skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not only is this bad for RapGenius, it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users. Yes, RapGenius screwed up, and they've paid the price. But they've publicly recognized what they did and apologized. Google really should reinstate their ranking, because people searching for lyrics right now are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites from days of yore.
Hypothetical question: if we ("we" being nebulous) were to unveil that every other major lyrics site (azlyrics, metrolyrics, stlyrics, lyricsfreak, lyrics365, etc. etc.) uses the same SEO tactics, would they receive the same attention and punishment?
While I think the grandparent is focussed on a non-issue (the two phrases offered are obviously metonymic, not literal), I have to note that this is a much stronger claim than you might gather from a glib programming analogy made by an armchair philosopher. Linguistic relativity is a thing [1], but statements like this widely overstate the extent to which language molds cognition. More importantly, though, I don't think the notion is relevant to the discussion at hand. We're not talking about alternative phrasings of the same idea, but different ideas entirely: yes and no. That different ideas expressed differently carry different semantic payloads is hardly a controversial assertion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Did.....did we just suggest forcefields?
It's quite painful to watch these guys take this beating. What they've done wasn't nice, but the consequences are extreme. What is most concerning is the monopoly Google Search has over driving traffic/revenue for most sites.
SEEKING WORK - Bristol, UK / remote

Native mobile developer with iOS and Android SDKs. Experience with the standard set of libraries, especially location based and REST.

Can help with UX design too.
nathan@nathanwong.co.uk
What?

The "game" RapGenius played was the act of being evil.
One of the most effective alarm clocks is to have children. You are guaranteed to be woken up bright and early. Well early, not so sure about the bright part.

Joking apart, having children does force you into a strict daily rhythm. They respond so well to doing the same thing, at the same time, and in the same order.

I always used to have poor sleep habits. Those habits have now been beaten out of me!

My point is that having a fastidious approach to sleep, and a strict sleep pattern means that you pretty much don't need an alarm clock. My children can't tell the time yet, but their internal body clocks are pretty accurate. Slowly I'm starting to trust my own internal clock as well.
Oh please. Nobody discriminated against my degree from Kerosinka, the 5-year course of classes was admitted as equivalent of MS in Applied Math. There is discrimination, in a very certain way, against medical degrees, for a variety of reasons, some are good reasons, some not; that seems to be an exception.
First, you don't understand what censorship is.

Second, RapGenius cheated the system. They knew they were cheating the system. They violated the public guidelines that tell you not to cheat the system. And now they are paying the price.

Why is that so difficult to grasp?
when are you ever interviewing for a poker position?

I think that would be a good question though. Or even something simple like "Explain how you could set-up a polarized 3bet range".
For me it's just empty lined paper. I much prefer that to all these fancy solutions.
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Il deserto dei tartari (The Tartar Steppe) by Dino Buzzati

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Not many funded startups are dumb enough to publicly email folk asking for links in return for tweets/linkbacks. That's pure stupidity; might as well upload a video on a bad political stance with your brand overlayed, because the worms don't stay in the can with any kind of public communication. They should have been more clock-and-dagger with their scheming -- their hubris was their downfall.

Of course many spammy sites use this practice but they don't have the respect from the tech community that Rap Genius warrants as a Y-Combinator funded entity. They lost that, and it's going to be a steep climb for them to find talented folk that want to be part of a seedy operation.
i'd love to hear what it would sound like if you were in the room while this thing levitated something like a golf ball.

i bet that becomes a new form of music.
SEO is such a fickle beast.

To everyone here who's saying they brought this upon themselves, when rules are unenforced and all your competition breaks them, you've already hamstrung yourself if you don't break them too.

If everyone in the MLB is juicing and a rookie gets caught, you don't say "what an idiot", you look at either 1) enforcing the rules on everyone and broadly changing the culture or 2) question whether the rules make sense in the first place.
I can't tell now that the other one is dead, but I believe it's link was http: while this one's is https:. I use the "https everywhere" browser extension so when I copied the URL I probably got the upgraded one. I think that explains why the dup detector didn't catch it. I don't know why this story took off and the other died. Maybe the headline?
I agree with this. They should be fine once they're reinstated.
Let's consider that it might be a fair coin, or it might be a double-headed coin.

Let's also say that every time you flip the coin and it comes up tails, you win $5. And every time you flip the coin and it comes up heads, you lose $1.

Clearly, this would be a great game to have the opportunity to play, if the coin is fair. Every time you flip you either win $5 or lose $1, so your profit, on average, is $4 per flip.

You've flipped it 10 times so far, and it's come up heads every time, and you've lost $10.

