skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure the heuristics are that simple.

The signal-to-noise ratio in Twitter is already low as it is. Most tweets contain links, lots of users are followers but are not followed.

Sure, combining several clever heuristics can reduce spam levels, and no doubt Twitter must attack this aspect if it wants to stay relevant.

But can you put your finger on what exactly constitutes spam in a platform that is so noisy?
As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path.
Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around 20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much nothing.
Most of communication that I see taking place is very very meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty much it.

For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.

If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt.
Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.

Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list.

And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble.

The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do.

Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads?
It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here.

Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.

Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target.

Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will.

Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.
tl;dr: Based on a comment by Microsoft VP, Julie Larson-Green, that a certain weather application they recently made was done using a platform based on HTML 5 and JS, ars technica's Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform, and then goes into a long rant on how disastrous this will be for all the Windows developers because it will make all their current knowledge useless and will force them to use a suboptimal technology to develop their applications. At the end of the article he concludes that, yeah, that's not actually going to happen, because Microsoft isn't stupid.
It won't do a perfect job, and their will be false positives, but the point is, unlike with spam in email - because of their asymmetrical following model, false positives are not nearly as much of a problem. Twitter should absolutely do this.

Twitter could easily detect spammers - by their follow history, reputation score (eg a google-rank link like SVD of the follow graph), or simple ratios like follows vs followers. It will inevitably false flag some people but that's not nearly so much of a problem.

That is, they don't have to outright ban these spammers, all they have to do is block these people from search results available for #hashtags or @replies. In the case of genuine people false flagged as spammers, they can still get their message out to genuine followers. It's not too much of a loss to be banned from search results and @reply messaging until you build your karma level a bit.

You're absolutely right twitter should fix this and do it fast. It's a goddamn shame seeing a potentially very useful public resource - like adhoc organising around #hashtags - being destroyed by the actions of a few.

tl;dr Twitter can starve out the spammers just by blocking search results.
Jimmy Johns, please be more responsible with my data
Wouldn't the spammers be mostly new accounts, as the old ones would be blocked already.

So I propose the heuristic: new account+trending topic => spam
Ask HN: How did you find a place to live in/near SF?
Been scouring through craigslist and padmapper the past couple weeks. Most listings are crap, and the ones that are decent rarely reply back.

I did a search of HN and found previous requests for roommate help have gone unnoticed, so I'm not very optimistic about this one either.

Little bit about me: 23 years old, have a steady job, clean, have a good sense of humor (I was going to say funny, but then I realized no one laughs at my jokes), likes all things web.

Would love to live with fellow hackers or at least someone involved in SF/bay area startup scene, but at this point I'd just choose a quiet place to live with chill roommates.

My email is 20000.legs@gmail.com, if you're interested or know someone I'd be very grateful.
Watch Boston vs Vancouver live streaming online HOCKEY
Most welcome to NHL between Boston vs Vancouver live stream online on your pc. Boston vs Vancouver live stream online will be held on Monday, June 13, 2011. So, NHL fans don't miss to watch this important game today.
The gap between consumer and corporate is getting smaller every day. This trend is only going to continue, so betting on something appealing only to enterprise, not consumers, is a self-defeating strategy.
The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know.

So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old colleagues.
Sounds good to me. Glad to see so much excitement about this.
Including a man page in your Ruby Gem
That's what I suggested with the quotes, at this rate startup news will drawn.
But fortunately we have way more (quality) startup news sources these days.
Tips and Tricks to avoid memory leaks in writing C
When I write C I used to prototype the model first, then fix the memory leaks. I think its OK for throw code. I find that these leaks are mostly due to patterns of code that one avoids.

Like,

1. not assigning null to a pointer after freeing it

2. not allocating enough memory for string processing

Please throw in your tips and tricks to avoid memory leaks and memory related problems.
Lenutaa_mirceaa
Guy I just found a web browser does flash page without paying monthly fees. Puffin browser!! Check it out
If Microsoft wants to destroy itself then it should focus only on HTML5/Javascript. Corporations are all about speed and efficiency and to compare .Net vs HTML5/Javascript is insane.

