skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is interesting. From an SEO perspective, the phrase "hacker news" doesn't appear many times on the site itself, but surely a great many incoming links must use that text.

at most 228 days ago the title tag changed from "Hacker News | $title" to "$title | Hacker News": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542

But that's quite a long time back so I'd be surprised if that has anything to do with it.

I have noticed that Google does put a huge amount of weight on domain name keywords, but thehackernews.com was registered in Oct 2010, so it's not like it's only just appeared.

Can't really see any reason for this.
Uh yeah, ethics.

You can treat life like a big exercise in game theory. But you're going to have this thing called a "reputation". Maybe you can get away with it on your campus interviews, but if you consistently lie to get the best of a situation, it will catch up to you. (Lying in this case being accepting an offer without the intention of taking it. As opposed to saying you need time to consider other offers.)

Joel is right -- this is a tactic used by second-rate companies. First-rate companies don't pull bullshit like this. Same with first-rate employees. Accepting every offer and then reneging on all but one marks you as a second-rate employee. It's the behavior of the desperate.

Personally I have always just applied for 1 or 2 jobs at a time so it's never been an issue.
The servers that were attacked weren't the actual exchange server but the servers for Director's Desk.

To be frank, it's a logistical nightmare to keep all your servers completely patched to the very latest patch level, so "unpatched" is really non-descriptive. Was it vanilla W2K3 or was it a couple of months old? I would imagine most servers that run Windows that house mission critical services is at least 1 month unpatched, because it takes time to test the patches to make sure it doesn't cause problems, so the title is a bit misleading.

I've had customers that had a window of 8 hrs per quarter to upgrade their mission critical servers for any reason (upgrading OS, upgrading software, etc), so I can imagine they would have been considered "unpatched" as well.

That being said, there's no excuse for misconfigured firewalls. You would have thought the 10 companies they hired for security would have noticed this, but I guess they were just feeding from the trough.
7 Free Addictive iOS Puzzle Games
It seems that lately puzzle games do furor among users of IOS and Android devices so I thought to share some of the most interesting we’ve ones we played.
The list is not based on download stats, but based on our team preferences and I am pretty sure you will enjoy it too.
I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly.

Added: Looks like HN has been blocking Googlebot, so our automated systems started to think that HN was dead. I dropped an email to PG to ask what he'd like us to do.
What's in store for Beachbody in 2012
Thanks. Looks cool. I'll look into it :)
Awesome! Is this something you could sell on Etsy or Kickstarter?
Ah yes, Europe being that pristine example of freedom and democracy (much better than police state USA). Just make sure you don't say anything racist or xenophobic, or you might wind up in prison --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial
Congratulations? It's a boiler plate response.
Unfortunately radio take a long time and a lot of money to get approval for, and the process is different for every country. And it's the entire 'system' that needs approval - you can't just say the chip is already used by everyone else.

That's why your laptop will often have the wifi+bluetooth model as a little simm card under a cover, it allows them to get the radio 'system' approved separately from the computer and use the same radio in different models without repeating the process.
Yes, particularly in December. Better to get started before companies have had to make decisions on many other applicants already, and this is about when some companies will start considering them in my experience. Other companies will start later so you're not screwed if you don start now, but you will be passing up some opportunities probably.
Google Waves Goodbye to Wave Via Gmail
How about some books that aren't pop-sci / business books? I am kind of biased, since I love this area of psychology.

- The Sciences of the Artificial by Simon

- The Psychology of Problem Solving by Davidson & Sternberg

- The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology) by Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich & Hoffman

- Minds, Brains and Computers - The Foundations of Cognitive Science: An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies)

- Choices, Values, and Frames by Kahneman & Tversky

The Sciences of the Artificial is a small but deep book by Herbert Simon, who is considered a key figure in founding the study of these areas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon ).

Davidson & Sternberg focuses on problem solving (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sternberg ).

The Cambridge Handbooks (there are many others) in particular are excellent as they contain classic articles in Cognitive Science and Psychology, with introductions and overviews by people who actually research this area. The one on Expertise and Expert performance is edited by K. A. Ericsson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson )

Minds, Brains and Computers is another collection of classics, from a more model-based perspective.

Finally, Kahneman and Tversky offer a more economics-centric viewpoint. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Tversky )

If you read scientific articles in this area, you'll notice that many of these author's names will keep popping up...
I will definitely second Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto.

