skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who sells car insurance leads for a living, this is an interesting discussion.

First, Geicko isn't ranked number 1, affiliates who mask themselves as Geicko are. In high rewards markets like insurance (where 30% of the overall price of insurance goes to affiliates) it's actually about which affiliates convert the best and have the best payout. Those SERPs are dominated by black hat SEO. None of that is organic.

The larger issue (percentage of the page dedicated to SERPs vs ads aside) is that Google's formula worked best in a world where people weren't trying to game it. In the end it breaks down to relevance and links.

Relevance is based on tags and keywords, which everyone can get a perfect score on. So in the end it comes down to links.

Is a link there because someone just loves the site, or because some SEO schmuck built it? There are correlations, but there's really no way of knowing. The key to spam is mimicking a human process closely enough that a computer (or algorithm) can't tell the difference, then making that scale.

Google does manually review the SERPs for the highest grossing terms basically daily to try and find foul play, but those can be beat, too.

So why doesn't Google just manually find and serve up the best pages of content? Because you just described Yahoo.

So it's a very complex game that evolves every day as both parties advance and become more sophisticated, often in response to each other. If you think you can do better you either have to out-engineer Google or find a way to rank sites based on something other than links.
Many thanks for your remark, the issue has been fixed, check it out here http://twittstrap.com/twittstrap/getting-started.html
George W. Bush: Edward Snowden 'Damaged The Security Of The Country'
Author makes some interesting points about this relationship. Riding a bike myself I can totally relate.
I did, but it still includes local results (it thinks I am in New York City). I signed up for a Google API account and tried the Google custom search engine and searched for "pizza restaurants" and received different results than with Startpage. Startpage tried to sell me NYC pizza.

Google Custom Search: http://i.imgur.com/PLZ79Vk.png?1

Startpage: http://i.imgur.com/5ui5LQc.png
Why? They will take his data, as the Chinese did, and then what else would they do?
If Russia grants him an asylum, nothing will stop US media from screaming 'traitor', since, he, well, "fled" to Russia.
Crazy. I don't think we as a society have even gotten used to the implications of face transplants.

My prediction: we'll be arguing for a long time whether this is a head transplant or a body transplant...at least in Philosophy 101 courses.
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I've found DDG to be better at finding obscure content, and the Goog to be better at finding what I call "canonical" content.

For example, if I search for "binary tree" I probably want Wikipedia followed maybe by StackExchange. Google does that, while DDG sends me deep into the netherworld.
So you're not OK with giving a site a fairly narrow range of sandboxed permissions, but you are OK with installing an opaque binary that can read, modify, transmit, and destroy nearly every piece of your data on your computer.
Zynga is committed to destroying your crops if you don't log in every day.
On desktop, set http://duckduckgo.com as your search provider. Problem Solved.

Even when I !g to see google results, I see 100% organic results because I have Adblock Plus plugin installed on firefox. Problem Solved.

Make sure you have 'Hide placeholders of blocked elements' option enabled, otherwise AdBlock will show a blank rectangle where the ads used to be.
that and the (sort of) anonymous account on hackernews.
Thank you for the clarification. It appears my confusion stems from me doing similar workflows, just with existing tools - when I tinker with either GAE or Heroku, I deploy nearly continuously, which achieves the same results, but on the exact infrastructure that the final version will be deployed on.

I definitely see the benefit for those not utilizing such practice already.
I see, thanks for the update! :)
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According to this article [1], with Ecuador wavering, Snowden as applied for asylum to 15 different countries, Russia among them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/world/europe/snowden-appl...
One of the things they used to do for this at my school (in another country) was to have 50 minutes of compulsory physical activity or drills in the morning, at least three out of five days. (This was excluding separate gym/physical training classes.)

I feel like this could go a long way into giving boys an outlet for their physical energy. I definitely know that even as one of the most talkative and fidgety kids in class, I used to fidget a lot less if I had returned from a bout of running or whatever.

Also, I am somewhat acquainted with some of the teachers in the US school system, and have found their knowledge about the subjects they are supposed to be teaching (specially science) to be severely subpar. Kids can often perceive this very accurately, and will respect a teacher less if he or she seems to be unsure or vague regarding what they are teaching.
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Using 'apply' to Emulate JavaScript's Upcoming Spread Operator
Question answering using Google Glass/Twitter/Mturk
From a network centrality metrics perspective, is there such a thing as "organic search"? Is the premise flawed or is the Page Rank metric considered organic?
I am pretty sure they can't make sense of the data, nor can they afford the sort of talent that might be able to make sense of the data. So they do whats easy...just keep collecting more.

It's much more efficient as an employment/pension guarantee scheme than an efficient intelligence tool.

Reminds me of the qoute from Yes Minister - Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.
To jail, because I'm really naive.
You should answer the question: Why would you not run Windows?