I've been programming in .Net for years now, but recently as I got new projects I figured to use them in HTML5/Javascript instead. But after countless of hours research it turns out .Net is by far the most efficient and only option in terms of speed and most direct relation to the hardware, which was important for my projects. They both play a part and neither should be ruled out. Using HTML5/Jquery for web projects and .Net for projects which requires quick access to local resources. Two different worlds.
If I were Microsoft I would focus fuse those two worlds together. And if they can add 1+1 this is their intent.

The developers and corporations will continue to use whatever means to maximize profit with the most efficient way for their app. And the corporations in whole is who steer the direction of the consumer market in the end. Not one or two companies.
Corporations use .Net not because Microsoft tells them to do so, but because it is most the efficient.

From a consumer point of view it might not be so easy to understand how these things works, as all you see in media is Microsoft that and Apple that and then one might think that's all there is to it.
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I am working in finance because the professors I knew were not salty enough. I have to do a lot of scut work, and I really am not on an impressive salary, but I see massive real-world problems on a daily basis and get a live view of the things that really matter in the world economy.

Running trading algorithms would be pretty pants, but managing risk is not quite so ignoble.
The ultimate car service would allow me to find a car a short walk from where I am and then do a one way trip, without a booking. I've always felt that the only barrier to providing this service was a critical mass of drivers and zipcars. Most cars are currently idle for the majority of their lifetime, taking up a lot of parking space. Imagine if the streets were lined with shared cars instead of privately owned cars. Once you get to a certain density you should be able guarantee availability in all but the most remote locations. There are large scale migrations like commuting that take place over the day/week but the availability of cars should match this.
Given a rising population density it seems inevitable that such a service will have to exist as we will run out of storage space for idle cars.
First impressions of the Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES2
Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES2 From From Experienced Adobe Flex developer's point of view.
To be fair, I've seen plenty of spammer accounts that have thousands of followers.

That said: I agree, banning accounts that tweet nothing but the same link would be a really easy step towards reducing the amount of spam. At the same time - maybe Twitter don't want to auto-ban, as this is a quick and easy way of finding spammers. Tricky :-/
Pardon my french, but this a shallow phrase. Typically enterprise UIs has dozens of input controls, not because the Developers suck but because they need a lot more input than the google search page, a media player or something like that. Touch Interfaces will always suck in those cases, and HTML5 is still far away from handling those beasts in an elegant way.
IPhone 5 in Final Testing, Due in September
@wordsontheweb: "Credit where credit's due, @twitter appears to have cleaned out the #eqnz spam"
http://twitter.com/#!/Wordsontheweb/status/80183699127275521

I think she's right.
I never really considered adding a man page last time I released a command line tool as a gem, I just stuck to -h, but I'll definitely give it a go. Seems easy enough!
The free software movement giant will definitely be around in 100 years.
The moral here is to use X- headers for evil, because people will quickly notice when you start injecting random stuff into URLs you don't manage.

Actually, current or planned location of the client is a sensible thing to provide in some standardized header, though of course not without informed consent.
Would work only if you're a regular in HN. For anyone else, this would fire (no one will return).
I cannot think of a single non-spam case where somebody would @-tweet the same link to a hundred people. That won't capture all spam, but it's a pretty easy low-pass filter.
There is so much ambiguity in language that parallelization is often possible at a very course-grained level. This usually doesn't require more cleverness than multi-processing or multi-threading.

Given that they switched from their own pattern matching language to an optimized WAM, I suspect they use one of the common Prolog implementations.
Whoops - a slip of the keyboard ;-)

Of course, Lisp is another one.
Turning Mortgage Around
Your house that you bought so many years ago represents one of the biggest investments of your life. By the time you approach retirement, if you have stuck with it, you may well have that house paid off. And with appreciation, that home may be worth twice or three times what you paid for it and you have all the equity from those years of house payments. Therefore, in addition to the joy you have had living in that house and raising your family there, that house is also can be a big part of your retirement planning as well.
Upcoming Apple store in Hamburg pranked with Windows logo
I used Windows Mobile 5 and 6. The hill (of their own making) that Microsoft has to climb to get me to even remotely think of them as the provider of a modern smartphone platform is monumental.
If not permanent ban, but ban for some time, lets say 5 hours would more helpful IMO.
> Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform

Actually, unless my memory fails me, it was that Microsoft video showing the tiled interface of Windows 8 that did that - it kind of implied HTML5 was the tool of choice (or, at least, the glue) for tiled and that tiled was the future. The thread kenjackson pointed out tells another story, but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.
Enterprise will always be different than the consumer market until the nature of the enterprise decentralizes.

