skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The solution to no-content black hattery is not to promote your no-content site with black hat techniques. Nobody here is criticizing site tuning and at the same time defending content farms. Why defend misbehavior as a justification for misbehavior?

Note that I am not saying that you yourself perform any of this in your role. Our anger is not at site tuning and placement but the techniques used to do so, which you appear to be unnecessarily defending as essential for any site's survival.
The cities are already there. That's a done deal.

And of the people that live there, not everyone lives there because they CHOSE it. Not everyone has the ability to up and move to a newer, safer city simply because they're worried about floods.

It's just not that easy.

So, given that cities ARE built on flood plains, and that flood insurance IS refused for those people that live there, what are we going to do? Abandon them entirely when a flood happens?

Good luck with that. What do you think will happen to the government that says "too damn bad, you should've moved?"

By the way, if you think Winnipeg is 'beach houses for the rich,' dude.. yeah..
What are you using for full-text search, anything unusual or just postgres built-in search?
Still no features that I don't have in IRC+emacs. Except for the code highlighter/formatting which is ok, but not enough.
I don't use rails but it seems that the quality of releases have been going downhill over the pass months.
Well that particular religious 'homily/joke/parable' is one of my favorites.

I'm guessing the Darwinians will jump in here with "Gov't Health Insurance" subverts natural selection. But frankly I find the whole insurance vs market economies question much more nuanced than that. Of course it is the heretical to suggest that health care, itself is the public service (you know the Army kills/wounds people, the Medics save/heal people kind of thing).
The User Interface Sounds of the Roku
The robots.txt limit in Google's Webmasterpanelthing is 100,000 characters. Googlebot has been said to stop parsing robots.txt after 500,000 characters. I don't know if that's bytes or characters.
> I fail to see how one is going to master any branch of mathematics if arithmetic is a major obstacle.

I can teach algebra and Calculus to a classroom of students without requiring anyone to do arithmetic. I would simply say, "Bring your calculators."

There's no doubt that a facility with arithmetic is a very useful skill. But for many, it represents an obstacle on the road to mathematics, including some very useful and enriching mathematics. I think this will change in the future, as people become more comfortable with calculating devices.

There was a similar change many centuries ago, at a time when the ability to memorize information was evidence of education. Then cheap print became available. Shortly thereafter the ability to read replaced the ability to memorize the teacher's words, as primary evidence of an education.

I think the same thing will happen with arithmetic and mathematics -- they will increasingly be seen as separate, independent skills.
Ask HN: Software for exploring billion row sized datasets
Given billions of rows of data across a few tables, how do you best make sense of it?

My current method involves thinking up interesting questions and writing database queries. I then plug the resulting data into gnuplot to examine it.

Is there generally a better way? I am kinda hoping a Mathematica/Matlab type shell or similar for databases or other data sources exists. Just type a query and view a graph. Even better, type queries, output graphs into a web page.

Or is the method to hire a data scientist to build specialised reports?

The data format is agnostic, interested in how this works across all ecosystems.
What about search + multiple chat windows on same screen?
Is it Monday again?
"This one seems pretty amateur and should have been caught as part of a pull request/code review process"

I say that about 95% of the bugs I ever see...especially ones written by me.
Most people are living in houses with a bank loan but it would be considered ludicrous for the bank to decide what furniture you can buy for it or what colors you can paint the inside walls.
I have to disagree. I consider part of my job to be some SEO (not my primary task and neither the most important, but I take care of it at my company) and its definitely the first part of what you sketch. And trying to clean all the second part stupid stuff someone else may have done before.

I don't see it as a game against Google... I try to make our sites as useful for humans as possible, and hope Google agrees with a decent enough ranking so humans can visit it and enjoy the content. But when it doesn't, then the game is between me and the "other SEOs" who may not see the point of making something useful for readers, not machines.
It been an hour and still no response from Bill, Obama was much more prompt with the replies
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but I'm just going to respond as if you are.

Could it be impossible to provide cost effective insurance against "Acts of God" aka "Nature" to a nation of people without staggering efficiencies? I think it's a very real possibility that this could be a pipe dream right now for a country the size of the United States. Why is it so hard to believe that we may not ever be able to mitigate Nature?

If you would like to draw comparisons between the US and Canada, the U.S. has 315 million people with a 34% obesity rate. Canada has 33 million people with a 24% obesity rate. That's a difference of ~99,231,174 obese people. If you notice, that difference is actually three times larger than Canada's entire population.

