment as defending Google. The article describes Google's behaviour. My comment describes a mpotivation for that behaviour. If you tilt your head sideways, you will see that my comment is helping to build a case against them, not a defence of them.

For an analogy, consider a murder trial. Someone stands up and says, "The accused stands to profit from the victim's death." Isn't that suggestion more likely to come from the prosecution than from the defense?
Don't jump to conclusion too fast.

Enable safethreading and you will likely go to 2 or 3 instances, due to the many small requests you have. You may even go to 1 or 2 instances when they have finished optimizing their scheduler. So who knows, you may even end up with a lower monthly bill!!
Exactly. Now I decided to stop using Skype.
Minimizing Clutter at Work
I have a very challenging work and deadlines to beat are pretty inevitable. I do a lot of paper works and so my workstation is messed with papers here and there. This spring time is a new beginning for me. This means that I need to start doing things right and that includes de-cluttering my space.
Thank you for replying, thank you for clarifying that. My question is since we've followed Google guidelines for 10 years, never intentionally engaged in any practices against Google's recommendations, are already doing the suggestions outlined in the most recent Google blog post on this subject, yet have, for some reason lost all of our rankings completely and are being outranked by known content farms and sites with adsense, what should we do?

I realize you can't guarantee any results, but honestly, we really have absolutely no clue what to do next. Every change we've made to our site in the past 2 years has been to try to do everything we read that Google wants from official Google channels. We truly just don't know what else to do.

Edit to add: we did 3 months ago change from a very long domain name to a short one (faso.com) because it is shorter and we own a federal trademark on the word "FASO" and thought that Google wanted to place more emphasis on brands - our rankings stayed the same and even improved....until Monday.
I'm more likely to share if I get early access..so have a signup followed by a "Share with 5 friends to get access first".
Phineas Barnes on Judo strategy and investment in Nodejitsu
I'd like to hear more about how you rolled your nice little snowball. Did you have any VC? You didn't have YC, but you did get support from Gangplank (gangplankhq.com) right?
Well, I've been on the fence for a while, but I'm fairly sure that I'm not going to build native code demos anymore. WebGL just enables far too much awesome stuff. This demo on its own was impressive, but the fact that people are able to design new parts of the demo is what sets it apart.

With WebGL, it becomes simple to build an online, collaborative demotool where group members can easily work together on building new productions. That's simply unprecedented and may lead to a rebirth of the demoscene.
The problem with Mysql fulltext is that you are required to use the MyISAM table type.

If you are doing any writes to this table, you will eventually run into corruption problems. This is because of the way it works underneath. So, I only use it with static data or data that I rarely update.

I wish Innodb had fulltext search capabilities. I don't like the idea of adding yet another 3rd party server in the mix.
I would say you're not a fan because you haven't tried them. For one, perl is very similar to php.
Perhaps, but I thought Windows Live Messenger have a bigger user base already. Maybe I'm wrong though.
YouTube U
Assuming you have equal passion for each of the ideas, I think you should choose the one which you feel:

- has the biggest possible market
- has the lowest costs (e.g. maintenance, support, marketing)
- is easiest/quickest to implement
I've encountered this too. I attribute it to a lack of critical thinking skills. I think there's a fuzz between surveillance and codebreaking plus a simple lack of knowledge of how codes and codebreaking has changed so much due to use of computers. I think a lot of flawed understanding of codebreaking comes from fiction, where it's dealt with in a dramatic fashion as opposed to realistic.
I call bullshit. This article is heavy on speculation and light on (if not absent of) actual analysis. Tell us, beyond valuations you disagree with, what fundamentals are unsound here. Are businesses IPOing despite being unprofitable? Are companies burning cash and garnering additional investment despite no steps toward profitability? What, exactly, other than a sneaking suspicion that Facebook might not be worth it's valuation? Clearly some people, the people buying Facebook stock, disagree with you. Why are you right and they're wrong?
Fukushima 'Full Meltdown' Made Official
the news discovery portion fascinates me. I know that they are sucking in all of Twitter, as much of Facebook as they can, tons of RSS, etc.

recently there was a case where the actress anne hathaway was trending on twitter and it caused the bots to short berkshire hathaway stock, which dipped ~6%

arms race going on which will only open more opportunities to exploit these situations. feeding in all this public news data and automating trades makes a mockery of SEC insider trading regulation (because it is so easy to hide - the computer did it!)

I would love to read a full feature of what goes on inside GS et al but I know that the quants aren't allowed to speak about it and the companies do not discuss it. We get drip fed small pieces of info but nobody has really assembled a complete picture of what is going on.

I do know that the investment banks are some of the largest customers for most of the large enterprise IT co's (IBM, Sun, Microsoft, EMC, etc.). The IB's are also hiring mathematicians and compsci graduates like crazy - the tech these guys are producing must be cutting edge and at a very very large scale
Google Is Investigated on Drug Ads
What's the Richard Stallman approach to it?
Just a few quick points.

First, PHP is a great language. It definitely has its strengths. It was the second language that I ever used to create web sites (right after Perl).

