blauwbilgorgel

Iron Man (2008) shows that Iron Man boots with the Mozilla JavaScript documentation. It seems to favor RegExp. Maybe that was shoddy movie research, maybe we should be glad that Iron Man does not run on W3Schools tutorials, maybe Jeff Atwood is right when he said: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

It was Panama hat. Rap Genius did not pay money, they offered a tweet. In a crude and obvious enough way to be a little scheme-y. Which unfortunately for RG was picked up in the media.

"even I was scratching my head to figure out if this was actually a Google violation or not. Rap Genius’s apology post had the company deciding itself that maybe it violated guidelines that links should be “editorially placed." - Danny Sullivan.

At least now we know. This is blackhat.

Yes. According to Google. It is a myth that is years old.

Matt Cutts answers: Do AdWords customers get special treatment in organic search results?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aV5DmL_eog

If there is evidence that Google gives special treatment to Adwords customers in organic search then this could be verified as a lie. As long as this evidence remains nothing more than accusations and suspicions, then I choose to believe Google that there is no teacup orbiting Venus. It seems unlikely, but not impossible. I am willing to sway my view when I get evidence. Till then, I will treat it as a common newbie myth.

> If I think of a a lot of things my users would search for and try to create valuable information for them concerning those queries... is that great content or are those doorway pages?

  Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages 
  that clearly and accurately describe your content.
  
  Think about the words users would type to find your pages,
  and make sure that your site actually includes those words
  within it.

  Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality 
  pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword
  or phrase.

  Some examples of doorways include:

  Having multiple domain names targeted at specific regions
  or cities that funnel users to one page
 
  Templated pages made solely for affiliate linking
  
  Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed
  to rank for specific queries like city or state names

>If when someone writes a nice article with a link to my site I give them a a few months of my service for free... is that good customer service or a link scheme?

  Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. 
  A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable
  explaining what you've done to a website that competes
  with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is
  to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if
  search engines didn't exist?"

  Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's 
  ranking in Google search results may be considered part of
  a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster
  Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates
  links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

  Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns 
  with keyword-rich anchor text links can negatively impact 
  a site's ranking in search results.

  The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, 
  relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant
  content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet
  community. 

  Effectively promoting your new content will lead to 
  faster discovery by those who are interested in the same 
  subject. Avoid: attempting to promote each new, small 
  piece of content you create; go for big, interesting 
  items. Avoid: involving your site in schemes where your 
  content is artificially promoted to the top of these 
  services. Avoid: spamming link requests out to all sites
  related to your topic area. Avoid: purchasing links from 
  another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of
  traffic.

> If I create a press release on PR Web and link to my service with an appropriate keyword ... is that participating in a link scheme?

  Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press 
  releases distributed on other sites can negatively impact
  a site's ranking in search results.

  Note: I wouldn't expect links from press release web 
  sites to benefit your rankings, however.

Google is constantly improving the search results. If factors, such as a low bounce rate and high dwell time, show that a site is popular and useful, why not rank it higher?

People tend to think in binary: A site is either spam or no spam. But spam is much more complex. A site can be 90% good and 10% bad. A site can turn spammy without their intention: comment spam, hacked sites. A site can pull out all the stops to hide their link buying. A site can be useful to have in index, regardless of some spammy behavior.

>Apart from evidence that seems to be pointing towards this already happening;

Please provide this evidence. I am getting a bit tired of this misinformation. Organic search and paid search are silo'd. To say that Google favors advertisers in the organic results or the other way round, is simply not true. It would destroy Google's credibility.

>how tempting do you think it would be for Google

It approaches conspiracy thinking. I love that, but I think HN is not the place. You are basically accusing a company of a very evil act, without proper evidence. Do you realize that many Googlers frequent this site? It would be a shame if all they get to read are conspiracy theories and baseless accusations.

>Especially when considering that the rules are so vague that almost every site is guaranteed to break some

Hogwash. Their rules are very clear and succinct.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Maybe if you want to spam or manipulate, then these rules are vague. Maybe when you don't read the guidelines then they are vague. I bet that if you can point to a rule that almost every site breaks, without them knowing, then Google will adjust that rule to be more clear.

You can not please them all.

