Rap Genius News

I also agree that the annotations on the Dorner manifesto don't show NG at its best. I wasn't around at the time, but News Genius as a brand was just finding its feet, and you'll see examples of both great and terrible annotations on it. For example, http://news.rapgenius.com/1489298 is a great annotation, and perfectly epitomizes what News Genius tries to be—objective annotations on the news, highlighting facts. But no, we didn't do a good job with the Dorner manifesto, as a whole. Part of that is due to the level of quality increase that the site has seen since then, but maybe part of that should have been a warning.

> Mahbod is the most brilliant community creator we've seen since Caterina Fake's heyday at Flickr. -Marc Andreessen http://news.rapgenius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-horowitz-is-i… Was Marc wrong, or is Moghadam just creating the wrong kind of community?

How do you know they document accurately this time? 'Obviously' as compared to what? Except if you have internal access to their source code and be able to verify against the documentation. I am always happy to give honest mistakes a chance, but not to a company who ignored customers complaints for years, sold inaccurate tools for big bucks, and tried to obfuscating documentation to hide the change of algorithm in request routing at dyno level. Sorry, I just find these acts are bordering evil, and my money will go to other businesses. If you are not so sure what I am talking, read the following link and see how Heroku's CTO and COO responded to complaints. http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-money-trees-rap-genius-response-to-her…

Rap Genius (YC S11) - Brooklyn, NY - http://rapgenius.com – Help us build the Wall of History [email protected] IF YOU PASS OUR TECHNICAL INTERVIEW AND RECEIVE A JOB OFFER FROM US, WE'LL GIVE YOU $1,000 CASH (even if you don't take the job!) http://news.rapgenius.com/2368105 We're one of the fastest-growing sites on the internet, we get 25MM unique visitors per month, we've raised $15m from Andreesen Horowitz, and yet our tech team is only seven people. Anyone who joins us is going to have the best of both worlds, you'll work on a product that millions love and use while getting the experience of being a part of a small team and helping define the culture. WHO WE ARE We're a tiny, quick-shipping team. Each of us makes product decisions and owns whole features. We're close and we all enjoy spending time together. We’re a small team because we’re picky about who joins us. We have one of the hardest technical interviews in NYC but if you make it, you’re going to be on the best team around. Our house library includes Metaprogramming in Ruby; Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid; POODR; and "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?". Loving rap is not a prerequisite for working here, though an appreciation osmoses to everyone after a while. WHAT WE'RE BUILDING We started Rap Genius in 2009 to explain the meaning of rap lyrics, but the big vision goes beyond music and touches all of text – whether it's the Bill of Rights (http://news.rapgenius.com/62958), the Bible…

Rap Genius (YC S11) - Brooklyn, NY - http://rapgenius.com - Help us build the Internet Talmud [email protected] Rap Genius is at an unusual point in our history: we're one of the fastest-growing sites on the internet, we get 25MM unique visitors per month, we've raised $15m from Andreesen Horowitz, and yet our tech team is still only six people. What this means is that for anyone who joins us now it's a best-of-all-possible-worlds–type situation: you'll get to work on something that a ton of people are obsessed with, you'll eat a lot of sushi, and yet you'll still have the chance to experience the small-team vibe and pick everyone else who works here / "define the culture." WHO WE ARE We're a tiny, quick-shipping team. Each of us makes product decisions and owns whole features. We're close and we all enjoy spending time together. Our house library includes Metaprogramming in Ruby; Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; POODR; and "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?". Loving rap is not a prerequisite for working here, though an appreciation osmoses to everyone after a while. WHAT WE'RE BUILDING We started Rap Genius in 2009 to explain the meaning of rap lyrics, but the big vision goes beyond music and touches all of text – whether it's the Bill of Rights (http://news.rapgenius.com/United-states-congress-the-us-constitution-b… the Bible (http://news.rapgenius.com/God-10-commandments-lyrics), “The…

original statement in case anyone's interested: http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-a-statement-about-mahbods-annotations-…

The annotated transcript is HERE: http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-how-launching-the-worst-version-of-a-s…

Here you go: http://news.rapgenius.com/Sam-altman-the-new-deal-annotated Feel free to comment (it's not very intensive in terms of VC deal terminology, but I wanted to give RG a spin).

Blatant blogspam? It's a single paragraph that links to http://news.rapgenius.com/Atodd-what-real-time-gambling-data-reveals-a… Edit: I guess it's cross-promotion, which is fine just not what I expected.

Could your performance problems be closer related to http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotated than the performance of Django or your code?

http://news.rapgenius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-horowitz-is-i… Rap Genius [...] and have always considered it to be spam That's pretty absurd...

Well spotted, it looks like all of their news article URLs end in '-lyrics', even those when it's not even slightly relevant eg: http://news.rapgenius.com/Snapchat-find-friends-abuse-lyrics More shady SEO practices from Rap Genius, disappointed but not surprised.

