skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Essentially Rap Genius violated one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet. In doing so, Google considers this as link scheme[2] which is trying to manipulate the results specifically in relation to Buying/Selling Links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

There are several other ways to "manipulate" the SERPs this way including some of them which you have identified such as - spam comments, doorway pages, forum profiles amongst others - and Google has an algorithm codenamed Penguin which, detects and penalises webmasters who attempt to manipulate the search engines in such way (although it is more complicated than this).

However, Penguin is not the only way which Google identifies people being involved in these practices as they also have a place to report the links[3].

This is one of Google's Manual Actions[4] that webmasters receive, when Google believes you are not providing the user with additional value and/or are trying to manipulate the results.

They cover everything from Thin Content (mainly through Panda) to Hacked Sites to User Generated Spam to the recent Image Mismatch Penalty etc. You can see them all here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re...

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[3] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=e...

[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en
Live Reload any Web App with Grunt
>However, since this is not a widespread practice so far, (almost) nobody has complained about it.

You haven't seen people complain about Twilight, or Fifty Shades of Grey?
Didn't get that far, because it insists on having Flash installed, even when spoofing User Agent as an iPad.

>2014
It's important to make a distinction between two different types of "get things done" here. There is one type where the candidate figures out what needs to be done to complete a feature in an application and does it. Then there's the type where the candidate figures out what is the least work (ie fastest way) and does that without trying to understand the potential outcomes. Given that the slapdash candidate is great at patching bugs I would maybe consider him/her, but frankly I prefer people who measure twice and cut once. I know that sounds like a separate concern --it is-- but some business cultures confuse work ethic and results along the lines of "gets things done".
Based on the last Wirth-related thread, I'm pretty sure it's done and it is just a matter of the documentation getting out there (or not).

Start here:
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.ht...

But I'm pretty sure the specifics of the FPGA he's running on are not well documented yet. I would be happy to be corrected on that point.

In any case, it's a super cool project.
Google is actually penalizing its users' as they'll have less useful results instead of the best possible results.

Google is not supposed to be the Internet police. It's supposed to analyze the best sites, and rank them. Rap Genius getting some spammy links doesn't make it a better site; but it doesn't make it worse either.

The next thing we are going to see is a Google Justice Department?
Essentially no (unless a lot of physics changes).

They are very different problems.

* Sound Barrier

The air is made of molecules, mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen, lot of them, like 10^23/galon. It’s impossible to keep track of all of them, so you must use approximations, and the approximate versions are too difficult, so you must approximate the approximations, until you get a theory that is simple enough to do the calculations and still it give the correct answer to your problems.

For example, if air is not trapped, then it’s almost incompressible when the speed is < 0,9 the sound speed (perhaps the approximation is good even for 0.99). I.e. for most of the calculations approximating that air is incompressible gives almost the correct result, unless you are very close to the sound speed. Incompressible fluids are lot easier to use in the calculations. (In particular, an incompressible 2D fluid can be modeled with complex analysis, it’s a beautiful approximation.) .So you are happier to get an almost correct result, with a lot less of computations and technical problems.

From the Wikipedia article:

> The Prandtl-Glauert transformation is found by linearizing the potential equations associated with compressible, inviscid flow.

This formula is a good approximation for slow air flux. If you try to apply this to almost Mach 1 problems, you void the guaranty.

* Light speed Barrier

You can combine Special Relativity, Electromagnetism and Quantum Mechanics (well you need a Nobel price to do that :) ) and get one of the most precise Physics Theories. It can be tested with simple systems like a single electron bouncing against a single electron, so you don’t have to make too many approximations. (The equipment is very complex and the calculations are awful, but that’s another kind of approximations.) One of the more precise results is the magnetic moment of a electron. It depends heavily Special Relativity, Electromagnetism and Quantum Mechanics. The theoretical result and the experimental result agree with more than 10 significative figures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_momen.... For all practical propose they are equal. The complete calculation involve also the week and strong force, but the theories that model them don’t change Special Relativity.

All the experiments in the LHC use very fast particles and to calculate their properties you must use a lot of corrections of Special Relativity. So the theory is already tested for particles with a speed very close to light speed. It’s very improbable that there will be possible to break the light barrier.

Another problem is that by Special Relativity, if you travel faster than light, someone with the right speed will see you traveling backward in time, and you open a Pandora box of paradox. There are some additional problems with gravity and General Relativity, but they don’t change the main points.

Every Physic Theory be proven wrong by an experiment, so it’s not possible to say that we will never have to modify Special Relativity to allow faster than light travel, but it is very improbable.
Loved the second article too. A bit like the saying "Writers write." I keep looking for that point when I get lost in my work, a state of flow, and I abandon anything that doesn't take me there. Maybe it's not just about inspiration, or getting into the zone, but just doing it.