With that said, the number of people using something does not inherently make it superior to all of the other choices. PHP, Python, Ruby, etc all have their proponents and they all have their valid use cases. Which one someone chooses to use is largely a matter of personal preference.

Drupal is a great package, but I found it to be cumbersome and unwieldy for my purposes, which is why I started fiddling around with Django. Choices are good - HipHop, Wordpress, etc do not innovate in a vacuum.

Innovation is facilitated by maintaining an open mind and looking to offer improvements and variations on existing solutions. There is no war between the languages. Everyone can learn from each other - and they often do.

Now, as to maturity. Both PHP and Ruby have been around since roughly 1995. (People sometimes mistakenly believe that Ruby did not exist until Ruby on Rails, but it was around for quite a bit of time before that.) Python has actually been around (publicly) since 1991. All three languages are mature by any definition of that word.

As to broadness, I think that it is worth noting that Python has really come into its own in the area of scientific and mathematic applications. I have always found Ruby to be an amazing general purpose text processing and scripting language (in addition to web programming). PHP, on the other hand, I have not actually seen in extremely heavy usage outside of the web environment. I would be pleased to know of any though, but you must admit that the usage of PHP in developing web sites fairly drowns out its usage in more general cases.

As to community size, I believe that quality not quantity is what counts. Both Python and Ruby have a lot of bright people working on a lot of really great projects. Of course, PHP does as well, but there is no reason to be outright dismissive of alternatives (you know, Perl is actually pretty neat too, but I rarely use it nowadays).

Additionally, where do you have numbers to support your assertion that Ruby is in decline? That is a rather strong statement - you should have numbers to back it up, and TIOBE is not a very good source of data for this.
> with JRuby you have full access to the Java ecosystem which (needless to say) puts you in the position to solve all kinds of problems beyond web applications.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that PHP is Turing-complete, are there any examples of these amazing things you can do in JRuby that you can't do in PHP? Even the JRuby wiki talks mainly about how awesome it is to be able to run Ruby on Rails via a Java interpreter.

To extend the medicine analogy, being a surgeon isn't about how awesome the particular scalpel you're using is. It's about knowing where and how to cut. The same is true with code. Someone who's a really good coder in PHP likely isn't going to have much trouble learning other languages if they so desire.
Not only a commodity business, a declining one. A specialized desktop application to chat. Hello, it's 2011, people do web-based peer-to-peer video chat for free. Just, ask the Chatroulette users. Free.

I bet this will go down as one of the most stupid buyouts in history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol
A)

An app that increases monitoring by managers isn't going to make anyone happy, and kid-friendly apps are pretty hard (because their users grow out of them so fast).
This is a highly important dreadful story but what is it doing on Hacker News, let alone the front page?
Having Windows users be able to call each other and every other Skype user right out of the box could be pretty interesting.
Show HN: Bored? Our Android app has the answer.
That's exactly right. I am dumbfounded that they didn't protect everything.
I don't think I will ever get used to ruby syntax. It looks like a mix between pascal and basic.
Erlang for Python Programers
Can you expand on that comment? I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Should this change how we interpret the stock price growth comparison between Microsoft, Apple, and Google?

Just thinking about it, I only see two ways in which that would change the stocks valuation. On the one hand, it must reduce the capital that Microsoft has on hand, which might reduce the price of the stock. On the other hand, I would imagine that the fact that owning Microsoft gives you real value in the form of an (quarterly?) payout might increase the stock's price. One can still buy and sell the stock just like a stock that doesn't pay a dividend, betting on the future success of the company, plus you get money on a regular basis. Is there some other way it relates? I really don't know much about this.
Can you (or someone else) please explain this in a little more detail? I understand the concept that a stock that pays dividends won't rise the same way as one that doesn't, but how does one "correct" for this effect to calculate market caps?

Are you implying that all those stories about Apple surpassing MSFT's market-cap were misleading due to this fact?

Thanks
You're really gonna tell me this is the end of the line for the field of cryptography? Humanity need not revist because Mission Accomplished?
Definitely falsifiability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Falsifiability is essentially irrelevant to 90% of people.
Very cool stuff, something I would most like use myself :)
The same board that approved this deal would be responsible for appointing a new CEO.
In other words: The only way we can obtain this information is to not tell what what information we're obtaining.
somebody needs to create a website that is a directory of sites that tick off all the important ToS conditions.

ie. which sites own your content when you upload, which ones do not delete, etc. sounds like a great weekend project for someone

publish an API and hookup a browser plugin that will color the address bar red whenever you are about to signup to a site that has a fishy ToS

At Techcrunch I built a bot that would crawl and grep ToS pages for changes, we used it a few times to detect new upcoming product launches from Google et al. I would integrate something similar into this ToS directory site
> it's better to crash hard and fast

I'm not so sure about that. If you need to squeeze out a little more performance, code that is "technically undefined" can be more portable than dropping to ASM.

I think LLVM should emit a warning on code with undefined semantics and generate DWIM instructions instead of UD2s.