skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is Google's SEO penalty is for Life?

No. It's very temporary, they'll may need to rely less on search engines to begin with.

> Any hope left for reconsideration

Is there hope? Yes, definitely.

Should there be reconsideration? No. They did something wrong, as in known to be very very wrong for a very very long time. Reconsidering this for them opens the doors to other people who may or may not have deliberately done the same. I'd like my search results to be free of arbitrary human judgement.

One reconsideration that I don't mind is if Google reverses the blacklisting of the terms "rapgenius" and "rap genius" but only once Google has figured out a alternate change to their algorithm to control such future behavior, while penalizing past transgressions.

> Any hope left for Rap Genius?

Sure, lots of it. This is really not that bad. Sure they lost 2/3 of their traffic overnight, but increasing traffic by 200% is not really a huge challenge on the web. They will just need to rebuild their traction the right way, not quite hard since they have a large existing community.

> So what do you need to do when this happens to you?

I mentioned this in a different comment[0], I personally know of a number of legitimate sites that were invariably affected due to content and blog farms harvesting their content when Google's panda algorithm rolled out.

They did need to go over any other possibilities for getting flagged, we did find a couple of unintentional transgressions, for example one of the authors had been publishing rather short articles, which were more like blurbs of coherent thought, unique but very easy to get flagged under duplicate filters. We did not delete those articles but set strict minimum content length rules.

Had to cut back on a few expenses while in recovery.

In the grand scheme of things, panda was just a blip. Once fixed, the traffic grew exponentially.

Lastly, I welcome these changes, as it gives newer sites and startups a fair chance to survive and grow.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966454
This screams of quota fulfillment.
A link to the announcement would probably be more helpful:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-Decem...
This is a joke, right? I can't tell because it is not very funny. But the idea is so absurd that it has to be a joke. Right?
Why would you disable pinchzoom?
Most people can't tell the difference between 30 and 60Hz, except in certain situations. Most TV programs are filmed at 30Hz, and until very recently, most movies were filmed at 24Hz.

You may notice a little bit of stuttering during long, slow pans, but for everything else, it should work pretty well.
I don't know that, IN THIS ARTICLE, anybody claimed Larry Page was a prodigy. I don't think he was (the concepts behind PageRank were already well known, and writing a crawler, indexer and search engine were also well-established). Also, many people worked on improving the search engine, such as Craig Silverstein.
In what world is Javascript "lightweight"?
Is it okay for a site to use black-hat tactics to rise to the top because they've got the 'best' content?

If they've got the best content, shouldn't it rise to the top organically? Or is the argument that 'everyone else is doing it, so if we don't do it, our organic rank will be jeopardized'?
Far from the same scale, but providing IT services (software development and testing for the most of it) is pretty big here.
Thanks for taking the trouble to write all this (when all I asked for was a link). It gives a good flavor of what you're talking about. I used to read network news inside of emacs, using a mode called gnus, decades ago, and before I switched to vim. That's probably an example of a complex application that could be written within emacs because of the architecture that you describe. This extensibility is tempting me to try emacs again, because vim is so hard to extend, but I don't want to give up vim's pure editing efficiency. I guess I need to see how well evil (vim mode for emacs) works in practice.
You can append "?share" to the Quora URL to read it without having to log in.
Are you using an especially old version of Spring? I work with Spring MVC on a pretty regular basis and I've never had that much trouble with defining a new controller/model/view.

Controller:
Add an @Controller annotation and some @RequestMappings and you're done.

Model:
Usually these have no Spring dependency at all, though there are annotations you could put on some of the fields for various tasks if you'd like.

View:
Also mostly unrelated to Spring. Write a Thymeleaf template or JSP and return the name of it from the appropriate controller method.
the entire argument is questionable as to what Google's strategy is but they are only in that position because of a superior product in a market with a relatively low barrier.
You're right that theres nothing magical, but there is a clear advantage to faster disks, a more modern & faster CPU, newer & faster ram (this is running DDR2 in the benchmark), etc. I'd be curious why this particular machine was used for benchmarking, and if the same benchmarking method yielded different results on EC2 or something like that.
"I learned that you should go straight to the person you're upset with rather than go to authorities."

This is bullshit and dumb advice. If someone steals my bike and I find out who it is, I'm not going to go to his apartment and beat him to death in the middle of the day (smart money on confronting a scumbag not leading to a productive conversation).

Fuck that. The reason we have "authorities" is because we have people that can't figure out how to live in a society. Why should someone not use the framework that we've invented to resolve issues?

edit: Whoops, I forgot that the internet is the place in which "snitches get stitches" and no one reports serious crimes to the police because there's a batman in each of us.
in this case, very accurate. Rapgenius has Quantcast analytics codes on their website.
Interesting, thanks.