Great blog you've got there. Why, oh why, did all you cool kids stop using RSS? :-)
Just wanted to say thanks! I published my game(Missilium) last night on Itch.io. It was really easy and pleasant, compared to Desura or IndieDB.

Great work on the site, it's a big help to the indie community
If you want your results from rapgenius, that's why site:rapgenius.com exists.
Still a fridge always full of good food is a perk that's comparably hard to get by oneself. There's still the question whether it is desirable (getting fat is a real problem) but the point remains: some perks can be much more effectively provided by the employer.

On the other hand I hate all kinds of the mandatory fun activities at work. These work as antiperks for me.
It's not good at matching partial words, and sometimes a song's title only contains very common words, etc. It doesn't deal well with those
Types of Procrastination and How You Can Fix Them
But it is still the only competitive game of its nature, and it plays like any game released recently.

So unless Valve intends on releasing L4D3 any time soon, I think it would be great if they put more work into L4D2.

In addition, keep in mind this is the game they chose to demo the feasibility of gaming on Linux.
Report those other companies to Google's anti spam team.
I agree that Rap Genius should have been penalized here, but so should literally every other lyrics site on the net. I've done SEO in hyper competitive spaces in the past and honestly, the system is broken.

Google and Cutts love to preach this "Create value and quality content and you'll rank high" bullocks but it doesn't work like that. When you have a high number of well funded competitors who are all playing dirty, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to compete with them with white hat tactics. You either play hardball yourself and risk a ban or you play nice and get creamed in the SERPs.

It's really a rock | hard place situation in some niches.

Oh, and I just saw the founders made this statement:

"We are working with Google right now to resolve this. They've been really great, helping us identify changes we need to make, even on Christmas. We’re working on it as fast as we can, and expect to be back on Google very soon."

WHAT? What makes these guys so special that they actually get help from Google. I think that pisses me off more than anything. There are a ton of webmasters out there trying to do the right thing SEO wise who get banned or penalized but could never, ever, get personal help from Google. We don't even get the courtesy of knowing why we've been banned most of the time. (Although to be fair this has gotten much better in GWT).
Are you sure they are getting attacked? Is there a status posting somewhere that reflects that assumption?

It's more likely that their servers are overloaded from the number of users trying to grab L4D2 along with the other winter sale items. Steam store has been iffy the past couple of days already.
Boulevard of Broken Ideologies
Related to this point, India also has pretty big problems with black money and the black market. Bitcoin is not going to make it better.
It will breed sequelitis, a specialty of movies. And more grave-robbing of dead authors (see fourth Millennium series book recently announced while Stieg Larsson spins in his grave).
A friend of mine is a director at Netflix. He was explaining to me that compensation vs retention are different conversations there.

They want to pay people market+ for A players, but if you're not at the level expected, you'll be let go if you don't get (back) to that level.

So a conversation shouldn't (but sometimes does) go from "we shouldn't give her a $25k raise, {s}he hasn't been doing well enough" to firing her for not improving.

On the other hand, no one is supposed to be confused about where {s}he stands with respect to performance and improvement.
Come on man, this whole thread/article is pretty ridiculous.

I'm a fan of RapGenius as well, but the whole underlying theory of Google is that the more people that organically link to something, the more valuable that content will be for someone searching key terms. You and I don't define what's "optimal" for everyone's search results, that's supposed to happen organically via legitimate link sharing (and it's the reason Google has grown to be the leading search engine, and that all major search engines now use similar logic).

To say that Google is doing something wrong for enforcing it's rules about organic links, just because you (or I) believe the results are more valuable, does not make that true for everyone.

Who do you expect to police this? Who is going to say what sites are breaking the rules for the sake of "optimizing everyones search results" and which ones are breaking them to optimize their revenue/valuation?

I'm a big fan of RapGenius, and I'll continue to use their service, but this was a shady SEO technique that backfired on them and I believe they know that. They'll be penalized for a week or two, remove the shady links, then have the penalty removed and be fine. I hope that other lyrics sites that are engaging in similar behavior get punished as well so we can try to maintain the quality of search.
Mmmm, we all love typing that.
I sure hope not .... but I have no way of knowing. Which is a problem.
I'd say it's neither a feature nor a bug; it's just different in a way that's partially incompatible with credit-based payment schemes.

This incompatibility shows up with Coinbase, where they require a bank account number and a credit card number and identity verification to buy Bitcoin instantly because they're bridging the gap and have no recourse if someone scams them. Not exactly peer-to-peer or anonymous.