After you're $10, $100, $1000, or $10e100 in the red, without ever seeing a win, when do you change your mind about playing this game?
Yes, it's still the same coin, but you don't know which coin you got. You know that you got 10 consecutive heads though. How improbable this is if you got a fair coin? How probable this is with the double-head coin? This is the data you can use to update the probability.
Bob Lutz now thinks the Chevy Volt should've been an electric truck
Hi Silvia, thank you for jumping in! Feel free to add your answers to the AMA questions. It would be helpful to have multiple perspectives.
Same here, whenever I attempt to give it another chance, sooner or later I break down and revert to hg-git. I recently discovered EasyGit [1] and it seems promising from the docs. There's also gitless [2] that was covered in HN a few days ago.

[1] https://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/

[2] http://people.csail.mit.edu/sperezde/gitless/
The factual correctness of this statement is well below its humorous content, which is shallow.
Highly relevant sources of information don't show up in the search results anyway.
Steve Job's book was very inspiring and motivational for me. The way he saw the world was very enlightening. Here's a video of what I thought was really profound for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
I agree - I've spent a lifetime trying to find the best to do solution (Microwriter Agenda, Psion 3, Palm, GTD, One Big Text File, David Seah's productivity tools, Superfocus, etc. etc.).

Paper in the form of a hardbacked A4 notepad with context specific todo lists and a 2-week calendar seem to work well (inspired by GTD (for contexts), David Seah (for his obsession with functional paper) [1])

I'm also reliant on ZIM Desktop wiki [2] for the 'trusted system' for weekly review - of course, ZIM has a weird bug somewhere in the To Do list functionality that I've had to code around - so it's (not devastatingly) not as trustworthy... but that's life I guess

Just trying out ActiveInbox [3] for managing Gmail better and seems to be working out nicely

[1] http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
[2] http://zim-wiki.org/
[3] http://www.activeinboxhq.com/index.php
That's interesting! I worked at Oncall Interactive when their clients were BSO and CSO! Did you guys work with them at all?
Wikipedia isnt gaming the system to make wikipedia relevant. Theyre not ramping up efforts to get inbound links from random blog websites. If anything this shows that RapGenius's numbers were hyper-inflated by SEO games rather than user relevance.
They're probably generated from random numbers so that they reveal no information about what they are naming.

Look up "PGP word list", for example.
I second this book: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
"This is the equivalent of censorship."

How is penalizing them for engaging in shady SEO tactics considered censorship?
I think that tech people talk about Google's power constantly.
New novel about hackers
They haven't paid the price yet. RapGenius knowingly engaged in blackhat SEO and broke the public rules. The punishment is several months in SERP Siberia. RapGenius hasn't paid that yet, but they will.
Awesome! But where to you put the wps password to connect to the AP?
> Google really should reinstate their ranking, because people searching for lyrics right now are being given the huge disservice of using the ultra-spammy lyrics sites from days of yore.

A short penalty of a few days or weeks isn't much of a deterrent. It may suck for people searching lyrics now, but making the page rank penalty effectively toothless would suck for everyone.
Empty pad -- I like it better that way. Sometimes my "TODO List" involves mockups or doodles, sometimes it involves sub-todo lists, etc. I like the flexibility.

I also only use a red pen for checking things off. Not sure why; it just feels better.
Yup - i have two files: work and personal and that's it.

Just two files forces me to prioritize within these two spheres.
what if... rapgenius is a beautiful pr stunt cooked by google to show everyone how valuable it is for websites/startups?
Yes, but those sites have more sense than to trumpet their affiliate link scams on Twitter
Yes, the full power of the internet is at your disposal. The catch is that you're limited to an hour to get it done.
A Brand Strategy for Wining Over Hearts and Wallets
What would be really cool is if this list of genres was open-sourced somewhere. I can see Netflix not wanting that, but it would really save time for however many hackers read this article and decide they want the same data.
As if Palo Alto is a perfect place, they had to use The Bronx as an example
What should Google do in this situation? I fully understand them murdering Rap Genius in their indexes, but it also hurts Google since Rap Genius actually has the best content.

First result for "jay-z holy grail lyrics"
Google: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jayz/holygrail.html
Bing: http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-holy-grail-lyrics

The Bing result is better (though both are valid).

I would suspect that most sites pulling these sort of SEO scams are going to have lousy content, so the rule makes sense, but perhaps there should be some sort of human element to it as well? That's not scalable, though, so I'm not really sure what the best answer for Google is on this one.
Do not underestimate domain age/link age in calculation of pr. Moving to a brand new domain would forfeit all of that.
I think everyone pretty much already assumes that all the other lyrics sites are as shady on their SEO as they are prolific in their on-page advertising. RapGenius was kinda held to a higher bar.
Maybe name and domain change?
How to Get the Work You Want
I think they got punished for playing the game worse than anyone else.

Blackhat SEO out in the open is not a good game.
> Rapgenius got punished for playing the game better than anyone else.