The key driving distinction between enterprise and consumer is that in the enterprise the person using the software had almost no say in its purchase and thus has almost no say in its development. Consumer software works well when you use it, enterprise software looks good when you see it in a powerpoint presentation next to a feature checkbox, or hear about it on a golf course. Since no one making the purchasing decision will ever actually use it, you're pretty much guaranteed sales. Especially if you can pair it with expensive training that is necessary because your software is designed so poorly.

Having features is generally how you get through an RFP the purpose of an RFP is to CYA. Thus if you have the RFP approved by management and the proposal meets the RFP you're guaranteed a sale if no one else can check the boxes. If you ever get approved for an RFP you should immediately apply to become the vendor of record / preferred vendor for everything in that space guaranteeing more sales of your atrocious software.

Never design software that works in the enterprise as you'll lose out on massive support / training revenue. The worse your software is the better it will sell. Hopefully you can figure out how to sell software that doesn't actually do ANYTHING until they hire programmers to customize it. (I'm looking at you CRM vendors)

Once you've been through a couple of these things you'll understand how it works and how crappy software is incentivized by the RFP system.

You should also have an RFP template ready that contains all the features your software has so that lazy employees from megacorp can submit it for approval. Your sales people should be all too ready to help the employee out with this task so that they have a very professional and tailored RFP. Now that they don't have anything to do that day you should take them out for a beer to celebrate how fast they submitted the RFP to management. Management will remember them as the guy who gets stuff done so quickly and professionally, they'll move up quickly.
"listening to my playlist" is a feature.
The best thing is to write as much as possible. Pick up as many projects as you can, design and recreate everything you have read about in computer science literature. Keep coding fun and do it as much as possible. Find the reference material used to teach computer science courses (there are standard books for many areas). READ READ READ. Diversify your knowledge into areas you find interesting. All you need is diligence.

You may find that by the time you're in your early 20s you are light years ahead of your peers.
everything simple as possible, no simpler. - Albert (he used too many words)
I remember reading about that in "The Information", where it is described how Claude Shannon did it.

Now I'll have to tweak my spam detection even more. Joke aside and somebody correct me if I'm wrong, spam probably runs on a simple wordlist type algorithm.

What is then the usefulness (I define usefulness extremely wide) of such a generator?
A tech marketer with a github profile?
My experience is the opposite. I work on a parsing/generation system that was developed in our group. Such a system consists of mundane parts (rewriting trees, applying a log-linear model) and sophisticated parts (parser, generator, guidance, grammar recompilation), and I find both to be natural in Prolog.

I suspect that you have just used the wrong tool for the job. Prolog works well for problems that require reasoning, and unification extensively. But if you are trying to write, say, a parameter estimator in Prolog, you are using the wrong tool for the job.
Hotels and alcohol seem to be clear winners - same service has been relevant as long as there has been commerce.
Maybe the lat/lon URL parameters would be a good thing to standardize on, actually. Having feeds tailored to your location makes a lot of sense on other mobile platforms than just cars.

Sending the car ID isn't nice, though.
True. @-tweeting the same message is indeed low hanging fruit. But spam gets sophisticated as the arms race continues.

My assertion is that after a certain point (which we are not far from), Twitter as a platform will have a problem making a distinction between "spam" and "legitimate content".
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/1corinthians/1corinthians14.h...
Why WikiLeaks Is Essential | | AlterNet
My Facebook account is alright, but my Twitter and Linkedin are overrun by spammers.
How to Increase your Business Blog Page Speed
Aren't people giving out recommendations like it's going out of style?
If you have a good generator for text, you have a useful language model that can be plugged into applications such as speech recognition, OCR, predictive text entry systems and compression.
> Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic
> X is now friends with 10 new people