>Penalize them using a generic message and refuse on principle to answer any inquiries as to why.

You can certainly not please the spammers that were caught with their hands in the cookie jar and then take to the internet to say that Google is unfair, and that the big brands get away with anything.

I want to give both Rap Genius and Google the benefit of the doubt.

I like to believe that Google checked the link profile again and found a large amount of low-quality links removed. Google would not remove a penalty if the spammy links were still abundant. So that they are out of a manual penalty is justified.

Rap Genius showed good intentions to comply with the guidelines. They went out of their way to clean up their act. These were no doorway pages or elaborate linking schemes with their own servers. It was a Linking Bieber Scheme that is considered greyhat in the industry, and after this, will probably be less popular.

This was a large and visible PR drama. Of course both Rap Genius and Google were on top of things. Google never stated that this was to be a month-long ban. We don´t know how those thousands of other sites were penalized. Maybe the large majority is so spammy/crappy that they simply won´t rank near the top with their spammy links removed, on the merits of their content and audience alone. For sites that are entirely build on manipulating SERPs, then yeah, a Google penalty can seem permanent. To me, that is an ok thing.

About the connections. Sure they help. I don´t see what is wrong though with leveraging your connections when there are millions on the line. Maybe a connection humbly asked: Hey, we effed up, how can we restore trust? This thread makes it sound like the connections pressured Google into removing the penalty. That seems unlikely if we all give the benefit of the doubt.

I am not a lawyer. I believe Google is exempt because it indexes all links it can find. It needs this to operate a general purpose search engine. As soon as Google became a specialized torrent search engine they could be similarly liable. Also Google has to comply with legit DMCA requests or they still risk being liable.

From the letter:

The clear purpose and/or design of this application is to encourage, _facilitate_, and/or cause its users to stream and/or download popular sound recordings, the vast majority of which are owned or controlled by RIAA Member companies and are not authorized for distribution in this manner, while at the same time providing you/your company with _certain financial or related benefits_.

This is how a lot of Dutch sharing websites were closed: Facilitating copyright infringement with monetary gain. They got TV links (a site very similar to OP's site, only crawling for and posting links and embeds) for trademark infringement. Later on some Dutch ISP's were forced to block The Pirate Bay, because by allowing access to the site they facilitated copyright infringement(or so the court ruled). A Dutch blog was charged with republishing copyrighted material by placing a link. This later was overturned and became a fine for "facilitating".

Placing some links as facilitating copyright infringement sets a dangerous precedent for net neutrality.

They singled out Abby for writing paid blog posts with targeted links. Who owns Nenad SEO? Nenad and Karine.

  http://askkarine.com/2013/09/12/how-find-perfect-luxury-holiday-retreat/

"Here are some of the most useful websites to help you find your ideal retreat."

  http://askkarine.com/2013/05/16/how-to-become-a-yoga-instructor/

"<a>Yoga instructor training</a> courses are incredibly varied and there are plenty of courses on offer, so you will need to decide what kind of course is best for you."

  http://askkarine.com/2012/12/29/how-to-make-money-fast-using-google-play/

"I’m an app review consultant and I wanted to know if your current version of ‘insert name of the app here’ has the capability to handle an extra 250-400 app downloads per day? Let me know so that I can begin downloading them at your convenience."

"Outsource your downloads (google it, there are several providers). Rinse and Repeat, as all the fake Guru’s like to say."

  http://askkarine.com/2013/08/03/how-to-make-your-holiday-into-a-home/

For example, you might have started looking at <a>houses for sale in Sudan</a> because you love the hospitality of the area, but find that flights from your usual home are prohibitively expensive, which would limit your use of it."

These tweets by you were enlightening too: https://twitter.com/searchmartin/status/417260215453876224

And of course the intro to the very post:

"After receiving a manual penalty by Google for 2 small sites (for gaming the Google PR system".

I would not touch this entire fiasco with a 10-foot pole and I do not envy all involved or dragged into this.

>which is a direct indictment of google and their (as you put it) ineffective search results

I think Google has the best quality index of all search engines. There is a Kaggle challenge for Yandex right now where you can optimize the search results taking into account data like user sessions and dwell time. It's hard, but very cool. Google owns hard and cool stuff. Web spam is a multi-faceted and complex problem. But these guys are training neural networks on Youtube stills and make it detect cats. The last time I found a top 10 spam result that irked me was months ago. I filed a report and move on to the otherwise great index.

