skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the first hearing, Sen. Whitehouse [0] (D-RI) told reformers that we should be careful. He congratulated us for getting a bill through the House in this session where that house of Congress seems to determined to be uncooperative. He warned us not to get stuck in the Senate when we've made it so far even if we have to compromise; we can always try to get ground back in conference.

The strategy for trolls looks to be attacking loser-pays. Democrats want vulnerable innocents to be protected by the legal system. Most federal civil lawsuits that don't involve two giant businesses are by individuals against powerful companies. Democrats don't want to reduce the chances to individuals.

But patent cases are mostly by giant powerful trolls and scam litigation shops against small businesses. Trial lawyers who run Democratic policy don't think that's important enough to allow the thin edge of the wedge to get started.

If the Senate changes hands in 2014, that might make it easier to get this bill through. It will make it harder to get good Supreme Court justices, though. Last time there was a business method patent case, four of five wingnut Republican-nominated justices wanted to hamstring businesses with software and business method patents with almost no limits while four Democrat-appointed justices wanted to protect business methods from patenting entirely.

[0] They say every senator sees himself as a future president; how much worse must it be if your actual name is Whitehouse?
This alone doesn't mean there is no problem here. A spammer has power, or at least perception thereof, to lower legit site's ranking? Not nice.
They're not talking to you about link spamming.
Honestly, the safety argument looks pretty moot to me - monorails don't derail either. For the noise, that's cool, but I'm under the impression that a high speed maglev will be quite noisy too.
My solution has been to recommend friend and family to switch to http://DuckDuckGo.com (or just http://ddg.gg)

This may seem to be an impossible task, but in days not too long ago people switched search providers often. I went from the curated links of Yahoo, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Webcrawler, to Google, and now DDG.

Google got a lot of mileage out of my in my mind with their motto "Don't be Evil", because I had some trust for them. I don't trust them anymore, and I regularly explain to others why they should no longer trust them either.
As someone who really enjoys cycling I have been surprised at how bad mapping and routing applications are, google maps have large portions of the world that are unavailable offline, its impossible (or hard to find out how_ to save routes offline, regularly sends me down dual carriageways and motorways. Open cycle routes loses your position every time you rotate the device and generally lacks quality.

Am I missing something? with the amount of effort gone into OSM I dont really understand why there isnt a top quality app to display and use all that data.
>> webmasters are going out of their way to control the flow of page rank from their site to other sites.

I agree with 90% of this piece. But this particular comment isn't new. Webmasters have been looking to control flow of PageRank since they learned what it was.
When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught.

This still seems to be missing the point.

As I understand it, sites that are not doing anything in the realm of SEO can get penalized because of the actions of people outside of their control.

If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?
What did humans do before large numbers of carbs were widely available? Die of kidney stones? Or perhaps this is because modern people have become accustomed to them being available?
Indeed! pysonar2 uses them with success.
Consider the argument the author is making, rather than addressing his person. The argument is:

The tail named Google is wagging the dog named Internet by sending thousands of web masters on a wild goose chase of policing sites outside their direct control, essentially the entire internet. It's a giant waste of human capital, and it only exists due to Google's dominant market position and their willingness to solve problems of their search algorithm at the expense of the third parties.
https://startpage.com and https://ixquick.com are the alternatives I use.

The former only proxies queries from Google, whereas the latter works on multiple engines.
I recommend you read up on a bit and give it a try, in my experience once you get past the first few days it is MUCH easier than you would think. Also, I believe participating (or at least lurking) in a community, looking at progress pictures (and reading the stories behind them) provides a much needed psychological base to stand on for this task - as you've noted, you personally seem to have strong psychological hurdles.
http://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/types.html?q=typed#%28p...

Right, looks very similar.
Matt, what's to stop people creating a website (or multiple websites) filled with spammy links pointing to their competitors websites, thereby reducing the weighting of a competitor in Google's pagerank algorithm. Is there protection against that sort of activity?
One thing no one has really mentioned yet, which I will throw out as a major positive impact from CrossFit, is that it's often a member's first exposure to more paleo styles of diet. I've personally found that to be hugely beneficial in reorienting my attitudes toward fat and meat, which are still unfortunately (and baselessly) viewed as dangerous in both pop culture and mainstream diet orthodoxy.
Vim Faq
I think another problem is that a lot of the examples you are mentioning here are already prepared. I know not everybody has time to create home cooked every day, but it can make a big difference and even things like french fries can be prepared with comparatively few calories (in the oven, just lightly coated with oil).

