skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am still a little confused on SEO and as this is a very slow last train home I would like to add some notes to my HN Evernote

1. I have never ranked well for anything until last year. Then suddenly a OSS project with about three articles got to the front page for "ORacle ODI source control". But it got there through a comment on a LinkedIn page.

I literally went back to the comment and said "BTW this solution now has a website here it is" and we ranked. admittedly no-one ever visits the site but we live in hope.

I mention this because it kinda-sorta reflects the good and evil twins of even white hat SEO.

1. Good side: we are / were building a genuinely useful OSS product (it puts source control into an oracle ETL product that has none). It has (yet!) no commercial upside to it but we just want it to succeed because. I have written a couple of articles saying what and why (odietamo.org.uk) but mostly it's hard to persuade people who are drowning that breathing water is not a normal state of affairs.

3. evil side - I went comment spamming. Shoved my link into a year old comment thread (admittedly that we had participated on a year ago but without a site to link to then) And afaik, it worked.

Now we are an incredibly low volume keyword search (IIRC it's "ODI source control" or "odi version control") so any good inbound link will have some big metric but even so

I think google is doing a good job because that search turns up a minimal amount of spam and a couple of threads and discussions - but it bothers me that comment spam in group forums can have such an outsized effect.

good remarkable content ought to rise to the top - but I am not sure if I know what is good content not if good content can be outweighed by other co-incidental metrics. (NB none of this is to do with link farms and blackhat SEO - just bumbling along white hat stuff)

PS if my site only ranks for my bubble and readers here simply cannot find it, please let me know.
Do you still use Google? Or any of the companies mentioned in the PRISM leaks?
> There's no possible reason for people to support these programs and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons.

I almost agree with this, were it not equivocating two different senses of the phrase “possible reason”.

There's no legitimate reason for people to support these programs and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons.

There are possible reasons to support these programs, but they're not legitimate or sensible or reasonable or good. And that's precisely why it is harmful to talk about possible reasons to support these programs. You make it harder for people to be sure in their own minds that they are as fucked up as they seem, which makes it harder to build resistance to them, which is an urgent necessity. It might sound like what I'm talking about is immaterial, but it's not. To build resistance you need morale, to have morale you need at the very least to have the surety that you're right. To participate in the endless repetition of half-baked, rational-sounding defences of the indefensible is to make it harder for those who want to attack the indefensible to believe that they're not crazy. But we need them to believe that they're not crazy.
Practicing "SEO" of 10+ years here.

Yes, that's black hat SEO. It's very different from the Search Engine Land world. The idea is burn/rinse/repeat of sketchy affiliate sites, people make a very good living off it. Even still. Matt Cutts can surely find all he needs to know about that world on Black Hat World, I don't think that these guys are keeping much from them. But I also don't think it's easy for them to fix without potentially having negative consequences for the rest of the world.

The flip-side of this is the "white hat SEO" world. I don't know about Jill's own practices, but the conference/publication world with which she's a part of is frequented by people like Matt Cutts. And I think she hits the nail on the head for that: it's driven by content/PR now. There is still a place for on-page SEO for a corporate site if you're strong with the technical stuff (for example, schema.org type stuff is just getting off the ground with the Google Knowledge Graph). But it's not the sexy / easy to sell fast salvation that it once was.
how about a 6th takeaway in a follow up, in which he discusses retention of these initial 1000 users? I think it's great he was able to obtain those numbers early but I think those users are a bit ephemeral.
Anyone looking for a Non-Technical Co-Founder in NYC?
I am looking to join a technical person or a team to work on a start-up. I had two startups before and they both failed. I have learned so much from each one of them. I know about the ins and outs of startup marketing, project management, and sales. Entrepreneurs never quit, so I want to take the lessons learned and try again. I have tried posting on HN before with little luck. I started my first business at the age of 15 in high school and my family is full of entrepreneurs so entrepreneurship runs deep in my blood.

I am willing to work my ass off including weeknights, weekends, or whatever it takes. Looking for someone who wants to start their own business just as badly as I do.

I am currently in NYC, and I have bunch of savings saved up that I can survive for at least three years without a job.

Here is a little about me:

-I graduated from one of the top undergraduate business schools in America (currently in the top five of the Business Week’s top undergraduate business school ranking list)

-I have worked at Google and Salesforce in San Francisco for about a year and a half prior to moving to NYC. I am a 24 year old male.

-I am really good at people's skills, presenting, networking, and business development. I have high emotional intelligence and am pretty easy to get along with.

-I can SELL! I am also well-read.

-I am a go-getter, and do not need to be told to do things. I literally can do everything and am a fast learner.

