skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Talking like a SEO Guy, Pagerank is not a metric for ranking on Google SERP's, in the past was. But pagerank is good to know the reputation of a site and advertisements.

The important is ranking for effective keywords and receive traffic from that. Search for videos of Matt Cutts explaining pagerank.

My advice for you, keep the good work in your site and wait for the next Pagerank's update.
My understanding of the law is that if they have established a business relationship with you (you express interest in their product), that "relationship" lasts for (I believe) 30 days, during which they can call you freely. Asking to be put on their DNC list should cut off your relationship, but I think had they gone to court they would have had a solid defense that you expressed interest in their product, and you would have likely won nothing.
I was young and like stated, I needed a job and wasn't picky. Not to mention when I started I didn't know what exactly was going on, because I was part of another section that sold the Boston Globe newspaper before moving to the shady side.

I only worked there for 3 months, then I told my boss to go fuck herself and walked out.

Edit: and no offense taken, if you have any questions in regards to what little bit I do know about such a crappy industry let me know. I am somewhat knowledge in it.

Funny enough my current job is at a call center for a GPS company. I don't do any calling though.
I disagree, it depends on the telemarketing, though I do agree that the vast majority is terrible, and that anything using an automated dialer is terrible.

Colleagues of mine in sales sometimes telemarket - in that they will cold call potential customers, but only people they have researched and genuinely think might want to advertise with us, and the track record of a.) people called who end up spending money with us and b.) of those people, the ones who are happy and become repeat customers, does show that in this situation telesales works great for both us and them.

On the other side of good telemarketing, I'm in a position to get plenty of cold calls / cold emails myself, business related, and it's not rare for me to get one that genuinely interests me, and sometimes leads to me spending money with them and getting good results from it. So I don't mind getting those calls/emails.

Outside of business I find them horrific, I've never had a good cold-call to my home landline or my mobile, presumably because for non-business sales it isn't worth doing any research into who I am and whether I'm a valid target.

(But yes, I agree with your judgement in this particular instance.)
But you have no reason to believe they won't in the future. Honestly, thank goodness for Mozilla and I hope they can keep up with browsers for a long time because the web will be a horrible place without Firefox.
I used to be very excited about Elixir, not because I hate Erlang's syntax (I actually quite like it), but because I saw in it the opportunity for a mainstream, general purpose language with macros on top of the excellent Erlang runtime.

However, after 2 small projects with Clojure, my thoughts have changed. To me it is the general programming language, and it's only a matter of time until clojure-beam sees the light of day (there's already Joxa).

Also, it occupies a weird spot: after v0.4's redesign, it pretty much kept Erlang's semantics, which made it unlikely to be adopted by old Erlangers and, with the whole OO thing was thrown away, it is too much a departure from Ruby.
"Assuming that its five-year return is equal to the stock market’s long-term average return of 11% annualized, Facebook shares currently would need to be trading at just $13.80."

I think it is odd to be comparing FB with the average market. Quite an assumption, fundamental to his calculations.

FB is threading on a new paradigm, similar to what Google/Apple were. Obviously, comparing them to historical averages does not make sense either (at the time), since no comparable paradigm existed.
The blackout or 'bat signal' page can contain all the relevant information, reaching out to a lot more people. Many people would miss out on that page because of lazy webmasters.
Ask HN: My competitor is gaming Google big time -- should I copy them?
I'm curious what HN thinks about gaming SEO.

My competitor (a well-funded startup with a very successful founder) has built a very significant number of micro sites and bought tons of links.

The micro sites are little mini blogs filled with their content and links back to their site. They seem to have bought some very old and very expensive domains for these sites.

The bought links are clearly just paid for on some link buying site.

It appears to be working very well for them. They've even bragged publicly about how much SEO traffic they get and they have very few legitimate inbound links.

I hate the game and the player, but I'm conflicted on whether I should allow my distaste effect my ability to grow my business. I could copy them.