Then, depending on how well I think you've answered that question - perhaps I'll answer yours.
During the baby boom there appeared to be an odd dynamic at work: in the primary grades, the neater, more docile girls were the teachers' favorites and got the better grades. Somewhere around or after puberty, they started to fall back behind the boys. Some of this was certainly socially motivated; a cousin said that boys didn't like to date girls they thought smarter. Some of it may have come from the teachers.

Just my two cents..
Using Lifecycle Emails To Grow Your Business
Starbucks' next stop in the drive-through revolution
You are 100% correct! I've thought this for years, but
gave up trying to convince friends. It seems like people
like paying more for cute advertising?
PRISM is probably just a small part of the all-encompassing spying program.
You may like the other post I wrote about this elsewhere on this page.

Basically, the reason I don't try drugs (I hope the sense I am using that word can be inferred), is because of my chemical engineering and research background. Every chemical (e.g. anything) you ingest has a certain effect on your body. I feel that with some drugs (marijuana, cocaine, etc.), there is a higher probability of a long-term negative effect. Is this actually the case? I don't know. But I know that science is at no position right now to answer the question as we only know with certainty the effects and mechanisms of the most basic chemical reactions. All of the subtle interactions with something as complex as the human body are nearly impossible to ascertain. What study could one possibly devise that would rule out so many confounding factors?

So, for something like marijuana, there may in fact be no long term effects. But when it's easy (at least for me) to not try it, I just don't see there being any benefit for myself. Others, obviously, see the risk/reward ratio as being more favorable.

Does that fit the use of the word "apathetic"? I think so. Maybe you think another word is more suitable. I am as apathetic to drug use as I am about skydiving, or tightrope walking, or running in a lightning storm. I'm simply indifferent to these activities because I don't see any reward they would provide me.
"While Reichert and Hawley's research was conducted in all-boys schools, these lessons can be used in all classrooms, with both boys and girls."

Not true, research shows that girls do worse when their performance is evaluated in relation to others (competitively), as opposed to when their performance is evaluated against an objective standard.
your cynical remarks are unbecoming of this situation
TL;DR: Get off my lawn.

HN demonstrates good use of JS: AJAX voting. Forcing you to navigate to another page in order to vote is slow, annoying, and disruptive. Plenty of sites make good use of JS. For those who don't use NoScript.
Yeah, with the aid of a paddle.
> On that basis the District Court found that the works had never been released in Germany and were therefore ineligible for protection under the Copyright Act

Germany is a party to the Berne Convention, so I find that highly unlikely. German copyright law explicitly says that foreign nationals are accorded all the protections required by international treaties (see article 121, section 4 of their Copyright Act).
>If Eclipse really was that bad, nobody would use it, and it wouldn't be probably the most widely used IDE in the world

I don't think this means much. It has (poor) support for just about every language under the sun and its free so of course its going to be widely used. It has many features for Java, but features for other languages quickly fall off a cliff. But its the slowness that is a showstopper for me unless I absolutely must go with eclipse. Yes, eventually computer technology will advance to the point where its bloated codebase is no longer a liability, and perhaps we're approaching that. I use the Juno release occasionally for python programming and everything I've mentioned still applies.

Personally I'm not a big fan of plugins in my IDEs: they always feel slow and clunky with a "bolted on" feel. This has been true of every IDE + plugin environment I've tried so far.
> The anonymous nature of the site will forever hold its ad revenues back

Or make revenues possible in the first place? What allure would 4chan have if it weren't anonymous?
The point isn't that it's overly professional, but that you can see they tried.
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I'm having a very hard time parsing what you wrote and trying to understand how the tsar/soviet era (or anything you say in that comment) is relevant in any way to the current Snowden situation.
I submitted this, not because it is a great article, but because I thought opening up the Snowden leak discussion to include Bush was useful.

My politics are peculiar: I donated money to Bush's 2000 campaign and strongly supported him. Same for Obama in 2008: money and lots of enthusiasm.

I have been disappointed with both W. Bush and Obama. Even though I believe they are both good men, in a moral sense, I also believe that they have both really hurt our country principally by being corporate puppets.
> They must in order to maintain sovereignty.

There's no way for Russia to be sovereign without being authoritarian?
I'd say whoever grants Snowden asylum will be seen as Robin Hood by many people :)
What's shocking about this...is I actually believe Bush and understand why he approved the surveillance in the first place.

Only problem I have with this article is this statement is misdirected: "I think he damaged the security of the country."
Why wouldn't you use the NoScript extension? Not only does it give you fine grain control over JS but it adds additional security monitoring, such as click jacking.
The submitter is the Asst. Managing Editor of the Daily Dot.

That being said, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with accounts that exist specifically to submit a given site's content (even programmatically), since that content must be still democratically approved by the user base. I think vote-brigading is a much more serious issue, and one that HN seems to deal with well.
Ask HN: Where do you keep your programming portfolio?
I started and launched quite a few cool projects. Some of them had interesting front-end things to show, but since I'm a programmer the back-end usually had more focus. I started to realized that it would be a shame if these projects go offline and everyone just forgets about it. I think it's a good idea to keep a list of the cool projects that I did, with a description of what makes it interesting.