I am looking for someone who loves coding and who is extremely dedicated and willing work their asses off to make a successful startup. If you are action-oriented, hacker-type, and are looking for a non-technical co-founder that fits the description above then please contact me at matt.gerboth@gmail.com.
If you aren't aware of the Five Eyes and Echelon arrangements, you don't have an opinion worth airing.
I would report your facebook posts as abuse if I saw them on my newsfeed, most likely. "I joined a bunch of groups so I could advertise to them." Scummy.
Even though I am very vocal about my opposition to NSA spying a fat paycheck can always make me change my mind.
I'd also like to add that you can just call them up and ask about stuff. Try that at a regular law firm. A few years back I was threatened with a cease and desist because commenters on my site were talking about someone. I called the EFF and they put me right through to a lawyer who explained that the DMCA, of all things, protected me as a service provider, and that I could essentially tell the other party to go fuck themselves.

I mean, they didn't say it like that.... But still, very valuable. Likely saved me thousands of dollars with a 5 minute phone call.

And, my god, I never would have expected to have to hide behind the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)! I used to protest against that thing like a maniac before it was passed!
Yeah, because all problems are foreseeable and only ever caused by crap code... right.

No matter how great your processes and your code are, no test can catch everything that can go wrong in a live environment, and doubly not if your system interfaces with anything third party.
NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Has New Job in Russia, Lawyer Says
Thank you pdm55.
Altera's Secret Processor Unveiled: a Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53
This is interesting. I am building a applicant tracking and organizational system right now. Never thought about applying it to AngelList, but that would be a good market.
If you make a plot of how many different sequences a particular number appears in in this database, a rather interesting pattern emerges.

Some numbers appear frequently, as you would expect (primes, numbers 1 off from prime, etc) while others appear infrequently, but in general there is a downward trend as the numbers become larger. That is all expected; what isn't expected is that there seems to be a break between common numbers and uncommon numbers. A very distinct break. The theory is that social prejudices towards certain bases and certain numbers have caused mathematicians to find more sequences with numbers that they "like" than those that they don't. So for example, numbers that look neat in base 10, say "3333" or "4444" get special treatment and tend to occur in more sequences.

The paper on this weird distribution is rather accessible, I recommend it: http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4470 Page 4 has the pretty plot.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-t...
So if the system catches things like this all the time, how come they only stopped 54 (no wait, that's the old figure, the new figure is 1 or 2) terror plots?
My only real fear is that some of these less-legitimate surveillance practices will discourage US companies from forming and people using US-hosted services, which would be a major blow to the United States' already volatile economy. The tech industry is the only industry that is/was actually doing well during the recession, and now our government is behaving dangerously with the trust that many international firms have given us. With that in mind, it's very alarming to hear that the NSA surveillance extends beyond admitted and known data collection in supposedly secure networks.

Seems like a bad idea to undermine the trust of most of the people (e.g. the tech industry) keeping your country afloat, if you ask me. And I really hope my fear here is unfounded...
I find it strange that the assumption is made that "Silicon Valley" is clearly going to be on the side of the general public in this. Why?

Isn't the smart money going to side with the real power? If those well connected enough to attempt to predict things see the odds of the US rolling back the surveillance state to be low and the odds of the levels of surveillance growing then certainly brokering user data and developing better surveillance tech and more popular services that produce personal data is a growth industry?

I personally think it would be insane to bet on a significant overhaul of the american defense and security industry. Everyone understands why the giants didn't pull a Lavabit and just helped cover things up, and carefully prepared inaccurate statements when it came out. The exact same reasons are why it's a much better business decision to go along with this, to step on your competitors to help further the surveillance state rather than fight it.

I only see two arguments for this: That they will lose customers because people demand privacy and will stop using their services if they cooperate. This hasn't happened yet and, if history repeats itself, would just take a big marketing spend to stop anyway. The user experience of any company taking a stand would probably be worse than a cooperating company, so people would have to make a sacrifice to secure their privacy. Also something that is clearly not what people do right now. This is clearly going to be the free market ideologue's argument. Fair warning: I'm going to ignore "people will boycott Google because they are self interested rational actors and it would be irrational to sacrifice privacy for convenience" like I would ignore other naive religious arguments.

The other argument seems to boil down to just: "But that's my team/tribe and they're the good guys" or that it's felt that rich and powerful people in the tech industry are fundamentally different kinds of people and will readily risk their money and power for reasons that obviously don't motivate most other rich and powerful people.

Neither is particularly convincing.
Well in Canada you can fire for no reason in the first 3 months anyway.
I've seen some examples of WebGL being applied to medical image visualization, but my gut tells me this area is still ripe for contributions.
> Sometimes it's important to halt that process and stop and just say "this is definitely fucked up", and yes, not to question it any further.