>If the best content is not being served based on its merit, the search results are bad.

If the best content is in an image without an alt attribute or longdesc or HTML fallback, on a page with no surrounding text, no sourcing, no pagetitle, no meta description. On a domain that accidentally blocks search engines with robots.txt, has no structural interlinking of pages, no backlinks, takes 50 seconds to load, redirects crawlers to a different page by IP, and only works with javascript on. If that happens to be the best content, then that is a shame. Google could probably still index it :). But the search results are better for not ranking that inaccessible, untrustworthy, undiscoverable piece of content very high. A store can sell the best goods, but if they put blinds in front of the window, do not promote or advertise, make customers crawl over obstacles to place their order, then such a store will simply not do very well.

>optimizing for good search results and optimizing for high ad clicks from searchers are two different things, and you can't do both.

Why not? Major sites both optimize organic results and their SEM. AirBnb could create content for each major city they host in and rank organically. They could advertise locally or very targeted to people interested in making use of their services and link to the actual property page or listings.

>I mean parasite in the nicest possible sense and I think it's an apt description. I'm not here for the business owners - I came for the hackers.

Google compresses nearly every information in the world to a single search query. That search box is the shortest program to expand to any related content that is currently found in the world. A giant information retrieval intelligence sends out its bots to crawl information every second and store it in global time consistent databases. From a black box algorithm with supposedly 200+ ranking factors, an SEO has to give each web page the optimal chance to rank for what its worth, by reading public documentation, experiment, analyze, track, predict, format HTML documents in an information retrieval friendly way, do split testing with contextual bandits or multivariate A/B, improve accessibility, improve the link graphs of the internet and semantic web with metadata. You come for the hackers, yet you treat SEO's and Google like script kiddies.

There certainly is good SEO. Good SEO is often indistinguishable from good accessibility, good marketing, good design, good conversion optimization, good information theory, good metrics.

You use sites because they used good SEO. You can find StackOverflow posts ranking at one, because they used the good SEO that the good content deserved.

Anyone with an internet business taking your comment at face value will find herself ranking not in the top 20, no matter how good their content.

Good SEO has worth, has value. Even Matt Cutts promotes good SEO and sees the worth. Without SEO analytics you are sailing blind. Without knowledge of how to interpret them. Without knowledge of the guidelines you get gaffs like these.

There is good SEO and there is vandalization. Rap Genius vandalized their rankings.

No industry needs to die. If it needs to, explain why.

Optimize your site for all users, not just search engines.

If you stay in this naive view of SEO you will never have a successful internet business in many niches. What is sad is that some developers and designers can not deliver a website that is SEO optimized, so a business owner has to pay double to get an SEO to fix all on-page accessibility issues.

This penalty is entirely the result of that blogpost and the PR it generated. I am willing to bet that Google already discovered many of these links, through spam reports, through manual spam fighters and through algorithmic detection. This PR, and the open letter, forced Google's hand. Of course they have to visibly act on it. Of course they are well aware that that niche has some scummy shady practices, and Rap Genius is not the only one. Of course they have a better internal tool than OSE and can check link profiles and detect networks in a manner of minutes.

Besides, you can be a great SEO and never do a single link-building campaign. There is tremendous value in simply finding new content and articles to rank for and drive traffic. I loath black hat SEO, not for the unfair temporary advantage it gives, but because it creates posts like yours. Because it burns companies that are now much more careful to hire good SEO's. Because I know that good SEO helps people access relevant content.

Like e-mail spam, search engine spam will die. SEO's will be retrained to create websites that are accessible, user friendly, give content that is relevant to the search query.

Just read: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

And try to find a single practice in there that is either manipulative, entirely done to service search engines alone, or hampers accessibility and user friendliness.

Good SEO builds authority. Creates quality mark-up. Makes descriptive website titles. Implements breadcrumbs and a sane website hierarchy. Rids the index of duplicates. Drives more users to your sites. Makes sure that blind people can access your content, like images or video. Makes sites load faster. Makes content more trustworthy etc. Good SEO needs no manipulation. There is a lot to gain by simply aligning yourself with Google's vision.