Eliyahu Goldratt's books (I have read Critical Chain and It's Not Luck as well as The Goal) are not as original as often claimed. They are very readable introductions, but a good project management text will cover most of what they do and more. The project management book that I have found most helpful is Project Management With Cpm, Pert and Precedence Diagramming; despite its age (1983) it covers a wider variety of techniques with more detail and less extraneous crud than any of the others I have seen (note I am still researching this area, anyone who has a favorite book can leave it in a comment). http://www.amazon.com/Project-Management-Pert-Precedence-Dia...

Jonathan Baron's Thinking and Deciding is one of the best books on improving your thinking in general that I have ever read. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Deciding-Jonathan-Baron/dp/05...
The last 1/5th of the article is about exactly this strategy.
Example: http://likeaboss.herokuapp.com/nuclear
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He's just stating the obvious. If they think you're a desirable employee, they're not going to be offended if you are considering multiple offers. Or if they are, they are so unprofessional and petty, that you're better off staying away. This is business, not dating.
Links are the currency of the web. TheVerge consciously avoids linking to the story originator on first in-context mention of that publication. Nor on the key verb phrase where they could allude to the fact they learned of the story via TPM ("...written a letter...") Nor where linking to TPM's more-detailed coverage could supply original source documents ("...the letter...").

The one link they do give is at the bottom, where many readers won't have even scrolled to, and in the sort of grayed text block many viewers skim over as ad or decoration.

Others have the same criticism of TheVerge's style:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/three-lessons-news-sites-ca...

This is especially egregious when an aggregator is primarily regurgitating the same details as from the single original source, who barely gets any credit at all. There's no reason for a site like HN to prefer the link-jacking, link-stingy aggregator in such cases. (Sometimes, mods even change the submission to reflect the more-primary story-originating site.)
I believe it's true; in fact, if it was ever slightly overstated, it is less overstated now, when the competition for talent is even fiercer.
Great man. Just a short story from a late friend of mine:

A collector (respectable govt. service post) used to sit in Mushayra (urdu poetry convention.

He recited "People say the art of poetry is evil. I became collector reciting it."

People clapped.

One man replied "Crown of world was in your destiny. You remained a collector reciting it."
Nanoparticle electrode for batteries could make large-scale power storage
Yes, invest more in open source. No reason these days for developing countries to be paying huge fees/taxes to proprietary software companies.

Experiment with the Salman Khan learning style - invert lectures and homework. Eg, have students watch lectures at home (from MIT OCW, Stanford, Berkeley, Khan Academy, etc), and devote class time to implementing, practicing, doing. Get rid of large boring lectures, replace them with more time in guided labs/sessions. Learning programming is all about doing, and the one advantage a University can offer over self-learning is mentoring by professors and a quicker instructional feedback loop. Leverage that.
Hi

I work at Google helping webmasters.

It seems something has been blocking Googlebot from crawling HN, and so our algorithms think the site is dead. A very common cause is a firewall.

I realize that pg has been cracking down on crawlers recently. Maybe there was an unexpected configuration change? If Googlebot is crawling too fast, you can slow it down in Webmaster Tools.

I'm happy to answer any questions. This is a common issue.

Pierre
Boots to Asses - WWE social media strategy leaves others in the dust
Love at first Jockey
I'm not sure why you should learn ruby only if you do web things. Is it true ? Is ruby only useful in web projects ?
The last PHP wrapper for MySQL you'll ever need
Actually the entire premise of Steve's book is that he was in charge of performance/latency at Yahoo, and started out looking for issues in the backend.

But when he measured end-user latency, he realized that all the issues were in the front end. It doesn't make sense to start tweaking 100,000 lines of C++ code to shave 1 ms from the backend response time when you're taking 200-300ms to load JavaScript and such.

