skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No - SEO is not a game to play in grey area, its a risk that they took by depending upon SERP for their source of traffic.
I joined last March when you first announced it .. and I have hung in there hoping that things would get 'better' than my first impression, which can be summed up thus: "hope you get better games".

So .. my question is .. what do you think you might do in order to increase the quality of the games you are offering? A lot of the games don't .. well .. appeal .. on initial inspection. But I hope that changes.
Born in the 1980s, not sure if that makes me a millenial.

The sentiment is incomplete. Privacy exists, but private from whom? The younger generations still have a reasonable expectation of privacy against their parents. But probably much less of one against Facebook, Google, or the government.

Public by default also doesn't imply a total lack of privacy. Younger people overshare all the time on social networks, but there's still an (unreasonable) expectation that these things are quasi-private. Think of it as talking loudly in a mall with your friends. Yes, anyone can overhear. But no one actually expects anyone to care or pay attention to your conversation.

EDIT: Should also point out that millenials and other generations are not homogeneous groups. I imagine that white upper middle-class Christians would likely have different expectations of privacy in America than someone who is black, poor, and Muslim.
You would think Google would be able to tell that a Justin Bieber link does not belong on an arbitrary twitter post
I think you're mistaken. Tax evasion is rampant because enforcement is hard. Salaried people are taxed at source, so there isn't too much evasion there. Similarly your big retail chains don't evade VAT because they're easy pickings for the tax authorities. Non-salaried people, small-time business persons etc. evade tax because there isn't really a paper trail of their earnings, and also because complying with tax laws is a massive pain in terms of effort and bookkeeping. In the rural areas, nobody even bothers because it's simply not worth the effort.

> To which I say, perhaps the main reason for rampant scams and bribery is that taxes are evaded and these public employees are paid poorly.

Not really. India is a poor country and public employees are paid well-above the median income. Even the lowest level of public employees - sweepers, janitors and the like make more than 2.5X the median income. [1] And bureaucrats who are worth bribing get well more than that. Corruption in India and most other developing countries is a prisoner's dilemma type of situation. Each individual benefits from being corrupt and there is significant improvement in quality of life if you earn $1200 a month instead of $900 month. So they choose to be corrupt and this is more or less a rational decision. It isn't an easy problem to solve, especially in the current world order with restrictive immigration practices.

[1] http://latestjobsingovt.com/freshers/peon-watchmensweeper-jo...
So it's ok to copy and resell books without compensating the author?
And it's good to remind again.
Israel Lobby in the U.S. is suppressing a report on 9/11 role
About 8 months ago, I blogged about http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/analytics/oss using hadoop and R for open source data science. I found R to be very useful, especially if you want to graph large data sets.

Since then, I have been playing with clojure with regards to data science. What I liked about clojure was that the programs looked more like transforming data sets with map, reduce, into, filter, merge-with, join, difference, union. You get more than just lists. You have maps, vectors, and sets too. The code looks like you are loading a lot of data into memory but with lazy sequences you are really processing these collections one element at a time. The so called threading macros (nothing to do with multi-threading) keeps the number of parenthesis down.
I agree that the quality of the displayed code is poor (let's hope they will refactor it before releasing in January) but I think the important thing in Nxt is the concept. One of the innovations It does is solving the "51% attack vector" of Bitcoin (and derivatives): you can not break the system by having the 51% of mining power. But if I understand correctly you can break it by having 51% of all coins.
I definitely agree. You need to treat Google SEO like any other platform that you build on. I'm curious to see if their negotiation on a resolution is met with deaf ears by the Google team. Google wins everything, and I hope they keep the penalty, even attacking the rest of the lyric ecosystem.

Need to protect the user by ensuring fairness, IMHO.
My bigger issue is with the fact that they're able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and team while thousands of other sites don't have that bargaining power. Started a discussion on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964169
This post is awesome and correctly describes that frameworks try to teach you certain methodologies by enforcing them. Once you understand the principles, you're often better of ditching the framework.

This is especially true with DI, which is a design principle and not a framework, countrary to popular belief.

I would also like to add that specific technologies such as xml are not inherently declarative. If some api or config is declarative it only means that it is well designed and that it's easy to express your intentions when using it. If you want counter-examples, look at imperative ant or declarative jmock.
Snowden is so smart: He knows how to avoid media oversaturation.

I bet every year now he'll put out nothing more than a couple 2 minute videos, and give one major nytimes interview.

In this way, every word that he says will get a helluva lot of attention... even a decade from now.
Their recommendation isn't going to work for me at work. They actively block Google Drive/Dropbox/Skydrive/etc.
That entire conversation is just surreal!
Why do you need to adjust the beam? Once it is right, its right.
That's a great marketing strategy. They don't lose any money because the game is developed in house and in return they get an influx in traffic on a day when a lot of people just received a lot of money as a gift. Well played Valve.
searching 2pac lyrics rap genius yields no rapgenius.com either. it shows all the competitor lyric sites but not rapgenius.