I agree that 1500 calories are hard to stick to though, I did this for a while and lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time (19 pounds in 3 months). Once the initial, rapid weight loss was over, it felt like too much of a sacrifice for very little gain. Unfortunately that let me abandoning calorie counting altogether and putting some of the weight back on.

Now I'm on a 1800 calorie limit per day and find it perfectly manageable. I often even have 100-200 calories left at the end of a day for a snack. Around 500 calories for breakfast, 600-700 for lunch (which fell often like copious amounts of food. A bowl of pasta with marinara sauce and cheese or such) and another 400-500 for dinner, which leaves just enough room for snacks. I also make a point of eating dinner fairly early, about 12 hours before I'll have breakfast.

What I'm trying to get at is that if you eat the right food (and ideally prepare it yourself) 2000 calories (which should still lead to a significant weight loss) can go a long way without leaving you hungry at the end of the day.
>ForHackernews, we say in our quality guidelines to "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines."

The problem with that is that it's not true (in my admittedly very limited experience). I used to believe that until I created a small website and found it wasn't getting listed in Google and I had to try and guess why and carefully read the rules.

Making pages primarily for users means you unthinkingly do things like having duplicate content on multiple pages/subdomains/sites or linking to a site that reviewed your product after you gave them a free sample (a paid link).

I'm sure to any even vaguely experienced webdev they know not to do these kinds of things (use canonical links, nofollow and all that jazz). Somebody just throwing a few pages together who has no experience in this stuff easily falls foul of the rules. The rules may seem obvious to people who understand how search engines work. If you have never heard of pagerank and don't have an understanding of how search engines work and how people try to game and spam search engines, the rules are not obvious at all and certainly the rules are not the same as the natural behaviour of somebody creating a legitimate site with the users in mind.
This is going to take a while.
Has anyone been able to find a link to the original paper? The link on The Verge is broken, and I couldn't quite find it with a quick google search.
It's not a huge surprise that some sites which went way too far spamming for links will sometimes go overboard when it's necessary to clean the spammy links up.

The main thing I'd recommend for a site owner who gets a fairly large number of link removal requests is to ask "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close.

But if the links actually look organic to you or you're confident that your site is high-quality or doesn't have those sorts of loopholes, you can safely ignore these requests unless you're feeling helpful.
Someone who didn't know about the Link Disavow Tool decided on their own to email him about taking the link down.

FTFA:

"In short, the email was a request to remove links from our site to their site. We linked to this company on our own accord, with no prior solicitation, because we felt it would be useful to our site visitors, which is generally why people link to things on the Internet."

"Apparently Google convinced them, via their Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked 'unnatural', and that they should use the Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link. Furthermore, they thought it necessary to contact us to manually remove the link, which is something I’m not going to do (out of principle)."
I can't tell if this is a serious new thing or if it's really intended to mock the "verifiably (pseudo)random" terminology, or both.
A lot of people have had success losing weight by going with a very simple diet that is nutrient replete. The low carb thing really is BS. Sugary fruit is fine nutrition.

It's really not hard to get complete nutrition from well chosen foods like fruit and dairy. Here's 20 bananas and four pints of 1% milk, totally nutrient replete: http://imgur.com/a/X6F6j
You could eat this every day for weeks and have no problems. If you're fat you'd almost certainly lose weight and maintain muscle.
I grew up speaking Albanian, and I find it pretty useless in any of the surrounding countries (aside from Kosovo, of course).

It's a fun language to know though!
You can do all of those now, even with only an hour a day; I do.
and, if they're abusing the DMCA like others have said, you're giving in to FUD, which is exactly what they want.
What India needs from Modi?
Politics
I'm sorry but "predictable results in communication" is not the criterion for being meaningful. If you fart in a courtroom, you get very predictable results, too. The phrase isn't 'real' just because some people use it. People use "God" quite a lot, and that doesn't make it a meaningful concept.

(why do I feel I just unleashed an unholy flame war from hell with that last analogy?)
tl;dr: these are a joke on the NIST curves and the "verifiably random" way in which they were defined. While being safe curves, they've been tweaked to include the hex string "BADA55" in the "verifiably random" B constant derived using B=SHA3(seed). This demonstrates how other curve parameters could've been tweaked (by, say, the NSA) even in a "verifiably random" standard like the NIST curves.

At the same time these could conceivably serve as drop-in replacements for the NIST curves, but then people would have to recognize that djb is a BADA55.
agreed, matt is talking in generalities at this point
The godfather of wearables
Out of curiosity: How many calories per day are you aiming for and how did you come up with that number?

