Hacker News Reader

autoreverseon VA Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest – $9M in prizes

But if won by an Afghani or Iraqi it could be a PR win.

autoreverseon StartChart - Growth metrics for 1,724 Australian startups

Pavlova, Phar Lap, Crowded House and now Xero? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xero_%28software%29

(You can keep Russell Crowe though...)

autoreverseon Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

WP Super Cache (using the htaccess option) got a client's site through 56,000 uniques / 78,000 page views on a HostGator VPS with 1.3GB RAM. The site unexpectedly got picked up by Japanese blogs as it was being taken live. Google Analytics showed up to 400 active visitors. Fun times.

AwStats screen shot: https://unavailable.s3.amazonaws.com/20121130_WP-Super-Cache...

autoreverseon How to Launch a 65Gbps DDoS, and How to Stop One

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ ?

autoreverseon Tell HN: Login to unsubscribe is against Federal Law

Not always.

Google's own google-content-api-for-shopping@googlegroups.com mailing list has this as the "To:" field:

google-content-api-for-shopping@googlegroups.com

And at the bottom of the message:

To unsubscribe from this group, send an empty message.

I had to ctrl-u and check the "Delivered-To:" and "X-Forwarded-For:" headers before I could unsubscribe.

(I'd tried to unsubscribe previously but the subscribed email account forwards to my main account so replying with an empty message didn't work. This thread prompted me to dig a little deeper and finally get one less piece of email per day - thanks HN!)

autoreverseon Loading half a billion rows into MySQL

The chown statement in the article uses a period instead of a colon.

Should it be "chown -R mysql:mysql" ?

autoreverseon ShowHN: BootstrapWP, Bootstrap theme for WordPress

Thank you for BootstrapWP Rachel, looks fab. Great timing BTW - I was just pondering using a Bootstrap 2.0 WP theme for a project and thought to check HN ...

autoreverseon The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances

I've been using mousezoom for several years with mouse speed set at 5.35 (approx 3x Apple's maximum speed). No lag for me!

http://benh57.com/mousezoom.html

autoreverseon Babson Burnbook gets 1200 visits in two days and then gets shut down by school

Nope.

Set your browser's user agent to "Google" to see. This is a common exploit to lift scam sites in SERPs.

Screen shot:

http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/2011110_Babson_Freep_hac...

Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JIadb7r...

autoreverseon Babson Burnbook gets 1200 visits in two days and then gets shut down by school

Off topic but perhaps someone could tell Babson Freep their WordPress has been hacked and displays spam content and links when visited by Google. Check Google's cache of the page linked to in this article for example.

Apologies for putting this as a reply on HN but I emailed their contact address twice and got bounced both times.

autoreverseon Learning from my web app 23 visits at a time

Thanks for building Akayame bambax. Pretty neat.

A few comments:

1) Please add one or more licenses so developers can include Akayame in their projects with confidence. A couple of examples:

http://jquery.org/license/

https://github.com/jquery/sizzle/blob/master/LICENSE

2) The footer and menu are below the fold in my browsers in the Converter and Editor views so I need to scroll to see the menu and "Yet Another Markdown Editor" text.

3) The footer could do with improved styling : text overlaps the border, bullets and links use default styles. Minor quibbles but improvements would improve the professionalism of the site. Image here:

http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/2011006_Akayame_footer.j...

4) Landing page does not convey to the visitors what the site is about (and"Yet Another Markdown Editor" is below the fold).

5) Adding a page or two with keyword rich text explaining the project ("jQuery powered online Markdown editor") and background ("inspired by other Showdown online Markdown editor projects") could help with search engines listings.

6) Have you considered hosting the code on Github for increased exposure and link juice?

autoreverseon Freelance2 has launched - my lunchbreak project

The logo designer job is dated Sep 07.

autoreverseon Robots.txt is a suicide note

I like humans browsing my sites but I certainly don't want scrapers copying my work wholesale, claiming it as their own and ranking ahead of me in SERPs.

I'm not alone :-) see http://incredibill.blogspot.com/

autoreverseon Robots.txt is a suicide note

Using a 1 pixel transparent GIF works - also worth putting in a warning for screen readers not to follow the link.

FWIW I've been using robots.txt honeypots on two sites for the past few years to deter scrapers. Approx 1,600 IP addresses have been banned. Most of these are for data centers.

autoreverseon Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog.

<i>"monthy"</i> should be monthLy

autoreverseon At work? Try this Hacker News homepage inspired by Node [SFW]

My version in HTML/JS (click the license to toggle HN)

http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/mit_yc_plain_text.html

autoreverseon [dead]

Or download it: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/static/LearnPythonTheHardWa...

autoreverseon Ask HN: How do you guys stop scrapers from mirroring your site?

Set no-cache meta tag so scrapers can't use Google cache.

Check out bad-behavior: http://bad-behavior.ioerror.us/

Otherwise:

Use a honey-pot to catch browsers that don't obey robots.txt. Send yourself an email for every new IP address so you can catch any false positives.

Redirect requests with no user agent specified to your honey-pot URL.

Same for known bad/useless user agents: wget, curl, Bing, etc.

Validate supposed good crawler agents via reverse IP lookup - cache bad IP addresses - redirect to honey-pot URL

Filter remainder based on request rate over a given period (use a DB to cache requests). More than 1 request per second for 20 seconds = bot, more than 200 requests per day = bot : redirect to honey-pot URL

I've been doing this for a site with around 150K URLs for the past 4 years. Have about a 600 URLs blocked and around 35 user-agents.