In my opinion, there are few things more tragic than someone carrying out actions with serious consequences on behalf of a belief that they refuse to question.

I believe I understand your pragmatic concerns. It is hard to act passionately while simultaneously entertaining doubts about your underlying beliefs. Obviously one does not need to set a timer and rigorously question their beliefs every five minutes. However, it is important that one welcomes evidence to the contrary and is willing to engage with that evidence. To do otherwise is to risk becoming a slave to dogma.
Since there is freedom of movement within Europe, you can think of the national governments as 32 local governments [1] that have their own systems and compete. Populations are a bit more sticky than with U.S. states, due to significant cultural/language/etc. differences. But on the other hand, you also have a more meaningful choice of systems, precisely because the countries differ much more than U.S. states do.

[1] Freedom of movement applies within the EU (28), the EEA (+3), and Switzerland (+1).
This is interesting, though I'm curious how basic or archaic did the author think their operations were? Did he assume it was a bunch of poor Somalis on handmade rafts going out there and hijacking boats?

Do most ships now employ private security onboard during their travels through that region?

Has anyone plotted a map that is public of piracy events worldwide? Would love to see a heatmap or something of it.
> It could be that with their security clearances, they know things about threats that make their decision to work for the NSA a moral imperative.

This I very much doubt.The builders would have security clearances, because what they're building is classified. But builders would not need and would not have access to intelligence; they aren't analysts or policy makers. They probably have barely more information on intelligence than you or I, and only in the form of more solid rumors than we have access to.
i'd speculate that Google is brought in because it is good PR, and Oracle, well, it sounds like healthcare.gov backend is running something like 4-6 node RAC (most probably Exadata). Good luck to them as they would really need it :)
It depends on your contract. The longest I ever had was 3 months to the end of a quarter. Theses conditons always go both ways. But which employer would insist in keeping you when he knows you want to leave? What level of motivation could he expect?
my fave snippet is from line 206:

}
}
}
}
}
}

To be fair I've seen that pattern in just about every codebase I've touched, sadly.
It's things like this that make me wish Silicon Valley invested less energy and resources in nutty utopian schemes like artificial islands and more in lobbying for liberalization and modernization of U.S. immigration policy.
Awesome! It was a pleasure to read your very compact source code, BTW.

edit: Can we rename this bot "The Feels Good Man"? ;)
Don't leave your job... yet.

It sounds like you would eventually like to leave, but do not leave until you find another one. Given your academic credentials, your job is currently your greatest qualification. Landing another gig without it would be much more difficult.
The great big threatening evil doers?

You're more likely to die by lightning strike than terrorism.

You mean the police right? They kill drastically more innocent civilians every year in America than terrorists do. And that has been true on average for decades.

You mean automobiles? Drunk driving?

Diabetes and heart disease from high fructose corn syrup and smoking?

Yeah, it's the evil doers that we should be giving up all of our liberties to fight. Because they're a big bad threat - somewhere between the number of people that drown by putting their heads in buckets of water, and the number of people that die every year from 60" televisions crushing them.
No necessarily. Just because it may be more difficult to achieve doesn't mean it is less effective. The process is more specialized now surely and yet the niche remains. We know that when supply is constrained the price rises. So it may now be even more profitable for fewer players.
It's exciting because there is movement at the top end of the general monitor market, for the first time in almost a decade.

I'm profoundly saddened by the situation. I have been waiting nearly 15 years for DPI to improve. I cut my LCD teeth on the old 110dpi SGI 1600SW monitors. Since then DPI went down and is only now starting to come back up.

But now my near-field eyesight is going and I'll have to start wearing reading-glasses in order to make use of these long overdue improvements. 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps back...
It's interesting how many problems the blockchain data structure solves for distributed systems.

Bitcoin uses (and invented) the blockchain as a way to solve the double-spend problem of distributed e-cash systems. But the fact that the blockchain solves the consensus problem without any trust makes it a compelling data structure for many other use-cases as well.

Even if bitcoin fails as a currency, academics will be referencing Satoshi Nakamoto's paper [1] for a long time to come.

[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
"Just like it wasn't 20 years ago, when the threat was as great as it is today." Do you have a link to the source of this data?
Except, they can't point to any plots that have actually been thwarted. First it was 52 plots thwarted, then 2, then none.
This is true. I tried to clarify this equivocation in another one of my posts in this thread.
In Germany it is up to 6 months (Probezeit) depending on your contract. But the employee can also leave with 2 weeks notice.
I'd do GoPhone if you need more coverage than T-Mobile will give you. $60 for 2 gigs isn't bad. And you're on the same APN as post-paid AT&T, so you get full access to LTE, etc.
Vybe Bracelet
"ask yourself if Charlie has ever had any ideals outside of looking out for number one."