I'm currently going for 1800 calories and after losing a decent amount of weight initially, I feel I'm making fairly little progress (to be expected). It seems to me that I actually lose more weight when I go a bit over the limit, which leads me to believe I might be eating so little that my metabolism slows down.
I have a PhD in Neuroscience and left the "postdoc treadmill" to be a software engineer. So far I am very happy with my decision and wish I would have read this article before getting my PhD. It's 100% accurate, and everyone in the biological sciences knows it.
Now if only they'd put terrain mode back.
A spammy link is a link created on behalf of the target site.

In this case the author says he created the link independently, because he thought it would be useful to his users. That's, by definition, a genuine, organic link.

I wonder if a link flagged by the disavow tool and confirmed by the user weaken the Google juice of the source site.

@MattCutts (or another Googler), is it the case?
It seems like quite a few people who are used to dynamic languages have found out that static typing and verbosity aren't strictly synonyms by using Go.
Duckduckgo crawls a fraction of the web that Google does. Would you like a Tomato or a Cherry Tomato?
It's accessible if you put 'terrain' in the search box (and I see a text button for it).

I couldn't get it to work together with a bike route.
In a complex app, there are many code paths that are executed by users that are easier to test with unit tests than feature tests. In general, unit tests are easier and faster to write than feature tests if (1) you're experienced writing unit tests (there is a learning curve) and (2) your application design supports good unit tests.

Feature tests are fine for simple or small apps, but I wouldn't rely on them for the bulk of my testing in any significant app.
Monorails seem to run pretty slow. A little more than half the speed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Monorail

As for the "high speed maglevs" making noise, you should read my comment again. I was clearly talking about low-speed maglevs. Yes, at 300 mph you are going to make some noise.
is google breaking the internet? naah (well at least not with google search - G+, google local and the new horrible google maps is a complete other story)

are webmasters breaking the net because they follow SEO worst practices? definitely.

i wrote this article for techcrunch in 2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your-co... the tl;dr: pagerank is thoughtcancer, if you start thinking of links as some flow of mystical pagerankjuice you will make bad decisions, decissions that will hurt your business, your users and in the end the internet.

the stupid "remove link emails" are just the newest iteration of this thoughtcancer.

my recommendation stays the same: link to whatever you like and link to whatever your users like, want or need, oh, and also link to your competition. but for gods, your sanities and the internets sake: don't do it for any kind of page/trust/magic-rank or any kind of link/penguin/panda-juices....

my name is franz enzenhofer /
i'm the most successful SEO in europe /
i do not care about links
ssh -R 80:localhost:8080 ubuntu@some-ec2-instance -i key.pem
is it binding if i write a script using curl? or, even better, hitting enter on the default button?
OK then, people are terrible through-and-through. Good way to end my day on that note.
I'll second that. Muscles micro-tear (the natural process which causes your muscles to heal come back bigger) when the muscle elongates while under tension (due to an opposing force greater than the muscle generates) rather than when it contracts pulling weight up. So if you do a pullup, pull yourself up and lower yourself slowly. Same with weight lifting, pull up normally and lower the weight slowly. This discovery is still unknown by most gym trainers even though its importance is so great it should have already become standard practice.

I'm amazed at how many people at the gym don't know this. It's jaw dropping.
The way the DMCA works ISPs or any other service hosting third-party content must comply with every takedown notice immediately, regardless of it's legitimacy, if they want to continue to enjoy the protections of the DMCA. (meaning, unless they want to accept liability for the copyright of every piece of content on their servers). So yes, it absolutely does work that way: you can send a takedown notice to anybody for any reason and they must comply with it.

The logic is that DMCA notices are sent under penalty of perjury, and people aren't going to risk perjuring themselves just to improve their SEO or take down a blog post they don't like. Unfortunately, the courts seem willing to accept excuses like "the automated process i use to send out DMCA takedown notices got a little overzealous" as legitimate, so DMCA takedowns are now pretty much just a free-for-all for anybody who wants anything taken down.
> For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close.

It isn't, and never has been.

We operate a nursery period ( https://www.lfgss.com/thread9350.html ) in which the actions of new members are both severely restricted and observed by existing members, and all initial content must be 100% public and observable by members (no private messages, no user profile customisations).

We very aggressively remove content and ban anyone who creates any content that appears spammy and continue to encourage reports of spam even long after they have been registered.