My other concern is that even if it does work Google may lake the smack down at some time in the future, but my competitor has been doing this for at least 18 months with success.

The other idea I had is to try to report them to Google. It's hard to believe they can't detect it or haven't noticed, and given the profile of the founder I wonder if there isn't some sort of discussion that's taken place.

What do you think?
JQuery Effects Width and Box-Shadow
Nope.

My test conditions were transferring them to a black t-shirt with an iron-on printer sheet, and then taking a jpeg of my wife wearing it in the kitchen with an iphone and using a QR code recoder app.
Beer for Mountain View
I was walking to the office the other day (youeye.com) in downtown Mountain View and passed by a window for a coming soon specialty beer store. They had an indiegogo url in the window which I attached to this post. It would be great if some of the other startups in the area lent a hand to get "Jane's Beer Store" off the ground. YouEye made a $50 donation and so can you! Cheers.
The solution to this is to put these people in prison. Phone harassment (and telemarketing is harrasement) is theft of attention and that ought to be as illegal as any other kind of theft.
I'm Irish, so I'm fairly familiar with the contest's history. I do live in the USA now though.

I am a bit skeptical about how effective politically motivated boycotts can be in Eurovision. The problem is that it's not possible to cast a vote against a country, so the only way a boycott can work is if it convinces a lot of people who were otherwise going to vote to abstain. That said, there has been quite a lot of coverage in at least the Western European media which has been very critical of Azerbaijan, so we'll see. It's also just possible that nobody will like their song - I'm not sure how we'd tell which had happened.
"For starters they could let you block calls from unknown numbers."
They do but you have to call them for this.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe MS is okay with Bing returning results, even pirate results that Google does not.

Maybe MS agrees with the Pirate mantra that piracy doesn't hurt, but help sales. What would happen if pirates, even casual pirates learned that Bing results weren't filtered but Google's were? I would suspect a massive uptake in usage if this was proven. And who are these pirates? They're the most geeky of your friends, the ones who influence and tutor the non-tech savvy about what tech products and services to use (Bing, Windows, Office etc.)

Crazy? Probably. But still fun to consider. Too bad MS is too big, slow and traditional to do something this radical.
In general, comments with negative scores will get at least a few upvotes, and comments with high scores will get at least a few downvotes, so when a comment is young it's easy to see it voted the opposite direction it will end up on once more people have seen it.

So thanks for the concern, but plenty of the oh-so-valuable karma points heading my way by now, just a couple of people who disagreed right at the start!

Urgh, I hate Karma on HN. I'd much prefer to see other people's comment scores than not see them. And I'd much prefer not to see my own than see them. What irony.
Either explain how/why, or just leave a downvote rather than a comment that says nothing.
Regardless of your persuasion "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" by Knuth is well worth a read.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language-Inf...
There are lost opportunity costs (of the space), depreciation costs (wear and tear), and bandwidth still costs money. And now, the AOL PR people have to spend time of this.

I'm not saying these are large costs, but the degree of harm isn't an excuse.
Switzerland does not have direct democracy; it is simply close to it

It is very close to it.

In fact the only differences between it and the theoretic ideal, are in the practical implementation of a direct democracy. All real world direct democracies would look very much like Switzerland.

Switzerland is also a country with 7 million people, not 350.

And 7 million is still far beyond the monkey sphere. Zurich is bigger than most towns in the US, except for the mega cities like New York and L.A and a few others.

Most of the US is made up less densely populated areas than Switzerland. That is why the US so much more conservative than Europe, because due to its geographic size, it is also much more rural. Europe packs something like twice the population in a similar area. And the expression "All politics is local." originates in the US - I think. So the US and its states could be structured like the Swiss federation and its cantons.

The bottom line is that real direct democracy on a very large scale (literally millions of people) exists and works like a Swiss watch.

That's one extreme I wish the world would follow.