I highly doubt we can apply very much of the implementation from Canada to the United States. The wheel very well may need to be re-thought. This is the equivalent of scaling any startup. Anyone can write a twitter clone in a couple hours, it's really not that hard. However, it takes some serious thinking, engineering, thought and complexity to scale that simple CRUD app to millions of users. Your comment seems rather like the owner of a small business complaining that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company can't control his employees as well as he can.
"I think SEO is practically dead, and for good. The Social Web is supposedly lot more democratic and apparently a better choice."

Subverting "The Social Web" occurs to feed users to their advertising or other attempts at monetization, they don't get paid to Tweet.
I agree; that last comment gives it away. I've been doing enterprise-level SEO for several years now as a day job and it's not as if algo updates are so frequent and far reaching as to make it difficult to keep up with. Most major updates from Google and the other engines are predicated on two major themes:

-Rewarding relevant, informative, keyword-rich content focused on specific topics and punishing sites that construct thinly constructed (UGC or otherwise) pages, particularly those who do it in huge numbers.

-Rewarding sites who links from similarly relevant, authoritative sources gained organically and punishing those who acquire links through artificial means (either through direct purchases, purchasing domain portfolios with thousands of backlinks etc.)

There are nuances that are market-specific that require slightly different approaches and concentrations (e.g. health care) but those are the main things folks should concern themselves with. There's no black magic behind it unless you're doing something shady to begin with.
What others have said about commenters/lurkers and not being able to downvote, but also I think the "sentiment" is more that SEO sucks than that this piece is garbage per se. I upvoted it because it's entertaining and it did, along with the discussion here, broaden my perspective on SEO.
IT Automation as a Service
What is theoretical about an article describing how health insurance actually works in an actual country from someone who has actually lived there for nearly all of his actual life?

And I didn't mention the word "US." You did.
I can also see nginx from http headers.
> On average, you are much better off investing the insurance payments than paying for insurance. If this were not true, insurance companies would be reluctant to offer you a policy.

Your maximum benefit when making this choice is the profit margin of the insurance company, which is typically well under 10%--hardly "way ahead."
Welcome to... Fantasy Island
Surely you should be using attr_accessible with config.active_record.whitelist_attributes = true anyway? I can't imagine a situation where you'd want to have to manually blacklist attributes over whitelisting them.
I don't tend to visit the local meet-ups, but the people they apparently run for office (which matter more to me) are the latter sort.
Screenhero (YC W13) Gives WebEx And Screen Sharing Apps A Run For Their Money
Does it count as assassination when it's part of a military operation? If so, then yes you're supposed to feel sympathy for people in the military that have trouble returning to normal life.
Nike has no plans to release FuelBand Android app, says it's focused on iOS
> Notably, Gitlab is written on Ruby on Rails; you should understand the security implications of Ruby on Rails before using Gitlab

Seems like the recent events have really hurt the trust toward RoR.
"They're such high risk, that no actuary will quote them a reasonable price."

That is just plain wrong.

The reason it's hard to insure people on a flood plain is not that they are high risk. It's because the risk of flood is too statistically dependent: if you get flooded, your closest 1000 neighbors probably also got flooded. Unless you are a very large insurer (to the point bailing out ten thousand homes is just another day at the office), it's just really hard to hedge that risk. Same thing for earthquakes.

Insurance works best on independent risks: car accidents, major medical events, lawsuits, even fires.

"The prevailing thought is, when nature strikes, the government must bail people out."

So the author's claim is essentially that the people of Canada want to subsidize the risky lifestyle of people on flood plains?

I guess it's probably true to a degree; people prefer to have costs hidden from them by indirection. But that doesn't mean that it makes sense economically.

What might be a better analogy is flood insurance and insuring the health of people with unhealthy lifestyles. Do we want to subsidize people who eat junk food all the time and never exercise? For the most part, we are (in US and Canada, at least), but I don't think that's a good idea, either.
I can search an emacs IRC buffer (it's just like searching a text file) or if I want to search everything I can just grep in my logs directory and get search results in emacs which I can then grep some more or easily copy paste to another buffer where I have a file open or a colleague who I'm chatting with.

For multiple windows, I can split my emacs in however many windows I want horizontally and vertically and switch around with whatever key bindings I want.
Yikes, looks like my morning is shot now
I think programs that are 90% C and 10% python do constitute "unusual use cases".
I think this thing could potentially be world-changing, if it really takes off. It lets you crowd-fund people doing great work that you want to support, in a sustainable way. So they can spend more time following their passion and doing great things, rather than wasting their time at a crappy 9-to-5 just to pay the bills.