I think this is probably a common performance characteristic at large companies; perhaps not small ones. At small ones you probably have a database bottleneck. But at companies Yahoo/Google the backend engineers have generally optimized things quite a lot (partly because that kind of work is rewarded), and there's a lot of flab in the front end.
You can't expect to see them, any more than a major car manufacturer can decide to enforce ethics in "their" sales rooms and remain competitive in the market place. The market dynamics for recruitment are dominated by adverse selection. The best recruiters can pick the best employers to work with and have little incentive to work in lesser-known companies. The (considerably larger) remainder of the market is run by sleazebag recruiters; that's all most companies will ever get to work with (internally or outsourced).
Google's shown something like this off before. Video at http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/google-liquid-galaxy/
Can you recommend resources for those 2 topics?
It's fun to think of candid rationales. "We did this because Joe bullied us into it. When he leaves the company, we're undoing it the next day." Or "Sue was able to keep her wits later in the evening than the rest of us, so we agreed to anything she wanted just so we could go home and sleep."
You'd wait 6 months to turn down an offer in the same month as your start date? That could screw them over for having an intern that summer.
It was true for me when I was in that spot. For the internship I had after my junior year, my on-site interview was the reason I skipped out on class and came home a day early for Thanksgiving break, and I was on the phone with them several weeks prior. IIRC, I think I got the actual acceptance in mid-January.
Everytime, I would rather have a potential hire be upfront and honest rather than 1. accept a position, 2. we stop looking, and 3. they drop out. That's just not professional. And as Joel says, by them telling us they have other options we're going to work on getting them interested in coming to work for us. I once lost a really great intern who was headhunted over a weekend, left me a voicemail on a Sunday morning to tell me he was being offered a position and took it on Monday first thing because I didn't get back to him immediately - I guess he was being pressured the same way as we had a great working relationship. It was really a shame as we didn't even get a chance to fight back for him.
> I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time

It's not. The question is how you factor time into your discounting. Take the $1 vs $10 example. There are several risk factors at play here, and we can discount for each of them.

First is the time value of money. Let's be generous and give you a 5% risk free rate of return. That $10 is now worth about $9.50.

Next is just the default risk. What if the guy asking you the question doesn't pay in a year? This risk, however, is artificial. We can modify the experiment to compensate for it: the guy can put it in an escrow account guaranteed to pay you in a year. No discount.

Catastrophe risk: what if the bank underwriting the escrow account goes under / what if the entire banking system is destroyed / what if dollars are no longer valuable / what if I'm too dead to enjoy the dollars? Let's be generous and say the combined possibility that some catastrophe will render the $9.50 worthless to you is 20%. Now the money is worth about $7.6.

Now the question is, what is this money actual worth to you in terms of utility. Suppose your total wealth was $100,000. $1 is 0.0001% of your wealth. The $7.6 is 7.6 times that value. That means that in order for the $7.6 to have a smaller impact on your life than the $1, your wealth would have to increase by over 7.6 times in the next year. If you're in a situation where the probability that your overall wealth will increase by over 7.6 times in the next year, then your decision to take the dollar now is likely rational. If not, your decision is not utility maximizing (and thus irrational).
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Entirely.

At my co-op job (just graduated in May) we hired for summer starting in spring semester. If you start prepping now you can start applying day 1. Companies who know the internship schedule will post at the beginning because they want the most time to screen applications, even if that means doing 2-3 interview days on campus. The other upside is that you're not crunched for interview schedules. It's not unheard of for Google to get back to you a few weeks after you applied, or even after you past round 1.

If you start applying in spring, you also have the option of starting in fall if that's your initiative. This would probably fall more in the co-op category than internship. This lets companies overlap you with another graduating co-op. If their schedule is summer, spring, fall, you could want fall to overlap. Or if they do 4 terms it's summer, spring, fall, summer.

From experience, our interview pool sucked in beginning of fall, so don't apply for spring term if you can help it. We would interview in fall for the upcoming summer sometimes, but most of the time we were trying to hire to replace the students who stayed 5 or 6 terms. We found that it was mostly (though not entirely) rejects from spring hiring that couldn't find a job in summer and didn't go to school over that past summer. As a result of this happening for several years in a row, we stopped having on campus interviews in Fall, though if you applied to us directly we would interview you.
Has Google been making significant changes to the search ranking algorithms in the past couple months? I've noticed a significant decline in the quality of results, to the point that (for the first time in years), I've bounced over to DuckDuckGo or Bing to try my luck there. I love Google as a company, so (if this isn't just in my head) I'd love to see things get better again.

EDIT: Looks like the change to HN's ranking is related to a change that pg made, so my comment is now less relevant to the parent post. I still stand by it, though. :-)
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How does this guy's low quality blog repeatedly make it to the front page?
1. Small companies don't recruit at colleges.

2. We're "small" by any reasonable definition and have structured ourselves so that we don't need to make expiring offers. It can be done.

3. Spolsky is talking about a very specific kind of hiring that bigger companies do, where the schedule is explicitly "interview in Q3-Q4, choose in Q4-Q1, start in Q2-3". It's this environment where exploding offers make sense.
Turkey Institutes "Voluntary" Internet Filtering
In the sales world, this is called "fear of loss". You pressure the client to buy because they might loose an opportunity. Example: "This offer is only valid today!".
Socialists think free speech is overrated.
There's no flip side to this. Spolsky is writing about college recruitment, where the idea is to interview at a bunch of companies and then pick one many weeks later. You are talking about a totally different kind of hiring, where exploding offers aren't (as much of) a problem.
That's a thought, but even moderately sized snippets might get hard to read. I think this concern is especially valid because the rest of the text on the site is large and easily readable from a distance, so making the most important text–the snippet–smaller would be out of place.
Thanks!