But sadly, despite your fears, the world is going towards the opposite extreme - Singapore.

Similar to Switzerland in its wealth and prosperity, Singapore is not at all a democracy. And that's the government model the world seems to want to follow.

That's where China is going and that's what the US and Europe are very slowly sliding towards.
... except for things like Unicode and lexicals and especially CPAN, which often fits the Unix model pretty well, thank you.
Prison should be for violent crimes.

This kind of thing should be settled in civil court - as it is.
Peter diamandis new company is aimed at mining asteroids. One of the ideas of how to do this is to build an engine that will move asteroids or large parts of asteroids to orbit. This kind of engine, if developed, seems very useful for space colonization.

Getting investment for such a company probably wouldn't have been possible without a private space industry.
I think they need to reevaluate how they score a tie, out of 58 games I have 4 losses and 30 wins and the rest are ties, but my percentage of games won is only 50%ish. Seems like a tie shouldn't be put in the same category as a loss.
Every businessperson should get to know a law librarian! Very insightful on where to find statutes and codes. Free research too!
A Visual Explanation of Crowdsourcing
Thank you for taking the time to examine this issue for us, sir.

We took your advice and booted up an old Windows machine to try out the Google Toolbar, and sure enough, as you had advised, the PR was displayed as 6/10. We will assume this is the last word on the issue.

Thanks again, sir.
Hey Matt, thanks a lot for investigating, I've updated the post.
oh god yes. a little bit over 8 years too late, but better late than never.
And don't forget to say that this guy publishes a free pdf version in the website above. I'm reading it now in my Kindle.
You're supposed to negotiate those, silly.
A Shopping Guide to Bed Covers
There are many types of bed covers but one of the most popular is a woven coverlet which is a design that is woven with colored yarn using a background of linen or cotton. Starting in the colonial era, woven coverlets were used in almost every community in theUnited States.
As I said, Coraid uses it for SANs. The question you're asking is equivalent to "Windows can play games, why doesn't Linux have any games?" Some of the things you might do with Unix Plan 9 cannot do. However, the reverse is also true.

You seem to seem to be looking for "an alternative to Unix." If that is the case, Plan 9 probably isn't what you're looking for. It is, however, useful in ways that Unix is not. It probably won't replace your specific Unix needs, though it largely replaces mine. Hope that clears that up.
Symentic Update
The Patents War of Tech IP [infographic]
I think you missed the OP's point. He was complaining about email provider/service, and you gave web browser alternatives...
I don't get what the problem is? It doesn't really make bruteforcing an account feasible, that there are only a lower Quadrillion number of combinations instead of Quintillion.

Quote:

> If you fail a certain number of logins against Battle.net, your IP address is temporarily banned. This makes it fairly difficult to bruteforce most accounts.
There are three things that non-proliferation folks talk about; mass to low earth orbit, guidance, and multiple payload deployment.

If you can put something into a pre-chosen orbit you've got the launch and navigation down (after all an ICBM in in 'orbit' that just happens to be highly elliptical and intersects the planet rather than goes around it.) But there is always the mass problem, conventional bombs, combined with relative lack of orbital precision, means that even a 2,000 lb bomb which is a 'big' iron bomb if you can't accurately get it within a mile or two of its target it won't be very effective. A nuclear weapon clearly can 'miss' by a couple of miles and still be very effective, but they are really really heavy unless you know what you are doing. The first bombs built by the US weighed in about 5 tons, but they did damage equivalent to more than 20,000 tons of explosive (a 'gain' of 4000). State of the art weapons have much higher yields. But if you're new at the game you have to have a rocket that can lift 5 - 6 tons before you are a 'threat' to the rest of the world.

"I suppose I always figured the main thing restricting proliferation is engineering the payload and not the delivery system."