We report those individuals to http://www.stopforumspam.com/ at the same time preventing signups from anyone that SFS reports as coming from an IP recently used to spam.

Comments are run through the Akismet API and moderated if they are flagged as spam.

When a spammer is caught (a few times a year someone does get past all of this - for a very brief moment), then every piece of content of theirs, and any other content from nearby IPs is reviewed and usually removed.

We made profile pages non-public, we even removed the customised profile fields from display (though we do leave them in the form as it helps us spot any scripts that are trying to spam us and we autoban them).

To put it mildly, we are aggressive.

We've made a really poor experience for new members of our community to help ensure the quality of the content on the site and that we're free from spam. We felt that was worth it from day one, we still feel that it's worth it.

Which is why it's hard to feel good about Google when our reward for fighting spam on our corner of the internet is to be spammed by merchants whipped into a state of panic by Google.
The operational focus. Half the company is working to get the most work out of the blue collar workforce for the lowest price. What do you think they see when an engineer walks through the door. They see another blue collar job that costs five times as much as normal. True or not, that's how management at e-commerce companies want to approach engineering.

Management doesn't even understand software development. E-commerce management is hardwired to expect a simple action-change-reaction cycle that lasts a couple of days. You don't 'develop' software over a few months or years. You make a software 'change' and things start happening immediately with bottom line improvement in a few days or weeks.

Their thinking is "we're going to optimize forklift operator costs by having people work 2 hour shorter shifts and position forklifts differently so costs next week will be $x less." Their equivalent idea of what software development is is "write a program to reduce shifts by 2 hours and reposition forklifts so costs next week will be $x less." The industry is hardwired to think of software as a tactical tool instead of a strategy.

Even if the company doesn't have operations and is just a website, its still 'make a change to increase conversion so that revenue next week is $x more. Again, software is not a strategy, but a mechanical 9-5 type job.
I want to jump in here and officially say that Vagrant Share in its current form will likely be free forever.
Hey Matt_Cutts, sorry that this is a little off-topic, I don't really know what would be the correct medium for this... so here I go: could you please kill mypdfmanuals.com from Google hits? I was searching for some instruction manuals (my exactly query was: <pax wardrobe manual filetype:pdf>), and again and again the top hits were unhelpful mypdfmanuals.com links, which don't even have manuals, they just tell you to go a site where you can get the "full version" of instruction manuals that are otherwise publicly available for free.
Do I understand correctly that Google will try to punish you (or the other party) if you host links in exchange of money but that Google is doing it in its search results ? (And I receive from time to time unsolicited regular paper mail from Google so that I advertise my enterprise through them.)

Page Rank is a neat idea, but making everyone listening to Google so that Page Rank remains meaningful is stupid. What do you do if suddenly Google thinks Twitter or Facebook are to be considered spammy link farms (which would be true) ? Do you ask everyon to delete their tweets linking to you ?
Finally a better anti-crossfit post with details and references.

My question: What’s a good alternative?

I’ve been only to one crossfit gym for half a year (and stopped because I went to a place without a crossfit gym nearby, I plan to start crossfit again).
I think I got lucky to have been at a good gym,
and as others have pointed out, the author cannot simply assume all gyms are bad.

Here’s my personal experience:

- Before a WOD, we ALWAYS did a refresher on the form of the WOD’s exercises WITHOUT weights

- The gym offered weekly special classes from professional weight lifters and gymnasts for working on form

- Sometimes, at the end more often, there were 2-3 coaches for a group of around 5 - 15 that watched the form

- I think we never did deadlifts within a WOD, only before as a separate exercise

- In WODs with time-limited sets the coaches always said we can take a minute time out if we reach the limit of a set

- I never saw coaches screaming “boot camp”-style

- I didn’t like partner WODs as they pushed me too hard and therefore made me neglect my form. Those partner WODs were only done once a week, so I simply didn’t go at that day.

Overall, my experience in terms of coaching and results was multiple times better than at any “normal” gym I went before.
Octotree – Browser extensions to display GitHub code in tree format
anyone ever been in this situation? what was the outcome like?
Nice website. The MaternityCompare page is driving my browser crazy though. And it's a bit unclear what the product really is.
Website: http://gracemink.com/
"If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site."

That's taken straight from Google's webmaster support forums... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Even in situation number #1, Google clearly encourages webmasters to "do as much work as you can to remove spammy and low quality links..."

I happen to disagree with the article, but it's kinds disingenuous to claim that Google had nothing to do with that link removal request.