I wonder if Quora does this to scam on SEO
Who said anything about race? The distinction is class and culture, not race.
it uses an old hardware, with an old JDK, etc.
2013 was a lost year for tech
I'd wager that a bigger goal is being able to take part of the Java ecosystem.

That said, we really need to know which flags he's running Jruby with - and which

The internet tells me that you achieve better performance with -server at the expense of a bigger start-up time penalty. Anecdotally, it takes a while for the JIT compiler to find the hotspots in your code and optimize them away.

All of this will depend on how Jruby-rails keeps code in memory, yadda yadda. Someone who actually has used Java/Jruby recently can chime in with more details.
Quite frankly, "killing dozens when you're young" isn't a predictor of good leadership when you're older, especially after you've been through solitary confinement for over a decade. In this regard Mujica's story is similar to Mandela's.
People in solitary confinement gather a lot of wisdom from the vast amount of time they have to meditate. And generally speaking, I believe people should be judged by what they are today, not by their pasts :)
Weird experience you had there. I have been to many IRC channels on Freenode and found pretty much all of them abusive and unfriendly with the big exception being #emacs, where people seem to be more open and tolerant, also very helpful.

I would say you had bad luck and met an ass (which could happen as anyone can go to #emacs and rant around)
None of which are true for Google, which actually encourages healthy worklife balance even though many people don't take advantage of it. Google has many non-product related company objectives, for example, increasing the number of women in the company, or improving work life balance. Younger people without kids tend to avail themselves of the on-campus resources and stay late, I myself leave at 6pm. I do not sacrifice time with my kids in the evening for the sake of free food. (In general, I don't believe Google HR/People Ops believes that # of hours worked = increased output)

Here's the thing, you've got your view of the world, of Google, and then there's the reality, in which Googlers tell you that your model doesn't match the facts, or that Google is consistently rated one of the best places or work, or that Glassdoor rates Google in the top 50 companies for work/life balance. A sweat shop of induced labor via sweets and candy it is not.

But oh yeah, I might be completely brain washed and believe Larry Page is my best buddy, that's why I spend my nights on social media and hacking on game code, and not working on finishing up stuff at the office from home.

Thanks for the free gifts Larry, I promise from now on I will work long overtime hours for free.
I've read more than 20 Pratchett books (I think I didn't read the last 2-3) and there're two absolutely great books among them:

- Nightwatch: Great idea, fantastically written

- Going Postal: Great book for everybody who reads HN. Great characters, storyline, and fantasy meets hacking.
> a very efficient (unspoken) system of coordinating who goes when
> approach a crosswalk and every car in every direction will stop and wait for you to cross

I confess to being baffled by these quotes: Are these not the law?

In every province in which I've lived, the rules for stop signs are simple: First in, first out. In case of multiple simultaneous arrivals, vehicle on the right has right of way. Only pathological case is a multi-road intersection with perfectly equal spacing between roads, e.g., four-way intersection of two perpendicular roads - the drivers have to sort something out, but it's such a rare case it's not worth solving.

That regulation works just as well for large intersections when then the lights are out: As you arrive, take note of who else is already there - you have right of way when they are all gone, everyone else has to wait for you.

That regulation is observed in Ontario, NB, NS, PEI, and, to a lesser or greater extent, Quebec (highway regs are provincial, but we're pretty consistent on many sensible points).

Likewise, pedestrians have absolute right of way wherever they are permitted to be. That is less observed, especially in bigger cities in Ontario and especially in Quebec, but is strictly observed in the Maritimes: Popup from between parked cars in Wolfville - or even Saint John, on many streets - and traffic halts for you.
Interesting point!

Google's search team has been famously resistant to any influence by Google's sales/marketing teams on ranking decisions. Search quality gave rise to the 'golden goose', after all, and the self-conception of the team, and its individual members, is based on independence from purely money-grubbing considerations.

But I wonder, what happens when Google's antitrust lawyers came to the ranking team, and say: "soften this penalty [or otherwise tweak these quality-rankings], because otherwise we'll be in more trouble with regulators or leave too much evidence of market-power."