Well if you can build a bomb, but the only way to hit someone with it is to fly it in on a huge transport plane, or drive in with it on a truck, it is both easy to defend against and you have plenty of time to figure out if you need to defend against it. If on the other hand you can launch it into space and have it fall out of the sky some where in 45 minutes to an hour, that requires a different strategy on the part of folks you might seek to attack.
This isn't an efficient market of valuing accomplishments with enthusiasm coins. We could go all day with the "who deserves more enthusiasm/respect?" debate. The cancer researcher? The AIDS researcher? The clean water specialist? The billionare philanthropist, who paid for all of the above? Space travel captivates a lot of people on HN. That's just the nature of the community; it doesn't intend to debase the work of others.
TeX increments 3.14159... and it will be pi when Knuth achieves equilibrium. He no longer sends cheques for finding bugs...

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html

One of the originals
living forever would lead to our extinction ... in along run our genome would adapt and we would become sterile
Is this really you're first C program. That's very, very impressive! My first C program was something like:

main() {
printf("Hello, world\n");
}
Quite possibly for the same reason that many, if not most (? I've no idea, really, but certainly plenty of), SEO companies consider Google to be the only actual target, because Bing just isn't popular enough to spend the time on.

If there was a search engine out there that had 10 uniques per month would you expect people to care enough to send take-down notices to them? So where do you draw the line... for some people, you draw it between Google and Bing, not below them both.
What certainly doesn't mean it would be less great if done with less ancient tools.

The problem is layers over layers of fossilized complexity. The LaTeX distribution in my laptop is 3.1GB. It contains 344 files in its bin directory. I'm pretty sure the beautiful typesetting can be achieved in a leaner way.
I dunno about Photoshop - I never use it - but in Illustrator, a lot of core program functionality is implemented as plugins nowadays. For CS5.1, plug-ins/extensions has 53 items, plug-ins/tools has 53.

I guess they could do some kind of lazy loading, but that'd be, you know, work to implement, and they're too busy with stuff like their own (broken) custom window routines to get Windowsesque MDI on the Mac.
The problem with lobbyists is that there are always competing interests on any issue and legislators should weigh them with the overall good of society in mind. But lobbyists' campaign contributions make it hard for legislators to fairly weigh the competing interests, instead they favor the guys that cut them the biggest check. So all our legislation is now tailored for the wealthiest and most powerful interests.
i already use ghostery, disconnect, do not track plus, and adblock. but i use the bbc site frequently, and want to be able to use the site well, while still avoiding ad-tracking. the new interface allows me to disable my "broad spectrum" tools and use a more nuanced approach. and yes, i do trust them.

more than that, this is the kind of interface my parents could understand and use.

finally, if i am an idiot then you're the dickwipe of humanity, a festering boil that should be lanced (with a cattle prod, anally), and a poopy-pants. you also come across as rather dull.
I think Dawkins' narrow concept of "the gene" is outdated, and he does not realize it because he is an old biologist, not an information scientist.

A "gene" was never a physical object, it is an information object--a mental placeholder for the smallest chunk of genetic information that determines a physical trait. But as our understanding of the nature of information has advanced, it seem like the gene is ultimately an obscuring concept, not a revealing concept.

A "gene" is not a specific, standardized DNA sequence. As a concept it is not physically specific enough to tie into the stack of rigorous scientific knowledge that starts with quantum mechanics and ascends through physics, past chemistry, to biology. As a result it cannot be treated wholly mathematically, which leaves open the risk of storytelling vs. actual rigorous hypothesizing and testing. The last few chapters of "The Selfish Gene" are filled with fuzzy, untestable storytelling for instance.

On the other hand, as a unit of information it is far too specific and limited, because of course a gene is not the only way that information can be passed from one generation to the next. Information is also passed through society and culture--and yes, that can lead directly to physical traits. For instance my wife has pierced ears, and so does my mother-in-law. This hole in the ear is a physically measurable trait of both those humans, and it was caused by the direct passage of information from one generation to the next. That chunk of information just does not happen to meet Dawkins' conception of a "gene". But why does he get to define which information "really matters", and which doesn't, when it comes to physical traits and survival of the fittest?

