skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly a harsh blow and a lesson learned, but not the lesson you think. The lesson is to not allow a third party "black box" to be the central traffic source for the monetization model of your business. Rapgenius understood this well and does have an excellent community on boarding strategy, but was still heavily reliant on google as a main pillar of its customer acquisition model.

I've lost one Alexa top 2000 site to a google penalty, and several smaller sites, saw this coming miles away.

I know exactly what they are going through, never forget the day when my JV partner called me at 4AM and told me the apocalypse scenario has happened. Even worst than the financial blow of losing a $30k a day advertising property, was the brutal realization of googling your brands name and seeing it not show up. Going in to analytics real time and seeing a sub 100 number for the first time in 6 months was quite an eery feeling as well.

Google did this to set an example, and they will be reinstated worst case in 6 months.
A visual history of the Apollo missions
How Rap Genius Won The SEO Game
You know what? If they actually are better, then that's only a good thing in my opinion. Who cares about "fairness" here, we want the best results. That's one way of looking at it anyway.
It's the cliche. But you're right, the most menial worker at google earns probably a lot more then I do (in academia). I don't know...
In China, Chairman Mao still bigger than Jesus
I agree it was what they should've done. At the very least it was the right direction. Hopefully their reputation is enough to keep them afloat while they build up again.
Everything in degrees, I suppose!
Auto wiring is great for test code. Most of you need to know about the test is contained in the testing class.

But I don't like using auto wired in the main code because it means I am required to use that wiring for every use. I find that we want to use classes in a few different ways, and keeping the dependency definitions and configuration values in the XML decouples it from the code and increases both reusability as well as exposing the XML configurations after deployment so that a recompile isn't required in the field.
Show HN: My little attempt at a "start up".
I made a post a few days ago asking if any software companies/start ups needed technical video tutorial writers and I had a few very interested and serious respondents email me. I've been looking for something to do with this domain hence I give myself a Christmas present.
Reddit comment from the author of this change discussing the reasons behind it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1qw73v/til_orac...
For lyrics sites, Google is the alpha and the omega. There are no other traffic sources for that niche.
If the "slap" is too temporary then it backfires as a deterrent because such a slap would teach future companies that you might as well game the system and then accept your small, temporary punishment if you do happen to get caught, which you might not in the first place if you are more clever about doing it than the rapgenius guys were. There's really no point to Google making public spectacle of a penalty that might end up so temporary as to be toothless.

In any case, I find it hard to shed a tear for these guys, they either knew full well that they were flagrantly disobeying the Google rules or they are incredibly stupid. And unlike some others I'm not so surprised that their previously high ranking might have been gamed because they are one of a set of companies I know of that has huge mindshare with the HN/startup crowd, but virtually none with people I know who aren't part of that first group.
It's not the case that all usernames are lower case. User names are case sensitive, but the system prevents you from registering with a name that differs from another only in case. That seems a reasonable choice.

Your browser insists on capitalizing something when you don't ask for it. That's not the fault of HN. I agree that the UI could pander to the foibles of your system, but it's not a bug.

By the way, you have a typo. You say:

If I try to register a user with the name "eDeNt"
I get the error "That username is taken. Please
choose another."

But then you say:

If I try to visit the user page
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edenT
I get an error.

Note that you didn't test the same username you attempted to register.
The purpose of patents is to suppress competition for one's own products. These patents don't protect any novel aspect of Apple's or Microsoft's products. By definition, if they're valid.
It looks neat, but the performance was bad enough that I couldn't play it.

To mention another decent open source strategy game project, I'd say Widelands is to Settlers what 0 A.D. is to Age of Empires.

https://wl.widelands.org/
Fine, fine, kill my dream of powering my neighborhood and giving FPL the boot. However, if you lived in the woods, why not... ?
Interestingly now on searching Rap Genius on google, articles about them getting penalised are coming on the first 3 pages.
100% agreed, google cut off their nose to spite their face here.
I dunno, seems pretty dismissive of music as an artform to say it can't offend anyone.

And indeed adults often make attempts to ban music. I don't hear much uncensored radio play for NWA or Johnny Rebel or Skrewdriver.

And I think that's a positive sign for music. If no-one is attempting to ban music, either no-one is saying anything, or no-one is listening.
What exactly do you expect Rockstar to do?

That begs the question. Apple and Microsoft should not have created this evil zombie company in the first place.
Speaking of CharSequence, one sneaky and bizarre option would be to make String's implementation of CharSequence::subSequence work the old way. subSequence returns a CharSequence, not a String, so it is free to return some specialised object which specifically represents a substring rather than a first-class string. Rather like slices in go, which would win Java some trendiness points.