I have mixed feelings about this. How long until we see a game of he-said-she-said? Of course, socially engineered link building aimed at gaming the SERP is against the interest of consumers and google. However, now that we can see a competitor get taken out from google SERP by pointing their attention to a malicious technique, we should see more stories like this.

The problem I have with SERP is that while it's good at finding the most relevant site (still returns spammy sites so not perfect) most of the time, it's built around the advertisement model. It doesn't give you a snapshot of the cross section of the data you are looking at across all the domains out there so that you can't choose on your own which lyric is the most to your liking (it really doesn't matter because lyrics are same across different websites). So the question of who ranks first even though they have identical content shows some underlying inefficiencies caused by the Advertisement revenue model. The more there is, the more advertisement gets seen and clicked.

I feel that the search engine space with selling our attention to advertisements only creates more waste by others trying to get a share of the revenue by jumping into a profitable niche by creating an identical or similar content (article spinning etc). In turn, more competition would create people to use more Adwords or other advertising platforms. The end result is that consumer ends up with untrustworthy websites with content in the back of their priorities. Content should be judged by comparing it with other websites that offer the same content with an overview listing all the different domains showing that content. While displaying such cross domain contents, it should not bring advertisement as an incentive model.
the rankings will be restored. rich, successful ppl always get their way
I mostly agreed with you until "without regard for quality or functionality." Either way, apps are extremely inexpensive for the effort put into them compared to say, a cup of coffee. There are also a lot of free or ad-supported apps, which means that price is likely not the main differentiator between two apps. And if that's true, then what else can you use to evaluate an app but its usability?

Do you yourself value cheap and "disposable" apps more than well-crafted ones?
Looks like you can break it by changing your system clock too.
You should try Bing for lyrics search. I've already made it the default engine on my phone.
would cripple the South Korean economy for two generations.

Firstly, that is a nonsensical figure. On what basis do you make a prediction that Korea would take two generations to recover from unification? It has been split up for only slightly longer than that and if you look to history, entire empires have come and gone in the timespan of two generations. Also, it just sounds like more of the same that was said by people about the reunification of Germany.
Seems toxic to lay such claims without getting to know someone personally. Have they done you wrong?

Perhaps you are uninterested in rap music, perhaps you believe in staunch professionalism, but at least have respect for an individual's choice to live to their life as they please. Success isn't truly success unless you do it while being yourself.

There is a reason you don't have the power to ban them for a year. Rap Genius was built with love - a reflection of the founders - and is a vastly superior product. If you had ever used it, you would clearly see that. You are blinded by hate my friend.
That assumes the Steam Store is up and running accepting orders. But since it's down due to the amount of traffic caused by this promotion, they're losing quite a bit of money right now.
I felt that too. I doubt that the NSA have a tap in place between the two halves of my brain. Until that happens I can have private thoughts.

I was hoping for a little bit more. Certainly he could have said more. By being overly concise he overstated things, this was not good.

I know he does not think he 'matters' (it is the story that 'matters'), however, it would have been good to hear from him how well things are going and how he is going to spend time this Christmas (presumably not at his mum and dad's place).
Christmas message from Edward Snowden
I intellectually border on atheism, but also acknowledge we do not know everything. Additionally from my life's experiences and "heart" and "spiritual" yearnings I live theistically.

The tensions of my belief rest in good company with the paradoxes of the Christian message. I am glad for the community and mystery this faith has enriched my life with.

Oh I love Christmas. Merry Christmas.
I know he has very few places to run to, but putting out a message about the dangerous overreach of state surveillance as he sits in Russia takes away some of the gusto for me.
Oh wow, I actually ran into this recently, I couldn't figure out what to search for to fix it though. Nice to see that it's built in now.

(It was for a tiny weekend project where I was reading logs from the ZNC IRC bouncer to present a nice web UI for them, for some reason sometimes there were invalid characters and I didn't really understand why - possible that I was just reading them with the wrong input encoding but I think I tried a few different ones.)
First up, Congrats. I've tried the app in a weekend thing myself, but never had enough motivation to pull through to the end. Shipping is hard!

As an iOS developer, doing this in a couple of hours is a bit crazy. It'd probably take me a day - day and a half to do.
I didn't see anyone ask. Does "mission accomplished" mean no more leaks from the Snowden pool?

What was the last leak, then, RSA security?

"By the way, RSA sucks! Mission accomplished."
Excellent comment.

For reference, dvanduzer is most likely referring to this blog post and the exchange that took place in the comments: http://dankaminsky.com/2011/01/13/spelunk-tri/

First, let me answer your question, "Does Namecoin square Zooko's Triangle?"