When I read this book review I see Dawkins attempting to defend an early, fuzzy conception of an information theory. Evolution is an information process, and information is information is information, regardless of whether it is coded in DNA, in societal behavior, or in the printed word. I have not read the book in question, but Wilson might be better equipped to break down old distinctions because of his focus on social behavior--which carries information.

Ironically Dawkins started down this road with his idea of the "meme" but has not been able to make the mental leap to a fully realized information-centric vision of life and evolution.

Biologists are in for a hard time in the next few decades. A lot of fuzzy concepts that they take for granted--like "gene"--are going to be broken down and reformulated rigorously by mathematicians and computer scientists. It is already well on its way--a friend who started his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology in the lab now spends the vast majority of his time at his laptop, coding hypotheses and tests against a deep data set of sequenced genomes.

Warning: the preceding has been the ravings of an interested amateur and should not be considered Real Authoritative Science.

edit: fixes
For the uninitiated, "PR0s" == "set Page Rank to zero".

Glad to see their problem's been resolved.
I bet a lot of VC and angel investors right now are looking at those FB quotes and starting to get a knot in their stomach. The jig is up, the Social Network Bubble that VC's have been hyping and pumping non-stop for the past couple years is over. I bet we'll see a return to interest in companies that have actual revenue, actual customers, and actual businesses.
Trending Tech News: Feedback please
I've been working on this site for a few months, now, and it has gone through many iterations to get where it is.

I'm not a designer, at all. My pride in the site is in its algorithms for compiling and ranking the headlines. I've tried keeping it dead-simple, no frills, no annoying social networking junk and, for now, no ads. This is something I'd like to see from a news site, since I just want the news. But does everyone else feel this way? Should I abandon this approach for a more traditional, prettier one?

Design and UX aside, does the functionality appeal to you? Does it seem to serve the right kind of headlines?

Here's the site: http://technosplode.com
Sure. Instead of running ls -lhrT, I could run ls -l | sort -n -r -k 5 | prettydate -k 6 | prettysize -k 5. Maybe make a shell alias. But at some point, I don't want my day to day life to be one big puzzle solving mission, I just want to get shit done. Is unix going to ship with 900 prettyX scripts, or do we make everybody write their own awk script?

Here's another thought I had about the old school unix way. Old school unix didn't have symlinks. The purpose of the filesystem is to store files, right? If you want aliases, then you should keep them in a file like /etc/symlinks. Or ~/.symlinks, then every user can have their own aliases. That's the real unix way, right? Let's not take the minimalism to absurd extremes.
I'm starting to believe that people who disagree with your sentiments described here simply don't get it yet (I, for one, agree with just about everything you said). I don't mean that as a put-down and I don't mean that condescendingly. We're all learning at our own pace. But I think you are correct. Thanks for sharing this.
1893 Newspaper Found in House Insulation
Ask HN: Is Disqus "Truly SEO-Compatible" like they say it is?
I was just reading the Disqus 2012 announcement blog post:

http://blog.disqus.com/post/22325598158/try-out-disqus-2012

And on that page is says that Disqus 2012 is, "Truly SEO-compatible. The new Disqus integrates in a way that is naturally discoverable by Google — out of the box, without any extra work."

This leads me to believe that if I search for a comment on google, it should show me the page where that comment was written.

To test that out, I found a comment on the blog post I mentioned above, wrapped it in quotes, and searched it using Google.

The comment reads, "I feel the voting system is ripe for abuse and will be used to silence dissenters. By making it anonymous you're really making it too easy for that to happen."

No results were found.

So is Disqus 2012 really SEO-compatible?
It looks like SpaceX control room is using VLC to stream video =)
Could all that be explained by bubbling? DDG starts without any context so you have to do the spadework of distinguishing jasmine from Jasmine, every time. Both a feature and a curse.