This would be a surprising bit of behaviour, which means it's probably a bad idea. However, it wouldn't break any current code, because it preserves current behaviour, and hopefully wouldn't break future code, because people could learn about the quirk. Also, i think subSequence tends to be used to create temporary objects as computational intermediaries, rather than new long-lived objects which escape to the heap, so it shouldn't lead to excessive packratting in the way the old-style substring did.
Has anyone outside of the tech bubble heard of Telegram?
Is there some LGBT organization in the UK who could pull off publicly granting a pardon to the government for its' treatment of Alan Turing?
I've worked in cubicles and in an open office most of my life. I'm now working for a company with offices with doors, and I have to say, offices are pretty much the worst.

In an open office (and to a lesser extent, places with open cubicles), you can have constant interaction with other people. You can scan the room quickly to see who's busy, who's concentrating, who looks available for a quick chat, etc. You can hear all the technical conversations going on and are able to jump in at any point if needed. Someone's sketching something out on a whiteboard, anyone can just glance it over if they're curious or feel they can contribute.

With offices, I've found people tend to hide behind their doors. E-mail/IM can be ignored. You have to force yourself to get out and have face to face interactions. If you want to understand how things are going, what the current challenges are, or have any kind of technical discussion that requires more than a few people, you need to schedule a meeting, pry everyone out of their offices and haul them into a conference room. You can't feel the general "pulse" of the place like you can with an open plan.

The only thing worse than closed-door offices is telecommuting, where all of the above is true plus there's not (generally) even the option of getting someone face-to-face at all. Quite honestly, I don't think I would accept a job offer at a place if you told me that a significant number of people telecommuted.

Different strokes for different folks, but I find open offices suit my work style and need for human interaction much better than offices.
You could always go direct to RG.
It's not permanent.

Google wants to make a point, they turn off the traffic faucet, Rap Genius repents, and things slowly return back to normal.

They don't even rank for "rap genius" right now. Their Facebook page does though.
Just clicked the link. I just see the usual lazy kit web site, and no prominently linked white paper. No, I didn't scroll or click. I just looked at where I landed. Nothing. Just standard bland marketing stuff, pushing something that comes across as snake oil. It makes fantastic claims that given what we know about the NSA and its tentacles, are very hard to take seriously. If their claim were true, I'd expect to know that straight away from the landing page, and be blown over by the storm such protection would mean. If any one really made it 100% impossible for the likes of GCHQ and the NSA to spy, all hell would break loose.
Very nice! This inspired me to create my own Merry Christmas "card" in CSS: http://codepen.io/userapp/full/DbhnB

Merry Christmas!
I too am curious what the next security flaw will be. Clearly their design does not include validation or testing
"that pulls in a strong majority of traffic for a given subject."

Not anymore now that Google brought the ranking hammer down on them.
It's super lame that Google penalizes individual cases versus just fixing their algorithms across the board, because it means that other sites that employ similar techniques and aren't high-profile/useful enough to get posted about to HN are able to continue unimpeded.
I don't know if aggressively firing low performers is a good strategy, but it has zero bearing on the economy as a whole, or H-1Bs.

All tech companies would gain if they were allowed access to cheaper labor, regardless of their HR strategy. And all companies would prefer better employees over worse, regardless of whether they prefer to achieve this in the hiring stage or by firing people later.
You and the sibling comment are exactly why bullies continue to bully their victims. I'm not part of any machine, I don't bully anyone and I don't get bullied because I believe in mutual respect among human beings. If a bully is using their power to bully someone, my point is you still put up a fight. When you don't it empowers them even more.

I'm not arguing because I'm pretty sure we'll never agree on this, but some people go through life without this problem and all I'll say is that it's often good to have a take no shit attitude about things.
Celebrate being a human, and celebrate having friends and family. Part of my family is born-again Christian, but they have the class not to shove it down anyone's throats. They say a few words of grace, and we tackle dinner. There's no reason for hatred and opposition of either side: we choose mutual respect instead of taking offense.
Everyone claims to hire "only A players." Alice interviews at TechCo, enters the interview anti-loop, and doesn't get an offer. Alice leaves while TechCo tells it's new hires "we only hire A players, you're the best of the best, welcome to the team." Alice avoids the anti-loop at MicroCo, gets an offer, and is told "we only hire A players, you're the best of the best, welcome to the team."

And the myth of only hiring A players perpetuates itself.

edit: grammar
I am pleased someone else is excited about String#scrub.