Yes, I believe it does. Whether or not Namecoin works depends on whether or not Bitcoin works. They are the same exact technology (they're just used for different purposes).

From what I could tell of Dan Kaminsky's comments, I believe his arguments boil down to the well known 51% attack. Two things of note here:

1. See Dan's 2013 post on businessinsider where he appears to be retracting his words: "I Tried Hacking Bitcoin And I Failed" http://www.businessinsider.com/dan-kaminsky-highlights-flaws...

2. The 51% attack is still a real threat. The Bitcoin community is on it:

Proof of blockchain fair sharing is a draft Bitcoin protocol change
proposal by Iain Stewart, with the goal of allowing the network to
continue to settle on a sensible consensus blockchain even when
subject to a considerably- greater-than-50% attack.

The protocol is under construction. The following description is a
"teaser", establishing its basic flavour and sketching how it exploits
an asymmetry in the goals of the honest (<50%) and malicious (>50%)
miners to avoid the usual reductio ad absurdum argument against any
protocol surviving a >50% attack.

From: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_blockchain_fair_sharing

Re: "I'd suggest rewriting this paper and removing all the political justification for why one might want such a system. Everyone gets that, but not everyone wants a system like this for the same reasons anyway."

Given the well popularized "debate" on this topic, I think it's quite clear that everyone does not get that.

it doesn't add much to the system.

It adds:

- The ability for JS apps to talk to and retrieve info from the blockchain without a browser extension (this wasn't possible before. It's a significant thing IMO).

- A new meta-domain (.nmc) and corresponding RESTful API for manipulating the blockchain

- DNSNMC may also support DNSCrypt (so that adds secure queries too).

- A gateway for browsers and other software to verify SSL certs without having to run a local namecoind client. (Which means you don't need to pay for them anymore!)

Probably other useful stuff I'm forgetting at the moment. Perhaps others might chime in. Oh, see also related topic: "Transitioning the web to Namecoin by addressing squatters" https://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1439
Mixpanel isn't completely dependent on SERPs. It is a different user acquisition/awareness tactic.

Also, illegal isn't really the right term to use here.
So....is it still oil? What is the molecular difference between bio-fuel and regular ol' jet fuel? What is the difference after it is burned? Seems ridiculously cool.
Groovy? Another reason not to use Spring.
Thanks! I looooved Total Annihilation, I'd love to play some more!
Buying an iBeacon: Guide to Bluetooth LE Devices
Judging from the code the devs seem to not understand the ideas of object oriented programming, which makes me hesitant to believe they know anything about the more difficult issues of cryptography or byzantine agreement. I feel bad for anyone uninformed enough to invest in this scam - but like most altcoins, its just another case of the blind leading the blind.
We’ll finally see that the Fed has done nothing to help Main Street
Because Linux is stil crap, Windows 8 became crap, and NSA backdors were found!
LOL - can't believe this got down voted.

Note to self: add the <sarcasm> tag next time :).

Happy present day guys :) ...
10 awesome tools a happy startup shouldn't live without
Post by Laurence McCahill: 10 awesome tools a happy startup shouldn’t live without http://happystartups.quora.com/10-awesome-tools-a-happy-startup-shouldn’t-live-without?srid=iYZV&share=1
Ahh... Thank you for the clarification. :)
I really don't have an answer. I just need to convince some of the more well known developers to upload their games. I need to try hard sell them on uploading, tell them it costs nothing and will take very little time.

More well known developers are uploading their games over time though, I think more people are starting to discover the utility of the site. Recently got two games from Vlambeer:

http://vlambeer.itch.io/gun-godz
http://vlambeer.itch.io/wasteland-kings

So I guess the real answer is time. I need to prove the platform isn't going anywhere and that it has the features that are truly indie friendly.
Their announcement said you have to install it. I wonder if that has anything to do with their servers being overloaded at the moment. It's a sizable download.
I agree, if they give rapgenius leniency it would mean a double standard exists at Google regarding their core product that we have come to trust. Already duckduckgo is gaining more popularity because some of the trust regarding our privacy has really gone down for a good reason (Snowden).
It's worth noting that this was broadcast at the same time as the traditional Christmas day speech pre-recorded and delivered by the Queen. Channel 4 has a history of doing things a little differently, and this certainly piqued my interests today.
What happens when you use a different bit length with that drill? Or multiple people share a bike? Or you want to move that light to a different frame and you need the magnet at a different angle?
Why I've Dropped Chrome to Develop in Safari 6 | The Phuse
Do I need to explain how a publicly traded company is still private, or are you just being purposely obtuse?
Why do you think they negotiated at all?
Ask HN: Best Christmas Gift?
What was the best gift you gave or received this holiday?
Do you think DuckDuckGo can play the long game though? #GoogleWinsEverything
> Are you telling me if you run a business you would never this kind of mistake?