I'm sorry, what? Didn't they lose the game?
I find the part at the end about the Perry Mason aspect very interesting, and actually my favourite part of the article.

And the final sentence, feels like the real reason this was posted to HN: "And sometimes we call that a bug and sometimes we call it a feature."

Edit: Also, the 'Gonzo' genre of Post-Apocalyptic Comedies and Friendship seems it's got its first one in "This Is The End".
the act of being evil.

Let's get some perspective here. They were offering to promote people's pages in return for them linking back to them. Far from being evil, this isn't even illegal.
They are the sleeze of the startup world, why is it so painful to watch?

I'll leave you this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

"Homie-source" "baller-source"

Yep, let em' burn.
Luckily their revenue has remained unchanged... $0. This could have been a financial disaster if Rap Genius was a real business, but you need to have revenue for that.
I've missed some news lately with Christmas and all. Any context on this?
Not to mention all inbound links.
Bitbucket is nice. I use bitbucket for all of my private git repos, while using github for all of my public repos (and three or four private repos).

Bitbucket provides a good service.
Just noticed you guys did code audits and CMS upgrades!
That puts them at PR0, too.
Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall
For Harmony And Strength by Thomas Rohlen
I was really into this back in high school but never got proficient in it. The concept is simple to understand but actually executing it takes a LOT of practice. Raking can open a lot of older locks pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean you're skilled.

Also, just owning the tools is illegal in some states.
The hell-banning will probably only be temporary (30 to 60 days).

And RG didn't just "screw up" by trying to game the system; they were blatantly cocky about it, so that's probably why Google felt they needed to step in and teach them a thing or two. Let's hope the lesson sticks, at least.
What you describe can easily be solved with Google Fusion Tables and a tiny script in your favorite server-side language.
I wonder if you can feel the waves with your hand. Presumably you can - anyone have any idea what that feels like?
Still taught in montessori schools as a tool for the development of fine motor control. Education in Montessori is literally hands-on for everything, as they feel the hand is the instrument of human intelligence. So for them it's like practicing a musical instrument or learning to draw.

But it appears also that kids who were taught cursive express more complex ideas in their writing later on - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/what...
No (though I'd suggest less atypical than you might think), but that's the point.

If you're looking to model migration patterns and you have a data gathering system that biases your data to capture a bimodal migration pattern - childhood in one location, adulthood in another - then I might suggest that you'll disproportionately find the data you were apparently expecting which fits that pattern.
In addition, they had no furtiveness; it appeared they thought this was something that required no concealment. I'm guessing they don't have a media relations employee, because any decent quality control would have said direct emails from @rapgenius to random folk about a seedy scheme aren't the best idea. At least a proxy should have been used..

Their emails were wanton risk, the wording had no stealth; they got what they deserved.
They weren't 'playing the game better,' they were cheating. It wouldn't ever happen to Wikipedia and you know that the comparison is absurd.

It isn't the equivalent of censorship, it's rewarding the good behavior of the competition.
Apart from resizing/moving windows, one feature I miss dearly from my Linux desktop is the ability to move windows from one desktop to the other. I use keyboard maestro to resize windows, and the developer mentions somewhere in his website that there's no way to move windows from one desktop to the other with OS X. Does anybody know if that's the case?
Of his work, I think the The Last Question has stuck with me the most http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
When I google "eminem lyrics" they don't show up in the results. Fine, whatever, seo penalty.

When I google "rapgenius eminem" they don't appear in the results. That's pretty close to censorship.

I'm not necessarily against it, but I don't disagree with the usage of the term.
> Raking can open a lot of older locks pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean you're skilled.

I disagree. Raking has opened a lot (most I've tried) of locks in my experience. So, I'd say I'm pretty skilled at picking locks.
From what I can tell from the text of the article, what happened was 2014 AA impacted the atmosphere and burned up on entry, but did not hit land or water.

I bring this up because from what I can gather "impact" to astronomers means "hits the atmosphere" while "impact" to a lay person means "hits ground or water".
Guide To Litecoin Mining With Nvidia Graphics Cards
>it's bad for Google, and most importantly bad for Google's users

BS.

What's good for Google is showing people that if you engage in bad practices your shit will get nuked from orbit, even if your site is better than the competitors.

You'd better believe that companies are going to avoid blackhat SEO in the future after this, and that's absolutely in Google's interests.
Many people would kill to have a site with millions and millions of uniques. If monetization HAD to be the primary focus, they could make money. Growth and product is the top priority. Unfortunately for them one of those is suffering right now.
They most certainly do in the vast majority of my searches.
The "public" has no problems with Jews, for the most part. These days, being Jewish in Russia is mostly not a problem, even on the contrary. Things may change very quickly, though.
I've not really tried it much in that position.
Similarities between the Learn to Code Movement and Online Poker
Hi Zikes, author here: This is the best to-do list for me —given my current workflow. I'm in front of my browser with GitHub open 90% of the day and this option fits nicely with my day-to-day activities.