For those who need #scrub behavior in ruby 1.9 or 2.0, I wrote a gem a while ago to do this -- I wrote it before I was aware of the upcoming String#scrub api -- I'll maybe change it to provide a String#scrub 'backfill' now, with monkey patching even?

https://github.com/jrochkind/ensure_valid_encoding
A few days ago I posted a thread asking if any software companies or start ups need technical video tutorials and a few serious respondents emailed me. Hence I decided to give myself a Christmas present. I figure its a pretty cool domain name for this kind of work as well :)
I think this is a great lesson in the disparity between two things:

1. Breaking rules

2. Not being liked and breaking rules
Could there be a similar singularity with the speed of light ?
From the article, the author clearly states he has issues with the DI-driven design in general; Spring just happened to be the DI framework he was using at the time. Guice or any other framework for that matter would not have made any difference.

Money quotes:

>>>> In the end, creating a coherent, small system is to me of much higher value than to create one that is decoupled just for the sake of decoupling. Coherence and decoupling are opposing forces and I side with coherence.

>>>> So reuse and decoupling are opposing forces. I find myself siding with decoupling.
I mean, I've given them the ability to withdraw money from my bank account so merely trading on CoinBase requires me to believe they won't do that or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that I don't trust CoinBase, but I know that our interests are somewhat aligned. If they damage their reputation by stealing my BitCoins or my cash they lose money because people don't trust them any more. They are backed by people I consider to be reputable and if CoinBase does something shady all of their reputations will suffer.
Making it Opt out, you mean.
Need more buzz words, cloud is getting old.
As I said before: Chad is way better at this than me! :)
I think this is a very good way to get a quick idea of how a new language works. No theory, no blabla, just the code in a language you know well side by side with the new one.

It actually works well with spoken languages: I've done that by buying the same book in my native language and a new one for which I know only the basics, with great success (and perseverance).
I liked their rape jokes. Grow a sense of humour.
Hi,

If you can't register Colinwright, does it matter what case representation you use to log in?

You're quite right that one shouldn't capitulate to every user-generated bug. But I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world with an Android phone which insists on capitalising text fields. At some point one has to say "it's not our problem - but will our users benefit if we make this change?"

It's not a typo - I was trying to show two different places where there was apparent case sensitivity.

Thanks for the feedback.

Terence
Any stats so far on the apps? What are your plans for promotion?
You don't think this gives competitors a chance to compete better?
You don't have to be theist to enjoy the modern Christmas tradition of giving and receiving gifts and spending time with loved ones. Christmas is based of the nativity fairy tale, but it's also based of solstice celebrations found in any cultures. The modern Christmas celebration has more grounding in Coca-Cola ads then biblical stories.

Atheists celebrating Christmas is no stranger than "Christians" celebrating this truly secular holiday.
> If the poster wanted all of us to be able to read it, they would have encrypted it with their private key. Then we'd just need their public key, which is published on keyservers, to decrypt it.

That's really interesting, I had no idea that public key encryption could be used this way.
Is there any good, recent ( but past the beta stage), fast, non bloated java framework anyone here could recommend ?

For? If you are developing REST applications, the JAX-RS standard is great, lightweight, and mature. I have used both Jersey and RestEasy without any problems.
This routine app developed by someone I know is better in my opinion:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/routines/id370297791?mt=8
You might be right now that the damage is done in some situations, but in many cultures where you teach kids to stand up for themselves, I think they'll be alright in adulthood. You might not win every fight, but you show up. After all, the problems and challenges you face in life can be broken down to run or fight.
The penalty that has been applied will degrade heavily with time. Rap Genius will have an opportunity to rebuild their ranking in the coming months. I suspect they'll be fine, as the product is solid; so clean-up in aisle three, and then business as usual. They're also very well capitalized to withstand this.
You remind me of Sheldon Cooper. :-)

Oh, and also, I completely agree with you.
What problem are you referring to?
Project Oberon
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/

discusson on HN a few weeks ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829464
I feel that if you don't know enough re styling code to write it properly in the first place, then an automated styling program is an easy way out, and not professional at all.
Looks like ordinary visitors can't even find their site now:
https://twitter.com/fuckshivan/status/415879789522587648

The power of Google.
Right on. I'd use a widget to embed lyrics with audio in every blog post if they made it easy. May be integrate with spotify. And create a Wordpress plugin.
Wow.

This is the worst Christmas present possible. Well, Google had no choice and the apology was not a stellar one (not that it could have mattered).

If I recall correctly, Google once penalized Google Chrome for doing shady SEO [1]. Although it was not as brutal as this which sends them to the equivalent of Siberia.

My Questions.

1. I normally search "<song name> rapgenius". Now, it is no longer on the first few pages. Is that not against Google's goal of giving the searcher what (s)he wants?

2. Probably the only way for RapGenius to counter this would be to go heavy on AdWords. Is that not a bit conflicted on Google's side?