The problem is that I haven't been able to find a free portfolio website for programmers. I'd love to just create a profile somewhere, add a few projects, write something about them, etc. I could set up my own website, but I don't want to pay for hosting costs and domain name costs for just my portfolio. The existing portfolio sites are aimed towards designers, not programmers.

I could keep track of my projects on LinkedIn, but I don't want to clutter my LinkedIn page with all sorts of projects, plus the LinkedIn projects feature isn't really flexible (for example: I want to show a screenshot, thats not possible with linkedin).

Does anyone know a good place where I can do this?
What a ridiculous slippery-slope assertion. The same argument could be said for the telephone - "Inevitably some company will offer discounts in exchange for random recordings of your phone calls. Everyone will sign up for that and then a hacker will take advantage of it."

There are at least two reasons stuff like that doesn't occur: 1) The cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data far outweighs any sort of tangential benefit a company may get from such a policy. That's on top of the massive PR risk. 2) The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant as to not constitute any sort of grand 'societal loss of privacy'.
Before Microsoft, he was a president at EA (Worldwide Studios). So Zynga is normal.
I am surprised to see that none of the comments really comment or reflect upon the issue this article brings up, which is that for boys to thrive they need to be taught differently. If we can actually create ciriculum that allows them to excel why would we not do this? I know that the main point against it would be that young girls perhaps would not thrive in such a system. Yet I think we have to find a balance between them if we want true equality and what is best for all of our children.

Mayhaps it is time to reaccess if we should not have separate classes for boys and girls..food for thought...
Microsoft to shut down TechNet subscription service
Yeap. we are doing exactly as you said. Hopefully we can find out.
ICANN makes Registries and Registrars to domain police
Governments Building Scalable Websites
Or what you're saying is that if you store a date of zero VALUE to MySQL it could be magically replaced by NULL internally? That would be really crazy.
Read: Snowden should publish everything he has, because after that he will be granted asylum.

What better way to get everything out of Snowden, still stay "neutral" and give USG the diplomatic finger
I like the Chicken he threw in after the return for good measure. Just didn't have enough chicken without it.
I find it interesting that when Firefox consumed too much memory it was bashed for it.
When it fixed that and became one of the most efficient browser, while Chrome uses tons of memory, Firefox still gets bashed for "spending time on making the browser efficient".

This only leads to one conclusion: unless your product is largely better than the competition, its all about who's the cool kid on the block and who has the most financial interests.

"news at 11" i guess
"Look at tiger cubs"

LOL I read that the first time as a Cub Scouts reference and agreed completely.

You might be surprised just how much of your "thought experiment" vaguely resembles the many Cub Scout pack meetings I've attended, other than the pack meetings only being about 2 hours every other week rather than 8 hours every weekday.

Like most organizations, the Scouts get many things right and a couple things wrong, and it improves the level of discourse to stay on track. So bringing up their very peculiar unamerican ideas about religion or sex is not terribly relevant to the discussion of "educating boys", which is kind of the point of the controversy about them, but I digress...

On the other hand, from what I've seen of my daughters girl scout troop meetings, its mostly craft time and snack/gossip time.

There's a heck of a big difference between the two scout orgs beyond one group's parents sell cookies (just tellin' it like it is...).
A few months ago (I think it was here on HN) I found a MIT paper that explains how to reconstruct what a old dot matrix printer is printing only by recording and analyzing the sound it makes. The idea is kinda fascinating - at least to me.
There has been DuckDuckGo ads on the NSFW boards for months.
I have no source for this, but I remember reading that it was some kind of partnership between DuckDuckGo and 4chan.
What is the evidence that Snowden's activities have harmed US?
I believe Bush in the sense that Cheney et. al. probably told Bush that Americans' rights were not being abused, and Bush believed them.
Snowden applies for political asylum in Russia.
Without knowing anything about the nature of the requests it doesn't tell us anything.

Imagine there are something like 800 actual terrorist suspects - people who have been identified via human intelligence, e.g. Known to have met with terrorist cells, visited training camps, etc.

Of 10,000 requests, it's easily possible that the vast majority could be simply following up on the immediate network surrounding those people - e.g. 'Suspect X called person Y, person Y is new to us, let us check whether person Y is linked to other suspects by phone or email'.

Requests like that would be made using a boilerplate form, and would be correctly rubber-stamped as long as they were closely connected to suspects identified by other means. We should expect many of those kinds of requests to be being generated every day by analysts.

The .03 needs to be put in the context of the number of non-routine requests that are being approved. It doesn't seem at all unreasonable that for every 10,000 boilerplate followups generated by desk clerk analysts, there are 10 more speculative ones generated as a result of more specific investigations, and of these 30% are deemed overreaching.

The vast majority of requests are likely to be boring inquiries generated by bureaucrats following procedure, rather than Jack Bauer like rogues constantly overstepping their authority.