Maybe the Heroku trouble? http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-money-trees-rap-genius-response-to-her…

What do find "juvenile" or "offensive" about them? The rap subject matter they cater to? I've always found them reasonably professional, particularly their evidence-driven handling of the Heroku load distribution debacle. http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics

Even though the name and email of the suspect are redacted, it says that the suspect is being investigated for 18 U.S.C. §§ 641, 793d-e, and 798(a)(3). This is exactly what Edward Snowden was charged under[0]. [0] http://news.rapgenius.com/Hon-john-f-anderson-united-states-of-america…

A lot of this language is identical on their jobs page: http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-engineering-team-rap-genius-is-hi…

True story. Here's an excerpt from the book about just that: http://news.rapgenius.com/Alexis-ohanian-without-their-permission-how-…

I've posted the article to Rap Genius http://news.rapgenius.com/Alex-pham-nmpa-targets-unlicensed-lyric-site… I wouldn't be surprised if in half an hour to an hour a lot of that information is annotated for you. It's hard to see the power of Rap Genius unless you use it, but once you do, you realize it's very much a new protocol in the same vein that pg called Twitter a new protocol in 2009. What's special is that a company owns that protocol, and you don't feel like it's owned by someone else.

I wonder how many WebSocket connections one dyno can take? Also seems like this would make heroku's routing problems[1] even worse. [1] http://news.rapgenius.com/Jesper-joergensen-routing-performance-update… et al.

Always a text annotation platform? That's a bit revisionist from what I've read. Fred Wilson initially told them "I think lyrics is a very crowded space and almost entirely reliant on Google for traffic" and they admitted "our pitch back then was a bit too lyrics-focused.." http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-how-rap-genius-raised-s18m-in-seed-fun… You can find those quotes in an annotation in the above link (which makes me realize the problem with annotations is you can't ctrl-f them).

Here is a permalink for that annotation: http://news.rapgenius.com/1900809 You can get that by clicking "share" in the annotation footer

Since Heroku's Ugly Secret I don't trust this company. http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics

(OP here) I feel you, but did you read the caveat to all the criticisms? http://news.rapgenius.com/1620770 On balance, it's pretty chill. Even the people who totally buy in and devote huge portions of their life to this organization are mostly just really into meditation (as opposed to, say, devotion to the organization or the man behind it). Though some of tactics are kind of strong-arm-y, the emphasis is always on getting you to practice a very simple, effective form of meditation

I don't get why this is getting so many points. It consists of a single graph and a bunch of hand-waving. Python doesn't have to be like the ruby community; it doesn't have to have a one-size-fits-all solution. We're happily using tornado in production. Between the heroku router and tornado's built-in support for multi-processing and asynchronous processing, I don't have to worry about nginx + uwsgi + whatever framework. I just run tornado. And we're immune from the heroku random routing debacle [1], something that neither rails nor uwsgi can say. 1: http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics

It's annotated via crowdsourcing, if you have something to say on subject - here you go: http://news.rapgenius.com/President-barack-obama-remarks-on-nsa-wireta… http://news.rapgenius.com/United-states-foreign-intelligence-surveilla… http://news.rapgenius.com/Apple-google-facebook-yahoo-microsoft-tech-c… http://news.rapgenius.com/Google-denial-of-prism-cooperation-lyrics

Hmmm, that makes it clearer why their CEO is at Bildeberg this year (http://news.rapgenius.com/The-bilderberg-group-list-of-attendees-for-2… I once had a startup project (shot down by internal "concerns") to spin-off an intelligence software for social network exploration & analysis that I build at the company I worked for, I remember browsing through Palantir's portfolio and thinking they had quite the arsenal for surveillance and intelligence. PS: Does this information being on RapGenius indicates something significant about their mid-term strategy?

Whilst this may be surprising to some people on HN, this happens all of the time to sites who build links in an unnatural way. For instance, this has happened in the past to well known brands such as J.C Penney through NYTimes expose[1], Interflora[2] more recently and a lots of others. An apology which RapGenius offered [3] doesn't fix this either. Is it fair? Yes and No. The only reason it isn't fair is that the site disappears from Google for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius]. My personal belief is that, devaluing the site for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius] actually devalues Google's quality. On the other side of the coin, if someone searches for [X rap genius] whilst they are under penalty its fair that they do not rank for that either. However, there are obvious reasons as to why the search quality team have decided to do this. How RapGenius can fix it / How you can too if your site gets a penalty: First of all, RapGenius if they are doing any link building now they should pause it immediately until they’re out of penalty. Secondly, in their apology [3] said: "With limited tools (Open Site Explorer), we found some suspicious backlinks to some of our competitors" They don't actually need to use any other tool to get out of penalty beyond Google Webmaster Tools although, ideally they should clean up all the links beyond the ones Google has found (trust me, Google doesn’t find them all within WMTs). Once you get out of a Google manual penalty and get hit by…

No. Unless your sincerity is merely the surface layer below which there is sarcasm, then another layer of sincerity, then a layer of irony, then more sincerity, and so on to the point where you have absolutely no idea of what your real opinion is, because you never had one in the first place. Notice how 5-10 years ago, people were wearing ironically bad second hand clothes from the 80s, because it was fun, and it marked them out as "in on the joke." Then over time, that became so much the fashion that the definition of "good" clothes realigned itself to cover these things, so now people are walking around with handlebar moustaches, tie-dye hotpants and wolf moon shirts thinking its completely normal. The lines have been blurred, "good" and "bad" are slowly breaking down as concepts, replaced with "in" and "out." The only way to escape it is to simply not think about any of it, and have absolute faith in your own objective internal preferences, whatever they are. Aesthetics is the only arena of thought in which fascism is not only acceptable, but morally right. Make full use of this fact. EDIT - see also: the rapgenius blog currently on the frontpage: http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-how-rap-genius-raised-s18m-in-seed-fun…