It might be just me, but isn't this the main use of FB, i.e. stalking? Of course I want to know when my friends have changed their profile pictures, how else would I assess their happiness and fulfillment in life if not by looking at their latest photos?
Gods and angels are a rude awakening. Just wait until you experience mind reading. You go to store and there are black people. Your head is full of turrets syndrome like thoughts. It's okay -- God's a racist. :-)
Q for Programmers: Why search for code, when you can sweat and code yourself
Being a programmer myself, I understand the path of how the application is to take, visualize and then write the code.<p>I got a programmer here who downloads classes from the internet and uses them and never writes the code himself. What is the psychology behind such an act. Does he not know programming, or he is just lazy.<p>I want to understand the reason, why he does not write but uses others classes, please exclude the fact its there and need not have to write the code.
The app is called Photato, it's not out yet but we have a new team and are building something that is accurate enough to be of use to the Quantified self community. If anyone here is interested in testing Photato, drop me a line at taro.franke (at) gmail (dot) com
Making hard liquor worth drinking is surprisingly difficult. It's lot easier if you know how to make activated carbon, but making activated carbon is difficult with equipment of that age(possible though).
Batterie pour ordinateur portable Ibm Thinkpad t41- 4400mAh 7200mAh
Puissant IBM 4400mAh 6600mAh THINKPAD T41 Batterie pour ordinateur portable IBM ThinkPad T41 Original Batterie pour ordinateur portable

Est-il nécessaire pour activer le nouveau IBM ThinkPad T41 batterie? Il fautgénéralement plus de 10 heures pour activer la batterie nouvellement acheté à chaque fois. Et il pourrait être pleinement activé après plusieurs 3-5 fois. IBM T41 circuit de protection de batterie rechargeable à l'intérieur contre les surcharges.
Yep, and witness Rake releasing an update that breaks Rails, Rubygems releasing an update that breaks Rails, Rails 3 being a performance nightmare, gem authors nuking each others' namespaces...

I think in general that Ruby has one of the better communities out there (I'm a rubyist myself) but all this noise about TDD and cute DSLs (RSpec, Cucumber...) hasn't made a material difference in Ruby code quality compared to any other language.
At least one of those isn't true, my "work" Twitter account is mainly links and a short comment from me for example. Each of your criteria only affects the probability than an account is a spammer. E.g. you could easily organize a campaign of "spam report" on a hated celebrity, politician, whoever and get them booted.
Is my business idea worth a success?
How to Explain Virtualization to Your Friends
Seems kind of silly without prefixing what the contents are. I collect old UNIX workstations and servers so some kind of swap would be awesome since eBay sellers tend to strip and desecrate these, but getting a random box of crap doesn't sound so useful.
I was quite sure that would be the case, as Microoft would never allow such an easy way to port Windows apps to other environments. Whatever glue is tied in HTLM/JS environment, it'll run deep into the Windows APIs in such a way no HTML5/JS app will be easily ported to, say, Google's ChromeOS.
Why not have a PageRank for twitter accounts? Essentially if I retweet something you say, that's the same as a link from one website to another (other heuristics: person A replies/@mentions B, or person A follows B, or person A follows B and vice-versa).
I want to bias my Google SERPs, Twitter search etc. with my social graphs - linkedin, twitter, facebook - like I do offline.

Sometimes I may still want to allow anonymous (to me) signals to influence what I see, but generally I only want to see content/recommendations that people 2 or 3 degrees of separation from me have given some positive signal for.

Too much of my day is filtering noise.
Aggregating the speed data is usefull too. e. g. based on lots of location and speed data, you can tell that traffic on Highway 1 is moving, but on Route B it isn't; and route incoming cars accordingly.

Or gather data on average speeds and numbers of journeys by time of day for capacity planning.

It can be used for evil; but there are legitimate uses too. it's a hard problem to get the data out to only where it can do good.
If A Programming Language Was A Boat
Everything good on Craigslist is going to have a ton of competition, there's no way around it. Just keep your mind open to opportunities - I got my current place when my first choice fell through, but I asked the landlord if he had anything else nearby. Turns out one of his tenants in the same building wanted to move out early.

You might also consider living in Berkeley/Oakland - it's easy to get to SF via BART, and cheaper to boot.
Most VB6 shops I know took the kool aid and went VB.Net or C#. It would take a whole lot lot of disappointment for them to move away from Microsoft.