It might be. I am trying to focus on my own distribution channel at the moment. I was thinking if people like this, and I need to scale, then I will turn to kickstarter!
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Non-Profit Groups in Missouri trying to cap interest rates for Car Title Loans
Where do I begin?

Laws against denying the holocaust are not equivalent to laws against xenophobia or racism. You might be thinking of laws against hate speech.

Next, you’ll have to do a little more than just rant to convince me that laws restricting hateful speech are somehow antithetical to “freedom and democracy.”

Xenophobia and racism are pretty much as anti-democratic as you can get: If you don’t want blacks, jews, romany, homosexuals, or indians in your homeland, you’re hardly advocating the idea of freedom and democracy, are you?
Then you probably aren't on Hacker News that often. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3271572
I enjoyed Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learni...). It's quite accessible, and doesn't feel too pop or new age.

If you're quick, you can get it rather cheaply during the Black Friday sale. (http://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2011-11-21.html)
The link you give is not an example of what you say though: you can be a holocaust denier without being a racist or a xenophobe and (more commonly) you can be a racist and a xenophobe (outspoken, too) and not be a holocaust denier.

A relevant link would have been http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

And not that I defend these laws (they're mostly pointless and useless) but being racist or xenophobe usually isn't sufficient to qualify for hate speech, by the way. Hell, xenophobia is positively thriving these days, just start talking about Romani to continental europeans, there's a good chance you'll see an explosion of xenophobia.
Is there any Flash involved? One of the biggest features in Flash 10 was the addition of p2p streaming.
For reference, there is another discussion about this here:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661

A few people from Google, including Matt Cutts, are taking part in that discussion.
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I work as a teacher in the UK. Until quite recently, it was normal practice to interview for jobs in teaching, choose the candidate, and then have the candidate sign the contract that day. All the candidates were kept in a room onsite until the committee decided who to appoint.

This system meant no one applied unless they wanted that specific job.

Teaching has become more like other occupations over the last 10 years or so, but the expectation is still that you decide within a few days of being offered the job. Must be a UK thing.
Not a business book, but "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" by George Lakoff is a great guide to how humans think about categories and other related topics rather than how as computer professionals we're trained to represent those relationships.
Never ceases to amaze me. I know upgrading servers can be royally difficult but for something as large and critical as NASDAQ and the fact that security experts seem to suggest that keeping software up to date is the #1 important rule, you would have thought that updating servers would be part of their general security strategy.
It was a big deal. The point is that statistically such incidents kill and injure far fewer than coal, natural gas, or even hydroelectricity.
Does it perhaps return something to the tune of "Unknown or expired link"? :-P
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date people "in your league". you can try to get with someone out of your league, but they're (much) more likely to string you along until something better comes along, or cheat on you. if you can't get hot enough people to date you, maybe you should work on yourself, and your social proof.
You can get around this pretty easily by just using a DVR and starting the game about halfway through. Fast forward through the commercials/breaks and you'll progressively catch up as the game goes on, and hopefully finish at about the same time.

The only major issue with this is if you have friends watching separately who regularly text you about occurences in the game as it's going on. You'll also have to make sure you don't look at any NFL websites during the game.
Paypal also has a button widget for sending paid customers to download link. Of course Paypal takes its 3% taste of the kick.
I remember times a few months ago when Hacker News was not the first result again. Just wanted to point this out.
> Next, you’ll have to do a little more than just rant to convince me that laws restricting hateful speech are somehow antithetical to “freedom and democracy.”

They're restrictions on freedom of speech, so they're restrictions on freedom (I have a harder time with the "restriction on democracy" part, that one does not make sense).

> Xenophobia and racism are pretty much as anti-democratic as you can get

Sure, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
So does email. Email will be around in 5-10 years and is not tied to a company. Who knows what will happen to Twitter.
That's an index premised on the hypothesis that "happiness" correlates in significant part with "access to education". It's unsurprising that Sweden does better on that index than the US, while doing poorer on others. That feels cherry picked.
I sent you an email about this.

(A couple weeks ago I banned all Google crawler IPs except one. Crawlers are disproportionately bad for HN's performance because HN is optimized to serve recent stuff, which is usually in memory.)
Advantages of having a deep Google guy as a user :)