Could the search team still say, "buzz off, we're sticking to what we know from the numbers is what's best for our users"? Or does keeping regulators happy, and avoiding smoking-gun fact-patterns, trump everything? I suspect it often will, because of the unique risks of state enforcement and appearing unlawful. It's also easier to rationalize "we're sacrificing our own idea of what's best because the law seems to require it" (even if the actual risk is fuzzy before losing in a formal legal process) than "we're doing this to make the guys over in ads/mobile/etc a bit more money this quarter".
Because you are a "mobile UX expert", which is the latin for "asshole".
Economist: Peripheral bitcoin services like BitPay safer investment than bitcoin
He crossed a red light, that seems fair to me( Europe has similar "prices" ). A car doing that would get at least 2x times that plus points depending on the country.
What if the remaining traffic is mainly due to HN people reading this article? Then they're in real trouble..
Me: activates tablet, types 'fuck', verifies that phone suggests music, get suckered into listening to that song again…

http://i.imgur.com/lAimHhn.png
Without knowing what runtimes and parameters are used it's really hard to tell what's going on in this benchmark; JRuby can see 100% and sometimes more improvement on many workloads by tweaking JVM options.

It looks like JRuby is just run under the system JRE (which is what?) with no additional options; that's going to be slow for most workloads.

It'd be nice to see a lot more documentation around the runtime configurations and what the Rails app itself is doing.
Yep. I keep mine windowed. Oh well.
Rampant Money Hacking Is Ruining GTA Online
Los Santos is supposed to be a criminals’ paradise, a place where the right crew, the right weapons and the right vehicles let you unlock as much money as you can earn. But a plague of hacking is clogging GTA Online‘s in-game economy with billions — maybe even trillions — of dirty dollars.
Most of GTA Online’s initial launch woes have been resolved and a big make-good has rolled out but players say that a networking exploit that opens the door to earning infinite amounts of cash is ruining the multiplayer portion of Rockstar’s hit game.
The complaints are everywhere. On Facebook, Reddit, Rockstar’s support forums and other sites, users are sharing stories of how random players are suddenly bestowing them with six- and seven-figure sums or placing bounties on their heads or with similarly inflated amounts.
A Step-by-Step Om Walkthrough
Yeah, but there are second order effects. You've heard the terms "tattletale" and "snitch". They developed in reaction to a police force that is seen as outsiders, and as violent and arbitrary. If you invoke the "authorities," you're punished by your peer group, because the authorities tend to make the whole group's life more difficult.

Instead of invoking "the authorities" you're left with direct confrontation, or often a makeshift internal justice system mediated by insider "elders" of some stripe.

Anyway, your position is understandable, but it also betrays a middle class privilege that most inmates don't experience.
I think "breaks" and "breaking" should be spelled "brakes" and "braking"
It's interesting how a simple symmetry instantly transforms what would otherwise be a bunch of random ugly lines into something beautiful.

Kaleidoscopic IFS fractals are also based on this concept. (8 axis symmetry + some simple transformations), and look at the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=renxaQZfsdk
Why do people even care about languages? I've written code in dozens of imperative, object oriented and functional languages and really can't see what the fuss is about. It takes a few days to get comfortable with a new syntax and then you're back to looking up library documentation and gluing pieces together. Learning a new syntax is a fraction of the time spent writing an application. Are people just lazy, complacent or stupid?
This quote is about "drawing wisdom from the past, to interpret current affairs". It's not about judging people by their past. In fact, if you research history you will find many examples of people who did grave mistakes and then went on to do great good later.
The way they deal with 4-way stop signs isn't "unspoken," it's the frigging law [1]. That law is exactly the same as every other state. This stuff is covered day one of driver's ed. If you "break the system," you're breaking the law and deserve a ticket, not just honking.

Moreover, the same deference can also be seen in Boston, which is a very walkable city. Although jaywalking is very common in Boston. New Orleans is a completely different city--only a small section of it has significant pedestrian traffic, and that section is often closed off to cars, anyway.

[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&gr...
As a Japanese native who went to college in America and moved to NYC to escape the societal pressure back home, I'm glad to see this. Maybe I'll move back someday.
Here's the Cambridge dictionary on the word: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/male_3

Note the example: "Among the bodies are two unidentified British males."
> The benchmark premptively runs the fans and pauses between runs in order to cool off. These measures give JRuby at least a 25% speed gain. However, JRuby still might be running slower than it would on a box with appropriate cooling.

Right. Your computer can't be trusted to not throttle its performance due to crap cooling, and you're trying to benchmark using it?
That's a bit of an extreme example. Think about this in the context of an office environment. Often times it is better to work out issues with someone directly. It commands a lot more respect and often times helps to cut through red tape.