Please reconsider your tone, or realize you do not add anything of value to the debate, or to the many online business owners on HN. Can you imagine raising funds for an online startup and then have your post be the slide for "online marketing"?

>... 33 'Yes' or 'No' general questions that, when answered correctly, uniquely identified everyone on the planet.

I think a lot is possible with this challenge. You could compress over 8 billion yes/no questions in a single yes/no question under these rules.

And if that doesn't neatly divide people, why not let the people divide themselves through unique thought?

A 33-bit hash would probably collide too much. Yet there seems no requirement to communicate your hash back to the creator of the questionnaire with your answers. It could be a 1024-bit hash of a short story like:

  Hi I am blauwbilgorgel. I currently define myself as male.
  My internet names are ... I lived at ... I think we are
  in Time Cube. Today is Setting Orange. I declare ...

that would create a unique hash with which to uniquely identify yourself with.

em or relative font-sizing seems like a good choice. Also see rem [1] which was introduced with CSS3 to combat issues with font size compounding. Use pt for print stylesheets [2].

For a bit of ancient internet history: http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size/points/font_wars.GIF

[1] http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/font-size-with-rem

[2] http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.en.html

Can you play .asf files with Mplayer or VLC media player?

If so, try:

http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/191304/191304.asf

The other two videos can be downloaded. Added .mp4 downloads for completeness:

http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/179806/dl/179806.mp4

http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/179795/dl/179795.mp4

You are seeing different results than me. This depends among other things on your location (also probably which data center served you the result). The number of pages in index for a large site can even differ depending on the time of day (About n results).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8MJKFSWJU (Matt Cutts answers: How reliable is the site: query and why does the total count sometimes change from page 1 to page 2?)

In short:

Because the "site:" operator does not rank on popularity or PR. I think it never has, and if it did, it was changed a long time ago. It merely shows you the indexed pages for a site. You can still gather a little info from it to see, for example, which pages are likely to appear in the secondary index / supplemental results ("In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries"). Pages in index is somewhat of a vanity metric. It can be more insightful to look at the number of pages that send you at least 1 visitor a month.

If Google would rank "site:" on popularity people would probably (ab)use it for icky stuff like PageRank sculpting or figuring out how (internal and external) linking influences ranking, much like they did with popular search words /trends.

In the same vein "Link:" does not show all pages that link to a site and doesn't order them by link strength.

If you want more reliable information on links and page importance set up webmaster tools and analytics.

If a government created Bitcoin wouldn't China be more likely than the US?

I don't think Google is competing with the black market (on money) or trying to attract the people that already sell to the black market.

For many researchers in the world these reward programs ship a substantial amount of money.

And even if Google pays 20k for a bug and some cybermob promises 100k for an exploit. Are you really comfortable giving your bank account to those guys? Would you have to look up money laundering on the internet? And would you stop using the vulnerable Google product for yourself and tell those you hold dear to do the same?

The amount of legit money paid vs. the hassle and legal problems with selling on the black market even out very nicely for me, but I guess that depends on your priorities (and morals).

This video http://vimeo.com/54130349 (Bug Bounty Programs - Michael Coates, Chris Evans, Jeremiah Grossman, Adam Mein, Alex Rice) shows how great these companies are doing with these bug bounty programs. I'd welcome more companies to follow suit, both in bug bounty programs and hardening patches reward programs.

Andreas Mueller is one of the core devs of scikit learn.

He is active on Kaggle.com too.

For more practical ML projects see: https://github.com/amueller

>I honestly don't understand how you can live in India and expect shit like this not to happen. People in India don't even have the reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death, how cold you possibly expect the authorities to care about counterfeit books?

I'm quite disgusted to see this poor comment. I don't understand how it is adding to the topic at hand. You went from a re-printed book with an error to rape and politics in the country of the author. The article had nothing to do with either.

Even if India has the highest rape statistics in the world, that doesn't add any relevance to the point you are making, which basically boils down to: You don't have a reasonable expectation of riding a public bus without getting raped to death, therefor you should expect "shit" like outdated re-prints. What?