Payment companies like credit card issuers or Paypal do a lot of policing of shady vendors and shady customers. If you're just using cash then it's buyer beware. But on the other hand, it allows you to make a payment when a bank wouldn't allow it.
>> We have to find a way to give the President the power he needs to protect us, while making sure he does not abuse that power.

Now if only he was interested in "protecting us". What you're suggesting is that we need to give a fox the power to protect the hen house, and to ensure it won't abuse that power. What do you think will happen? It's not about the president either, by the way. He's just a puppet for The Powers That Shouldn't Be.
Thanks for sharing ...
Definitely inspiring.
Just wondering ... how long did the design work took?
My tools already do that. With IntelliJ and its Spring support I can easily jump directly to the actual implementation that is being wired in, just as easily as I would jump to source if it was a concrete class. But in a properly designed system I rarely need to go poking into the implementations of my dependencies.
I don't understand how Rap Genius' hack was any worse than what Mixpanel does with its free plan.

https://mixpanel.com/free/

Here, they are bribing customers to link to their site? Would this not be illegal too?
> "and help writers give readers more of what they want"

If all writers write stuff based only on what readers want to read we're doomed.

There are great books written, that were not popular at the time of publishing; but instead they became popular years and years later.

Even worse, this data will be used by publishers as a filter what kind of books to produce next, and authors may have their works rejected. For example, Orwell's Animal Farm was once rejected with the publisher saying "It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA". Clearly the publisher had an opinion on what kind of books are (not) profitable. With this new data publishers will have even more opinions.
Design work? There is no design work in iOS 7. The icons were all really simply. Great Words is just a "g" with single fill color, Note 22 is just three lines with a white background, Routines is pretty much just like Note 22 with a different background color, and Do Something is just basic shapes.
I never implied that the reporter was culpable. He isn't, RapGenius 100% is. But if I were in the original poster's shoes-- for me at least-- I would've initially found breaking the story to be fun and interesting, but seeing how Rap Genius as a business is basically screwed for the foreseeable future, I would've definitely thought twice. I agree that Rap Genius is 100% wrong in its shady tactics, but as a lot of the other commenters in this above thread (who have not been down-voted to oblivion) have stated, this is a pretty harsh punishment on Google's part. Knowing the harshness of the punishment after the fact, I was just pondering as to how the original poster felt, that's all.
I like to appreciate you on your work and giving this for free to community. I think people are right with their complaints about cover. The way paint is shown getting dropped from text on the front cover - it reminds me about beginning of a horror movie. A simple black color font on white cover could have also done the job.
Dogewallet was hacked today. Millions of coins stolen.
21st Century Carol of the Bells
Ask HN: What is your preferred stack for prototyping new apps?
Rails used to be my go-to a couple years ago, but I'm wondering what the latest and greatest is specifically for weekend projects and hackathons. For example:

- Rails

- Rails + Frontend Framework

- Sinatra + Frontend Framework

- Meteor

- Node + Frontend Framework

Feel free to get more specific if you have a very thoughtful stack.
He's also describing a cultural shift. While it may be hyperbolic, I think there's some truth to the notion that the Facebook generation thinks in terms of being public by default, possibly without even being aware of it, because it's so trivial for information to leak out into the world unless you jump through a lot of hoops to prevent it. There are fewer and fewer "secret gardens" left to children.

I'd be very curious to hear from a millennial (or younger) on the subject; anyone Snowden's age or older is probably too far removed from the next generation to assess it well.
Definitely being hit hard by legitimate users. It's always bad during steam sales, but things like this put it over capacity.
About the same as me! I generally do DDG first unless I know I want a map, or I'm searching for error messages. Other commands I use fairly frequently are

!yt (youtube)
!gmail
!news
!gg (google groups)
!hn
!boingboing
!torrent
!itunes
!rubydoc
!rubygems
!codex
!so (stack)
!am (amazon)
!jstor (and a few other specific academic journal searches, but you can also use !googlescholar)
!flickr

and probably a few others! I encourage everyone to check out the list and get it into their workflow. With Alfred + DDG I can get to most things much quicker than I could through google

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
Also re: your P.s., it doesn't matter if they were only retweeting blogs they interested in or supported. They were asking people to add links (for SEO) that had zero relation to the article, in exchange for a tweet (which they wanted the blogger to write for them).

Does this interview about YOG$ have any relation to Justin Beiber? http://hiphophundred.com/yog-explains-his-new-mixtape-everyd....