Hopefully this punishment will not be permanent. I would hope they have learned to tone things down sometimes.

This may be a lesson in disguise as they would be forced to think of how to survive without SEO. If they can survive now, they will be doubly badass when this penalty is lifted.

--

Edited to include source

[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
Just goes to show, invest in some real marketing, make something really valuable to someone rather than relying on 'growth hacks' that tend to explode in your face.
I like the idea of recurring task lists, i.e. a group of tasks that belong to a template/type of event. We do this for event planning in asana, but do it manually.
The user experience that has contributed to Snapchat's success is the ability to message with untrusted partner with constraints established by the central server and client. The biggest constraint is certain level of inconvenience in logging and redistributing the contents of the conversation.

Snapchat's business value could evaporate if clients that subvert the constraints on the user experience proliferated. The discussion seems to indicate that the technical barriers to this outcome are deeply inadequate. Snapchat looks like they are primarily going to use mechanisms to block the distribution channels of the Play Store and iTunes to ensure user experience integrity. This has the potential to fail catastrophically.
Experience your holiday trip with local tips
That's beside the point. Millions of people that search Google for lyrics every month getting sent to worse sites is a problem for Google, not for me.
Really nice and quick.
It gives more of a Acme feel to vim, but without having to use the mouse.
Will definitely start using it.
I don't have the stamina to debate with libertarians, but I also have found that "beating them at their own game" is not a useful strategy.

Suppose, for example, you manage to prove to a libertarian that the current distribution of wealth is the result of unfair actions in the past. Then for them, the next best option would probably be to redistribute wealth, and then press "play". Which isn't what you wanted to argue for in the first place, so why make that argument?

You say you have lost your taste for intellectual debate online, but I think you would regain it if you were to engage in real debate rather than point-scoring.

Your starting point is that you know the truth, and it is "material" factors that prevent others from knowing this truth. But to have this point of view underestimates the power of debate and reason. But of course I can't really convince you that I haven't been subconsciously made blind to the intellectual power of Marxism by my comfortable middle class lifestyle.
On the other hand, think about the benefits we get from seeing a bug in the software, and then seeing that Telegram have fixed it within the hour. Until a bug is shown and fixed, you don't even know whether it exists or not. So, you have doubt. But once it's exposed, and fixed, your attention is brought to an aspect of the software that you now know is good. The doubt is reduced. Which is a good thing.
It's obviously wrong what Rap Genius did, no doubt about it. They should not have used these techniques. But, it's not a bizarre line of thinking to think of whether the person who posted it finds it to be worth it after the fact given the severity of the repercussion (which could effectively ruin the whole business).
I hate that lyrics have to be licensed for informational purposes. I think it's stupid.
Care to elaborate? RG clearly broke the rules and forced google's hand here. Google has to protect the integrity of their search results against such gaming, else a day might come when all of Google's search results are due to black-hat SEO and Google's brand itself would be worthless.

This would be the equivalent of Walmart/Safeway refusing to carry some company's products because of {false/mis}-representation.
I think the best thank

you Would be to outflank

google And fill the blanks

With lyrics that lank

them back out of the dunk-tank;

Justin Bieber lyrics CLICK HERE
I definitely understand that. Personally, they are both tough choices. One is essentially a race to the top and the other a race to the bottom. That might be the trouble in looking for rare things(unicorns). You often need to go to extremes to find them, and extremes are usually quite uncomfortable.

Speaking of what I've done myself, I've found a combination of the two seem more likely to succeed. By limiting my resource requirements(cheap rent etc), which I may have focused on too much on the past, and increasing my skills(and pay rate), which I spend more energy on these days, I can spend a continually reducing portion of my time on the things I don't want to do.

Thanks for the interesting article btw.
I think the point of the article is that whether or not someone is an A-player is context dependent. Alice might not be an A-player at TechCo (for some reason e.g. the way they dole out projects) but is an excellent fit at MicroCo, where she is considered an A-player because she can work well in their context.

Whether or not this works in practice is obviously a bit iffy, since finding someone who fits exactly your context is incredibly difficult.
agreed, one of the better sites out there but what revenue?
Classic blaming of the messenger.
I agree that is the most important distinction. The filter which is just coming into force, on BT (what was British Telecom, and one of the largest ISPs) is what's called an 'unavoidable question', where you have to make a choice when you first go online, to be filtered or not (and if so, at which level) so effectively opt-in or out. I don't really understand why people complain about that on free speech grounds. There has been government pressure to set up decent filters, but these are ultimately just private sector ISP-level parental controls. I would personally expect such features to be standard.
Had to look up who Sheldon Cooper is... Thanks? :)

Merry Christmas, Hacker News!