Rape statistics are not even clear enough to make the point that India has more cases of rape than the USA (due to differences in reporting rates and definitions of rape). Some experts estimate rape statistics to be about equal [1]. Homicide statistics are a lot clearer in both reporting and definition and there the USA "beats" India. [2]

>India is a beautiful place, with lots of brilliant, talented people, but until their local and federal governments start observing and enforcing the rule of law, it's going to remain one of the shittiest countries to live in.

Is that your final conclusion? That India is a shitty country to live in? To an article about an Indian re-print of Donald Knuth's book with an error in it?

If you had used this argument template for an American author, to drag American politics and crime rates into an unrelated topic, you'd be ridiculed and derided.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/01/02/are-women-safe... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

Surely this is innovation when applied to a new domain (ranking websites). Also Google never stopped innovating PageRank and other ranking techniques.

PG applying Bayes' theorem to e-mail spam was innovative.

If we get very loose with our definition of algorithm, one could even say that ants implemented the first PageRank-like algorithm, when they ranked sources of food, using pheromone trails.

Yes, good catch. If you want to recreate the Youtube bar, you'd need position fixed. For this faux-progress bar, position absolute works most of the time, because you usually load a new webpage without scrolling down.

I tried to recreate this effect in raw JavaScript.

http://fiddle.jshell.net/zuBDW/2/show/

It doesn't load new content with ajax, nor does it pre-fetch. It just shows a website loading bar. I think this UI element is very nice. Especially for heavier pages, showing a website loading bar might combat users leaving, as something is happening.

For Ajax-loading I think it is a nice alternative for a center-center spinner.

I didn't say they were simply solved through natural language parsing. I said they were better solved (and that combining it with other approaches might help).

  Can an alligator run the hundred-metre hurdles?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjslsKZYXQ8 (Can alligators jump and climb? Yes, they can!)

http://www.animalquestions.org/reptiles/alligators/can-allig... (many have thought was a myth, it is true that alligators are in fact able to climb fences.)

These anaphora questions are better solved through natural language parsing, for example turning them into predicate logic. The article is right when it says that big data algo's have a problem with these sentences. But that is not to say they can't help. In the article:

  The town councillors refused to give the angry 
  demonstrators a permit because they feared violence. Who
  feared violence?

You can use big data to calculate the semantic closeness between "town council" and "fear violence". If that is closer than between "demonstrators" and "fear violence" you can make a good guess.

From the Wikipedia article on anaphora:

  We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were hungry.
  We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were ripe.
  We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were here. 

A quick Google search for "bananas were ripe", "monkeys were ripe", "monkeys were hungry" and "bananas were hungry" and counting the results will solve this.

Using semantic closeness can also work against you in the case of ambiguity:

  The robber sits on the bank.

Is "bank" a furniture here? A money bank? A river bank? Semantic closeness might picture the robber sitting on a money bank. A second or third pass is necessary: calculate the chance that a person will sit on a building vs. the chance that a person will sit on furniture.

This is a decades-old hard problem that is close to philosophy. Is the robot inside Searle's Chinese room intelligent? Is it really understanding what it is saying? Or is it "faking" it?

Humans are notoriously bad at generating random numbers. [1] Very random strings are described by very complex programs.

The human mind, taken as an algorithm, might prefer short programs that are fast to execute and require little energy to run.

Vitanyi proved that highly random strings must include repetition and patterns. Very crudely (and because I don't quite get all the maths):

A string-generating program is more random when its output is less predictable. If you don't have to worry about predicting patterns and repetitions, this makes the rest of the program output more predictable. Thus, highly random generators should output patterns and repetitions too.

So, if we take the lottery numbers to be randomly generated (this is important), we must expect patterns like 1111111111 too.

We can approach Kolmogorov complexity (not computable) through compression. Basic Run-Length Encoding (RLE) of 1111111111 gives us (10,1). This is a very short and simple program and it seems that humans prefer such programs over more complex ones.

If we don't want to share the lottery with people who look for patterns in previous draws, we should generate a string, that, when added to the previous draws and compressed produces the longest output.