Again - I'm a huge fan of RapGenius, and I think their superior quality will bring them to the top again in no time (look at their growth over time, they are clearing winning on quality already), but there's zero question that this was a terrible move. You can't fault Google for this.
ReactOS is against NSA!

ReactOS is opensource!
Seriously, if you want to laugh, take a look at some of the code [0] the NXT devs have released. If you've ever written Java professionally, you will immediately realize that the code was probably written by someone with very little experience.

Please don't fill HN with this scammy pump-and-dump crap.

[0] - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352286.0
The latest Spring release supports a Groovy DSL for configuration: http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.0.RELEASE/spring-frame...
Rails. Plain old straight rails.
Congrats on launching! I don't entirely understand what you're doing here, though. Custom training videos? I highly recommend flipping around the subject of the text on your website, and making it about your prospective users, and how you can make them more awesome.

To that end, I cannot recommend this talk from Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2012 highly enough: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-...
The non official Steam status page

http://steamstat.us/

(But even the Dota matchmaking is down right now)
PHP 5.5 vs HHVM vs Node.js Benchmark
The last few DLCs have just been good community campaigns that Valve has reworked slightly, I don't see why they wouldn't keep adding more when it's little work for them.

Even if they don't it's very easy to get custom campaigns in the game yourself.
Egotism, the genius and the tragedy.

I think he'd be horrified at his type, once used for the bible, now being used for posters.
Looks like there is already a gem backporting String#scrub: https://github.com/hsbt/string-scrub/

It was mentioned in the changelog.
Just some snow in 3D using JavaScript
Personal experience.

This was many years ago though (> 5) so likely the numbers have changed since then.
oh, right. this is also really good advice. after learning how to write a yacc grammar, it's really easy to trick "non-technical" people into doing their own programming with with domain-specific languages. JBehave also looks useful for this purpose.
This was announced in May (as noted by the date of the blog post)
I didn't say it was an attack. It's a distributed denial of service via demand for the service rather than malicious intent.

edit: Perhaps I should have said "organically DDOSed" or something to that effect to better signal that I was using the term in a casual manner somewhat divorced from its malicious origin.
I like that perspective. Very different to the often propagated big-launch mantra. Can you share a bit more on what approach you took with the Spanish Bible apps? Thank you!
Or just download from pirates and get high quality drm free ebooks that dont fuck around.
Does any of the consoles have free AAA games?
-50 is the number of results they were bumped down. If you search "rap genius" you'll find it on the 5th page.
Right now all purchases are associated with an email address, you can request a list of your purchases to be emailed to you from this page: http://itch.io/about/support

I'm very close to deploying a feature for registered users to view their purchases. I'm doing a revamp of user profiles and that's part of it.

Early access games are interesting, I think it's a realistic alternative to kickstarter. I don't have any rules regarding them, still thinking about it, but I very much encourage them.
Not sure about the latter, but my impression of the Twilight series was that it's just bad writing rather than being too formulaic, like Hardy Boys or romance novels are.

Now the same author may churn out book after book which seem pretty repetitive, but that may be because it's their own style. That is, their works may certainly be formulaic, but at least it's their own formula.

So what I meant by the comparison with pop music is, the criticism is not just that the same artist puts out albums that sound like their previous ones, but rather that all artists start to sound like each other. And that is what I fear may happen with "pop lit": in the quest to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, all authors may end up sounding like each other.
Why the hell I can not do this? Can anyone do this?
This kid is doing strange walk, I tried literally many times but I am not able to do it, Is it my bones different kind or this kid is special ? I want someone to try if this can really be done or not..... !
OP here: The announcement hadn't been written at the time I posted this link. I figured people would rather install it, and when the announcements became available, I'd add them as comments. They are both posted here if you scroll down.
Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and Google?
I started my tech career working in Adwords Sales and Sales Operations at Google. One of the biggest complaints we received was our clients needed help getting ahold of someone regarding SEO problems. Of course, there was little we could do on the paid side - which was Google's policy.

The whole point of Google's ranking algorithm is to keep it as much of a black box as possible with even Jason Calacanis getting nowhere with his Mahalo battle with Matt Cutts and team.

I'm uncomfortable with what appears to be almost a direct line the RapGenius gents have with the Google team to come to what they've coined as a "resolution" between the two entities.

With thousands of other sites being unable to get ahold of a human being at Google to resolve SEO problems, do you think RapGenius should have the ability to negotiate with Google? Do they have enough traffic to justify the conversation? Should that matter?
flag.StringVar(&path, "watch", ".", "path to be watched")
flag.StringVar(&command, "command", "echo", "path to be watched")

I think there may be a mistake?
You asked if they thought it was real. It is real, so if they think that, they are correct.