Unlike a charity, where you typically support a "cause" but have no clear way of seeing how your money makes a contribution (or even be sure that the money doesn't get stolen), I prefer this much more because it lets you fund people (of your choice) directly.

Also, I really like the concept of an "open company" behind Gittip.

"Gittip is funded on Gittip. That means the interests of Gittip as a company are perfectly aligned with the interests of Gittip’s users."

I would not be as enthusiastic about this if Gittip were a for-profit company like many others are. But this really feels like something "made for people, by the people" in a genuine way. Or at least that's my current understanding of it.
I think there's something to be said about keeping some key metrics super simple so that "everybody" can understand without having to refer to a formula or arbitrarily set thresholds. I've been using 99 and 90 percentile avg performance. It captures enough information in most cases and doesn't require any explanation.
I really like the interaction and flexibility, but I failed to generate a set of colors as nice as those provided by Color Brewer (http://colorbrewer2.org/). Sure, Color Brewer doesn't dynamically generate color schemes, but the set of colors it provides looks damn good in just about any context. I might use this new app in cases where I need more than 12 colors (Color Brewer's limit), but I don't think dynamic color scheme generation adds much. The JSON and CSS exports do seem very useful, however, and a big improvement over Color Brewer's interface.
don't hate the player hate the game?

Why choose? I'm already somewhat of a misanthrope, but the fact that SEO exists just makes me hate everyone and everything.
Wow! That is an incredibly well thought out response. Thanks so much. I have already made my response and while it wasn't quite as eloquent and elaborate, it essentially said that we would love to prove to them that we are worth the extra budget but we can't commit to their current pricing expectations. I will surely reference this in the future as it shows an incredible amount of respect while being completely honest.
These vulnerabilities have been present for many years. They're just being found now. If anything, the quality is now going up. :)
It's just that there has been a large amount of vulnerabilities found in the last month
"For all we know"? They explicitly state [0] that upvotes and downvotes are fuzzed, it really isn't a matter of some weird machination.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s_...
If it comes to that (and granted, it may), not being able to fly easily would be pretty low on my list of worries.
Legacy codebases, etc etc
I'm really not meaning to bring up "emotional responses", I'm merely trying to give some people with different opinions a voice.

Also, you seem to think I'm advocating we do not perform life-threatening procedures, which I'm not. I'm questioning who pays for them. Does the public, including those who find abortion morally reprehensible, pay for those abortions? Does the public pay for a liposuction that could have been avoided with diet and exercise?

People seem to forget that this isn't a question of doing procedures or not, this is about who foots the bill for that procedure.
I think it's smart, so the good question float top.
"to his clients an SEO consultant isn't just a black hole they throw money into. They do expect to see results in the form of higher search ranking, and Google's algorithm changes make it harder to deliver on that."

Wouldn't it then be harder to demonstrate objective returns if Google's algorithms are so obfuscated? If they're not afraid to game Google for their customer's benefit, they're certainly not going to be afraid to game customer expectations and fudge their results for a living.
> You keep talking about "things you can afford to lose". Houses NEVER fall into that category.

Of course they do. Consider -- do you want to be financially solvent, or own a house? Many people choose being financially solvent. Others walk away from houses whose mortgages are larger than the house's actual value. In both these cases, a house is just another commodity, a choice, not an absolute necessity like breathing.

> So why do you keep bringing it up?

Because it's true, as I just demonstrated.
500kb is the hard upper limit in the crawler itself. Limits that are exposed elsewhere (Webmaster Tools, etc) are irrelevant.
I wonder if the insurance payments (~$65 per month) is enough to cover the ongoing healthcare costs even when everybody has to pay up.

I mean, if it was as simple as charging everybody 65 bucks, you'd think the US wouldn't have the problem where many people can't afford to pay for medical care.
Great guide, thanks!

I do this with an old Acer Aspire One.

I wish the author explained some parts a little, like dev tun vs tun0.
Patio11 is indeed the security soothsayer
Fair point, but you try and get a whole company to use IRC+emacs ;) Not gonna happen.
Hey, what about all those guys that are used to "Plug-and-play" tools like Visual Studio? That don't want to rediscover the common problems and spend countless hours trying to figure out how to do something slightly less trivial than just Hello, World? What if somebody just wants to get things working fast and does not want to learn how to make the cursor move up in vim?

There are for sure a lot of guys used to simple tools like vim, but there are also plenty of people that believe that tools are just tools and the more intuitive the tools are the better it is.