Let's say the previous two draws were 1111111111 and 22222222222, or compressed with RLE (10,1),(10,2). Humans who will optimize for patterns will produce strings that result in a shorter size. Let's say some humans play the numbers of latest draw (222222222). That will result in a compressed string of all 3 draws: (10,1),(20,2). This has the exact same length as the compressed string of only 2 draws. The previous draws and the prediction share patterns that allow the compressor to produce smaller strings.

Optimizing for maximum complexity would have you pick a draw like "2453160798" (not possible to compress with RLE). A string like "1234567890" also does not compress with RLE, but it easy to spot the simple, short program generating it (n+1..).

What happens when some humans increasingly pick numbers that appear random, but in fact are very short programs or carry cultural relevance (a range starting at _n_th decimal of Pi, validation key of pirated windows XP, dates of birth of my first two children, my lucky 100-digit number).

If our compression algorithms were perfect they would be able to generate the shortest program that describes another, bigger (or equal size) string. But compression is not perfect. Most compression algo's would struggle to compress a range of decimals of pi at n, as something smaller than a completely random number string. There is a simple pattern, but it won't be found in a reasonable time.

Luckily we can use search engine indexes as our compression algorithm! If a string like "12345" has 1 million hits and string "67890" has 1 million hits and both strings together have 500k hits, we can say that these strings often co-occur (probably in the form 1234567890).

If a certain date carries cultural significance (1970-01-01), it would have more hits/results, than a date that carries zero, to little, significance (2641-10-02). If 8 is your lucky number, chances are (Chinese) people local to you, also have picked this as their lucky number.

Then the key to picking a less predictable sequence is to pick a sequence that doesn't appear (a lot) in the search engine index. With a little luck we don't even have to get the hits for previous draws, as a large search engine index is likely to already contain these draws.

So if we want to optimize for not sharing with a large amount of people, and we assume that the lottery numbers are highly random: pick number ranges that do not compress well with the previous draws and pick number ranges that have a low result count in a search engine like Google.

[1] Tasked to pick a random number between 1 and 4, there is a bias to picking 3. When between 1 and 10, there is a bias to picking 7. Why this is? 3 and 7 may appear more special than 6 (23) or 4 (22). Also the phrasing of picking _between_ 1 and 4 might throw of humans to NOT pick 1 or 4. A randomrange program doesn't care for such human subtleties.

Random passwords are harder to remember for humans (this might be because the "mind program" to generate them is complex and requires more energy). Human passwords often contain dictionary words and commonly used patterns (which are faster and cheaper to regenerate).

Their writing and marketing is very effective. But they are close to my definition of evil with selling points like these:

  The correct way to do healing visualizations, whether 
  someone’s suffering from cancer, liver problems, or any 
  ache or pain.

  Hard to believe? Well… consider that a world-renowned 
  cancer therapy researcher Dr. O Carl Simonton called the
  Silva technique: “the most powerful single tool that I can
  offer my patients”.

  It’s supposed to help depression, control pain, increase 
  longevity, slow down cancers,...

  Cancer Patients:
  Show significantly higher wellbeing levels, improved 
  cognitive functions, and less inflammation. Subjects even
  report greater sexual satisfaction.

  Learn to protect yourself against chronic diseases such as
  cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and heart attacks.

  I've been able to cure the cancer I had, help to solve 
  murders, find missing people.

  You put yourself at risk for developing diseases such as 
  cancer ... Through a technique called Quantum Jumping, 
  you can learn how to access deep restfulness.

  Cancer patients can cause their cancer to go into 
  spontaneous remission (which means “disappear”)... 
  through the practice of creative visualization.

  Could a doctor really cure cancer? Does this seem too 
  impossible? And if it’s true then why don’t more people 
  know about it? A Healing Miracle – How One Doctor Used 
  Silva To Cure Cancer... people just don’t want to take 
  that step and realize the healing powers of their own 
  mind. It is after all easier to go see a doctor and have 
  them tell you what pill or treatment to take.

Python. I'll open source when I am done.

I am writing a bot to play Cards Against Humanity.

One trick to know if a sentence is funny or controversial that works quite well: Simply have the bot post it in an IRC channel or chat-room and count the number of responses it elicits (and give extra weight to words like "lol").

The more people fail the Turing-test, the funnier/controversial the statement.