It's not that hard to, you know, not spam.
That was true until about 5.12. Since 2011, Perl's been much more aggressive about fixing warts and breaking backwards compatibility in intelligent ways (where it's getting in the way of something better or actively harmful).
The NSA is already getting into our brains via self-censoring, which has seen a dramatic rise in the last few years as reported by journalists and others.
My favorite and least favorite office environments were both open plan, it's all about how tightly you're packed in together, and whether there are side offices for private conversations or phone calls.
See the CPAN module Moops.
I'm not worried about new content. Steam Workshop makes that a non-issue.

But there can definitely be some work done on netcode and various gameplay glitchy issues.
Anon_Operation tweeting again 3 years after account suspension
> The enum is a bad abstraction because when I play GoFish, the computer asks, "Do you have any 13's?" and when I ask, "Do you have any Jacks?", I am always told to GoFish.

What? No it doesn't. Scala case objects don't have numerical values.
And where does your particular choice of freedom stop, and oppression begin? Will you let me be free to come over and take all your belonging? Or do you simply draw your freedom line in a very, very slightly different place?
Well why do they that do that?

It's like complaining that Amazon can't deliver to you because you don't allow FedEx in your building.
A gem to update lyrics on iTunes from command line
no kidding..it helped make me richer in terms of rising stock prices, web 2.0 valuations, and real estate but didn't help mainstreet because it was never intended to. fighting unemployment is the excuse the fed uses to sell the program and the media buys it.
I agree... to an extent. But does blacklisting them help get more relevant search results?

Seems like the best scenario would be ignoring the extra links... My point is that, yes, Rap Genius did something wrong. But a punishment like this is equally as wrong- And it's Google showing the world that they run like a bureaucracy not a "start-up"* which I feel is how they portray themselves.

*I obviously KNOW Google's not a start-up, but i'm saying the pretend/try act like one. Ex: Should be caring more about accurate/relevant Search results for lyrics rather than if some tech start-up gamed their system. If they want to crack down on shady SEO tactics there are plenty of other places to start that result in LESS relevant results.
FWIW as a big scala fan I've given up on akka actors, until they manage to make typed ones that work (the current ones rely on an experimental reflection library that has threading bugs). The biggest advantage of Scala is type safety; if I wanted an unsafe language with actors I'd use Erlang.
When I used a bicycle I would often change the position depending on the road type. If in a city the beam would be directed down with a larger angle to prevent from blinding the other drivers and pedestrians, as the road itself is lit and the light is used merely to bring attention to yourself. Also the angle varies regarding to driving speed and type of ground surface(gravel, asphalt ) when on unlit roads.
> ...by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet.

How is that different from paying bloggers to write a product review with a link to a product? Why is not that considered a "manipulation of SERPs" - you exchange (money/tweet) for a link.
Why Brazil? Because of the climate? If this becomes financially viable for the farmers there, won't they burn down even more of the rain forest just to grow these?
No, the queen's speech was broadcast at 3pm (BBC1, ITV). Channel 4's alternative message was at 4.15pm. They have broadcast alternate messages at the same time before, like when the Simpsons did it - just not this year.
I can't believe someone really does this! It's good to learn other tools but I really doubt if you can do everything you can do in Chrome Dev Tools in Safari dev tools.
L4D3 is already in development. Based on how long the second game took to make, 2014 seems realistic.
Pretty sure Left 4 Dead 2 is the next free-to-play for Valve and this is an initial test. They are probably adding items and upgrades soon, but they do it very tastefully like in TF2 and CS.

They probably have a growth curve that starts initially as a pay game, then on taper, open it up, then add in items/content and the markets. Very smart and they have done them one at a time. The markets and goods actually make the game fun to go back to and don't bend game balancing too much, but add a layer of fun. They are pretty much the model for good in-app purchases on desktop.
To put it another way, for me, I am way less happy making $75K than I am now. That's even considering I have to do more to get the extra income.

The way I read the original article is that most people pursue things like luxury goods, houses, and cars which don't increase your happiness. If you keep your standard of living low, but income high, you can do more traveling, use the money to spend time on your hobbies or with your family.
Netflix open sources its data traffic cop, Suro
Go incognito if the Economist says you're over your article limit (or delete the relevant cookies).
Israel-Japan
Israel and Japan share their secret?
True. You can never say for sure if your kids have privacy or not. Most kids these days don't have any notion of what privacy is, given the kind of content they are sharing on Facebook and other social networking websites.
Rag adjust
Hardcore programmers don't bother with commenting.

Quoting the NXT developer.
Google is seriously doing a disservice to its lyrics searching users by penalizing RG. RG offers (in my opinion) the best quality and the most information rich lyrics pages on the web, it doesn't compare to anything out there.
Bit gold (2005)
Edward Snowden Warns Of Loss Of Privacy In Christmas Message
Ask HN: What problem triggered this?