Problem is, if he doesn't, who will? I think that one thing that might have changed in our generation, is that we have the distinct impression that nobody has our back. I'm not saying that politics are more messed up than they used to be, it's just more blatant. Nobody gives a fuck that people are dying in the streets, that we're invading countries to enrich defense contractors, and that we're bankrupting our own country just "because we won't be disrespected". So one guy decides that, fuck it, he has one life, and he'll have his fun. You may call this guy coward, selfish, anything. And maybe you're right. My guts agree with you. My head tells me he's on to something.
Is it just the article author thats shit then? Because the story is full of weirdness.
In this context bandwidth throttling is also a consideration - perhaps a per token or per bucket max object size?
Teen LinkedIn Is A Wasted Opportunity
Videos of all of the talks from the Northeast PHP 2013 Conference
A nuclear bomb has not been detonated in Houston, TX. But nice straw man.
Read this guy's tweets: https://twitter.com/justinschuh

I'm certainly not a fan of his ideology, but he gives an insight from someone who came from the NSA and is supportive of the executive branch's behavior.
Show HN: An animated HelloBar alternative (Free)
Well, yeah. Because you don't have to root/jailbreak normal computers.

The true horror of "appified-zomg-everyting-in-teh-cloud" tablets, smart phones and other mobile devices is that the walled garden model leaves most people benumbed to the concept of DRM, as if it were a novocaine injection.

Then, to top it off, the combination of shitty cell phone reception along with the price of a required data plan behaves like some continuous supply of laughing gas, and net neutrality just goes out the window.

It's different when you use a real computer, because you haven't acquiesced to all the limitations of cramming every last tidbit of computation and networking into the space of a 3' x 5' index card. People stop caring about standards compliance, page rendering consistency, and the whole works. Most people are still amazed that full motion video, megapixel cameras, the internet, and gigabytes of storage can fit in the palm of their hand, and then get put on pause and stuffed in their pocket for later. We don't complain as much because we're so happy for the convenience.

The Web does not exist within the mobile domain as it does among laptops and desktops. Your standards are 1,000 times higher, sitting at a desk in a controlled environment, than they are while standing in a train station or an airport, or sitting in the back of a taxi cab.
I was fortunate enough to be able to go to the conference this year, but it's awesome to be able to watch the talks that I wasn't able to get to (especially as I had to pop out at one point to catch the Red Sox :) ).
I think the article gets it wrong. Sorry.

Having your body think that it is comfortable, especially when the environment is hazardous, would be a lose. Like filtering out the sound of smoke detectors so you can sleep easier.

That said, this would be quite useful in office situations like ours where some people whine that 75 is too hot and other complain that at 70 they need mukluks. In that situation where the office is actually at a livable temperature, if we could adjust individual perceptions to be comfortable then it would be quite useful.
Phrases like "the competition" set off my buzzword detector.

I'm not ever thinking about 'the competition' of the products I'm using, I'm thinking of other ways to solve the same problem.

I dunno, just try to stick to more descriptive terms - "It's worked really well for us compared to the other telephony systems we've used", vs "it's far ahead of the competition"? I'm not a writer by trade.
Saying you won't help the Department of Health and Human Services because you don't like the NSA is about like saying you won't buy a Ford because your last Chrysler was a lemon. The government is not a single entity. There's a single chain of command, but there are thousands of different cultures.
Nope. My HTC One, which I love, has a higher DPI. I'm not sure what it matters at that level though. Great will look great.
Fully agree with you on that. Perfectionism or shooting the bird with one bullet only is not what made Facebook a billion dollar company.

a) Serve b) Improve quality c) goto a)
They both use force. Putting heavily toxic, hard-to-remove substances into tap water -- as additives rather than as "necessary" treatments -- is, I would hope, an action considered aggressive and highly unethical to many people. Consider the degree to which people are now dependent on municipal water and the degree to which water is crucial to sustain life. I would call poisoning a water supply a form of force. It's physical and economic taxation, mostly hurting poor people (who can't afford proper filtration). And it's to the detriment of an entire food chain.

Under the new health insurance law, the penalty for not buying health insurance is a fine. I forget the yearly amount: $500-1000 (depending)? Yes, that's a form of force. The amount of the fine and who it impacts is the amount of force. It's economic taxation. It also further opens up a slippery slope in the ability for such forms of force to be used increasingly in other aspects of government and society. That's another topic.

Both propositions are easily argued as forms of force. They could easily be argued as unjustified compared to other systems and methods. However, for now, I'd argue that contaminating water is a larger form of force.
JSHint, a JavaScript Code Quality Tool