And as for the development today, it's becoming more and more about the result and not about the process. About how fast you can get your application or game up and running. And hours spent on figuring out why something is not working when it should is becoming rather an avoidable annoyance than the experience of "real" programming.
I wont respond to the rest of your response, but it has been pretty clearly demonstrated by people smarter than you or I (at least in their respective professions) that free markets aren't always the most efficient solution to a problem, particularly when the desired solution is not just to come up with a price that is profitable for for the seller.

http://www.basiceconomics.info/market-failures-and-externali...
what is bypass?
Most of the vulnerabilities you (likely) have been seeing are from code that's been a part of rails for a lot longer than the past few months.

The spate of recent vulnerabilities has more to do with YAML in particular than with rails itself.
Heatmap of 1 million check-ins at Atlanta's Airport
The original post is from over an hour but answers should start now: "I’ll be answering your questions live, starting at 10:45 am PST"
YC passed up on Drew the first time but now Dropbox is a huge success story. What gave him a better chance the second time around?
Chrome Workflow + Sublime Text 2 = Puuuurrrfect!
President Obama Holding Google+ Hangout
They should've went with sym.com
That is a product of the anti-gaming filter. There are automatically generated extra upvotes and downvotes.
The fake names are disconcerting for a product that will handle sensitive information (chats).

(edit: unless 2 co-founders are genuinely named Bob Smith and John Doe, in which case maybe consider changing your names :p)
Visual Studio is also very good in some aspects

And once you get ReSharper, also from JetBrains, Visual Studio becomes quite good, too :)
Single Molecule Determines Complex Behavior, Say Scientists
No, the problem is that the insurance company can't average out this risk. Going without insurance is an all-or-nothing proposition - either you lose your house, or you lose nothing. By contrast, insurance companies average this out - they lose X% of houses each year, and charge enough to make a profit.

But insurance in a flood plain is different. The insurance company can't average out the risk - either they lose all of the houses they're insuring, or none of them. Thus, they can't provide any averaging benefit to the consumer - they have to charge an exorbitant amount to ensure they don't go bankrupt if the flood happens the year they open their doors.

The government _can_ handle this, because they are, in a sense, diversified across industries.
I got this during the "end of the world" sale last year and I love it. Well deserved. I'm hoping this will be the closest thing we'll get to Visual Studio for Java.
But I'm sure there is something in the contract that forbids you from making modifications that would drastically devalue your home. Otherwise they have no collateral for the loan. For example, I believe you can't just take a wrecking ball to your house and turn it into a parking lot.
..unfortunately it'd probably get flagged off the front page
Anyone know when 4.0 is coming out?
btw, I recommend you change the code font-face order of

Monaco,Menlo,Consolas,"Courier New",monospace;

to

Menlo,Consolas,Monaco,"Courier New",monospace;

this way the nicer system-specific fonts will actually work, right now everything gets rendered in Monaco since it's universally available, and the nicer fonts are never used.

Also, maybe pick a more contrasting scheme for the syntax highlighting in code, right now it's very nearly indistinguishable from plaintext...
only problem with that is to find someone else who knows what emacs and irc are and how to use it, but anyone can use web-app or mobile-app.
Bay Area stuck with congestion like Los Angeles'
> Would you be okay with 3 million people dying or living in perpetual poverty because they don't have access to preventative/emergency care?

Obviously not, which is why I said that it is right that the government should step into those kinds of situations.

But now let's picture 3 million people for which private insurance works fine. Why should the government take over their insurance?
I'm currently playing around with it for a large internal development project. My only concern (and why I'm leaning towards using Neo4j at least initially) is that I don't really yet have a good indication if I'm going to be dealing with enough data to warrant a big distributed solution.

I'm actually right now mostly messing with TinkerGraph (an in memory graph database that's part of the Tinkerpop utilities that the Titan guys make).
Sorry. We'll put up our real names soon. We're legit though, I swear!
Well, there's a negative as well, hence I used keywords like supposedly, apparently etc. But wouldn't you rather your insurance-selling uncle visit you for yourself, instead of an intent to sell you the insurance? I think those days will be here eventually.
Are your chat logs encrypted and suitably protected? Losing your chat logs could be very damaging for a company - knowing that logs are safe is a required feature for us.
The first time he applied, it was not for Dropbox but for an SAT prep service.
How about setting up your own? I run openvpn on my dd-wrt router from home. I can securely connect to it from pretty much anywhere. It gets you all of the availability without any of the logging.

The only thing it doesn't provide is an anonymous proxy endpoint, which I'd consider different than a request for a good VPN solution.