A lot of the time if you go to your boss over a problem with someone that you work with, they view you as a "tattle-tale" or somebody that is too weak to stand up for yourself.
Whistleblower Snowden hailed by internet founder
Dangerous viewpoint is when science is provided by anonymous wikipedia, but not by scientists themselves.
This reminds me a good advice for seduction: don't tell, show. Nice read!
When I lived in philly, I jay-walked all the time. Now I live in LA, the streets are usually wider and the cars tend to drive faster so I very rarely jay-walk.
Actually no, in this case it's directly measured. Quantcast only shows exact stats for sites that include their JS tracker. Sites normally do this for advertising purposes (advertisers don't have to wonder about your traffic).
try and go to the guardian when you're in prison because a guy insulted you and you'll probably be seen as a snitch for the length of your sentence. Trust me, I've seen the whole Oz series (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/)
This reminds me of the duodecimal system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc

Mathematically, 10 is a pretty arbitrary choice to base your number system on. We would have been better off learning base 12 than inventing metric.
it is like this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/12/26/what_...
>De-weighting RG is one thing, nuking it into the ground is entirely different, and is in my opinion unwarranted.
If I type "Rap Genius" into Google, I am justified in expecting Rap Genius to be the first result. Period. When Google goes out of its way to effectively expunge a site from existence (to the extent that Google can expunge a site), they are doing a massive disservice to their users and are degrading the quality of their search results.

Necessary reminder that Google does whatever the fuck they want with their service, and that no one is in a position to expect anything. Does it suck? Yes. Is it a predictable outcome of the free market on which Silicon Valley and the tech industry in General is built? You bet.
I actually think it's important to call things what they are, just as North Korea aint a democracy even though they call themselves that, this is nothing reassembling anarchist thought. By hi-jacking concepts we introduce confusion and ultimately destroy the original meaning and ideas.

I'm fairly tired of this being the case from the right, not just in america but in my country as well where the most right-wing party recently branded themselves "The new workers party".
Vivid post-mortems are valuable if they serve their purpose: Motivating action that prevents future post-mortems.

But post-mortems themselves are not valuable at all. Quite the opposite: Every post-mortem signifies that something has died. Resurrecting the dead has probably consumed a lot of time and resources that could have been better spent on something else.

An organization should never write the same post-mortem twice, and should see the rate of post-mortems diminish over time, to the point where they are incredibly rare. But that doesn't always happen.

Instead, fetishizing post-mortems can be a real problem. It is easy to accidentally build an engineering culture that glorifies firefighting. Every day an expensive team of trained technicians comes to work and dives into the usual series of daily emergencies. Each emergency winds up with a glowing after-action report that gets filed with the other reports. People compete to tell the most entertaining tales of command-line heroics in the face of hilariously broken systems. It can actually be kind of fun, like a game. Everyone feels very productive and important, because without constant vigilance the software would die dozens of times every day. And the post-mortems may be of the highest quality, because every employee has ample opportunity to practice writing them.

In such an environment it's astonishingly easy to lose the plot: It is better to be the organization whose software consistently works, and which never writes post-mortems because nothing ever dies. A boring report is a quality report!
I think you're being pedantic. To the surprise of absolutely no-one, this axiom (like all axioms) can't be applied universally.

This advice was doled out in the context of earning "respect". As such, it's more applicable when working within a persistent social construct (schoolyard, office environment, family, etc) - and not random strangers who you will likely never meet again (bike thieves, DMV clerks, magazine subscription salespeople, et al).
FIFO is typically perceived to be the case, but technically the law in many locales actually states that each driver yield to the right. The distance at which a car is to be included as “at” the intersection is a little fuzzy, so in practice it often looks like FIFO.
Would have to investigate this further. But you may be correct.

I haven't seen this one done in years.

It would have been legitimate if the user saw the same content as the crawlers, but displaying different content to SE crawlers would definitely be bad.

If confirmed, this could turn a bad situation in to a ghastly one.
Most popular with Scala projects on Github is likely only partially relevant to Scala in actual production use. Sadly we can't really know the usage outside of Github to assess how meaningful this analysis really is.
He was ticketed for starting during the flashing "Don't Walk" signal. That seems more like a yellow light to me. In other words, there's still plenty of time to cross if you're a fast walker. Don't walk too fast though, you might get a speeding ticket.
> Why should anyone use this over wikipedia?

A better comparison would be one with mainstream science journalism.
It is too bad that XDK is still on Cordova 2.9. 3.3 is out now and is a big jump from 2.x.
How is this different to http://www.3sourcing.com/ (500 Startups 007 batch) ?
>EDIT: Also interestingly, JRuby seems to be slightly better on the small instance EC2 test at techempower than regular Ruby (small instance should be similar to a laptop?). Yet in these graphs it's much slower. Anybody know the reason?

Thanks to some community experts, we're now using TorqBox (TorqueBox 3, built on Undertow [1]) for our JRuby tests. The JRuby community seems satisfied [2]. :)

[1] http://torquebox.org/news/2013/12/04/torquebox-next-generati...

[2] https://twitter.com/headius/status/413021218728443904