That being said, I definitely think that the best to-do list depends on each person's workflow (the gist approach would be terrible for a real estate person that's always on the run, for example).

Do you use http://todotxt.com/? I hadn't heard of it before, maybe it's worth giving it a shot :)
Why "Save To Pocket | Add To Buffer" Should Disappear
I expect them to go back to right where they were once their penalty is lifted. Assuming most of their visits were google searchers clicking on the top link, nearly all of those visits/day will come back once they're the top link again. Remember that a huge majority of people have not heard about this controversy. The hacker news sort of community is not their primary audience.

It's possible they'll be bigger, what with all the free (though bad) press they've gotten.
And the point is to appeal to multiple customer segments. You can always offer custom plans over the phone and advertise that option alongside the more affordable plans you display on your page.
damn, they got CUTT
Someone should just do blackhat SEO for a bunch of those sites, and then Google would have to punish them too (because who could proove that they didn't do it themselves?)

Or taking it one step further, use these tactics to promote a controversial institution or politician (without them knowing). Then "leak" it to Google, so they get punished. Then claim Google is censoring them. Finally enjoy the outrage :-)
They aren't above any other good site "just trying to get traffic" and not be "trampled by blackhat seos" and should face the same penalty.

I applaud Google for this, and that's the first time I've applauded Google in a while!
A friend of mine ran a long tail content generation service, much like HitTail, and recently had all his clients penalized regardless of the quality of the content they wrote for those long tail keywords.

Apparently they already anticipated something like this because several other companies were being manually penalized over the past year and half following an algorithm that seemed like: "Which big AdWords spenders cut down significantly on their budget? Are they getting it organically now? Let's cut that off."

Several of those companies are suing Google for violating EU regulations, so hopefully something will come out of that.

The first step will probably be that penalizations can be fought through the EU judicial system, but it will be a while before we get jurisprudence on that.

I don't know how this would work in the US legal system but, regardless of what the outcome would be in Rap Genius' case, it's probably time for similar jurisprudence to be established in the US.
> help for some of the current Emacs developers to publish a "How to start hacking Emacs" documen

1. Find thing you don't like
2. M-x find-function RET function-to-fix RET
3. Hack hack hack (use C-M-x or M-x eval-buffer liberally; also, read about edebug)
4. Make diff relative to Emacs base code
5. Send diff to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org

What I love about hacking on Emacs is that it's so easy to find the bit of code responsible for a given feature and hack on that code in a running editor. There's nothing like it. If I'm using Firefox and don't like the address bar, I need to go dig through XUL, find the thing I don't like, and restart Firefox. Emacs? You just find the function and edit it right in the editor.
I tend to feel like they wouldn't. Maybe RapGenuis's more refined image and branding yields a harsher judgment in this case as they probably perform well in many other aspects of SEO.

The link selling, not the meta data of their pages, was what caused this. It's likely that these other lyric sites do these sorts of arrangements in a less public way, whereas RapGenuis was using Twitter, of all places, to sell links.
Because, it is not really their land. If they are paying property taxes to anyone, or other taxes based on it, or rent , it is not theirs. The hammer that I bought at Home Depot is mine. Nobody can come and take my hammer away after I paid money for it.

Nevada has tried allodial titles but they are largely a sham you basically pay your property taxes ahead, and yes, you can win if you start developing the land quickly, and then don't get into an accident and die somehow.

Basically, the land belongs to those who have the military power to defend it from others who might come and take it. Then that owner leases /doles/rents/sets-up-a-title-system+tax to whoever it wants. This is not different from the Medieval times. It is just wrapped in nice (or not so nice) laws and terms and so on, but at the bottom it is what it always was.

So in some state or countries, government can and will take your land away. Sometimes it will let other come and extract natural resources from it. In some places it will take it and give it to bigger companies to build malls or factories.

> to make this guy's job easier?

The road is not built for this guy to use, it is built for everyone else to use. One can turn that question on its head and say why can't all the citizens drive in a nice straight direct way saving time, gas, money because someone's farm is in the way? Talk about a sense of entitlement...
I only partially agree with you. Xenophobia is everywhere and in every country of the world, but racism and antisemitism, which are not really based on ethnicity or national identity, seem to be a particularly European disease.
> Unless you claim that the officials of MGU went great lengths to keep young Edward Frenkel out of the university for some other reason than his Jewish surname

That is exactly what I am saying. Examiners could got orders to fail him, if for example his uncle lived on west. Officially there was no discrimination, so it was mostly done by bulling people at exams.

White (perhaps even heterosexual male) has statistically lower chances to study for free. It fits definition of discrimination as a glove.
IOS 8 Concept for Split Screen Multitasking