Galaxy Quest - <AUTHOR> http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/galaxy-quest?fullpage=1 <comment><USER2> I wonder how it will affect things if she doesn't go? You get married with (presumably) the assumption that this person is the core of your life, but then this Mars stuff happens and it becomes apparent where the spouse falls in the pecking order of your value system. Does it cast a dark cloud on the relationship afterward? "I want to be with you forever unless this really cool opportunity comes up, then I'm leaving you and the kids and we'll never see each other again."

This isn't a criticism -- it's nothing to me how these people choose to live their lives, and I'm all about pursuing your dreams. But it seems like there would be consequences to being so formally (and publicly) ranked second, or lower, by your wife.

<comment><USER3> Well it just takes being a strong, independent person. Personally I don't really subscribe to the marriage-above-all-else philosophy. You have to accept that you are not the center of the universe, and even if someone truly loves you their agenda might not line up with yours. By the same token the husband should feel free to seek whatever he needs to make do in light of that. It may be cliche, but "if you love someone, set them free." It certainly does take courage and resolve to do that.

<comment><USER4> You forgot the kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure how this ended up on the front page... I thought we already decided that Mars One is a giant scam: [http://www.iflscience.com/space/whats- going-mars-one](http://www.iflscience.com/space/whats-going-mars-one)

<comment><USER6> Even if it is a scam, I don't see how that is relevant. Most of the article is about things that apply to this kind of grand endeavor regardless of whether it turns out to be realistic and legit, completely nuts and legit, or illegitimate.

<comment><USER7> "Even if it is a scam, I don't see how that is relevant." Well that certainly neatly summarises the sort of magical thinking about technology currently in vogue.

The fact is it does matter whether or not Mars One is realistic or legitimate. Because there's always a backlash. Right now we have some optimism about space - big, hairy expensive programs like the ISS are actually getting done. Space X is actually achieving what so many internet billionaire's pet space projects failed to do previously. "Grand Endeavours" aren't made up of PR stunts and ridiculous plans - they're made up of really smart, tough people working on really hard problems for a long time.

What happens when the Mars One backlash and disappointment hits the mainstream? Do you think the average person is going to have a lot of faith in subsequent NASA proposals for Mars? What do you think is the flipside of this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Mars One did certainly request donations along with 75 percent of any proceeds from participants' media interviews, but this had no impact on Sonia's selection that we could see."

this is denial. if it isn't, it's a giant red flag at the very least.

</comment><comment><USER9> That is a very long article over-dramatizing a fantasy scenario that will 100% not happen in their lifetime. These folks sure glommed onto something that allows them to talk about themselves a lot.

If Mars One wasn't just a short-term money grab, they wouldn't be too concerned with collecting 75% of interview fees. That is so bush league that to imagine your whole life is going to be shaped by this organization is pretty delusional.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Galaxy" quest? I know that authors in print publications generally don't write the headlines, and it seems a perfectly worthy article despite the iffiness of the Mars One project. But I still wonder why writers generally make no effort to distinguish between the Solar System, our Galaxy, other galaxies and the whole universe.

Of course, 'Galaxy Quest' is a pretty popular science fiction film, but it's one that parodies mainly a space opera series that takes place long after the Solar System has been explored. For anyone interested enough to read the article, titling it 'Galaxy Quest' is an outright distraction. You can say I'm pointlessly nitpicking, but I genuinely believe that laziness and sticking to convention ('here's a sci-fi reference!') has fuelled the decline of print journalism in favour of more authentic fare.

</comment><comment><USER11> But seriously I thought this Mars One thing was just crap - we have no idea how to build the rockets to get there let alone land, find water, make food and oxygen. I mean nice idea and all that but... It's crap. By the time we sort this out these folks will be retired and we will be looking for another 20 younger folks to go die.

Surely they can't think she is actually going to go, as opposed to go do training and have some fun things to say at cocktail parties.

Edit: ok so maybe we have an idea, but not enough to just ask Elon for the extras package, and no where near enough money to do the research and development. I mean - moonshot, 5% of GDP for 10 years.

<comment><USER10> Robert Zubrin reckoned the whole Mars Direct programme would cost $55 billion in 1995 dollars.

Let's say 'The Case for Mars' is viable but the costings were optimistic, and should be more like $500 billion in 2015 dollars, that's more like 0.3% of USA GDP for ten years. Way greater than Mars One's supposed budget but achievable if America decided to colonise Mars.

<comment><USER11> Iirc NASA's budget for Apollo reached 5% of GDP - so I would rather look at the past project costs than future projections.

<comment><USER11> So some slightly more researched figures:

[http://mobile.extremetech.com/latest/221705-the- apollo-11-mo...](http://mobile.extremetech.com/latest/221705-the- apollo-11-moon-landing-45-years-on-looking-back-at-mankinds-giant- leap?origref=)

>> In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars.

1966 NASA funding peaked at 4.4% of Federal Budget (not GDP). So my memory is way off.

The parent post of 500bn looks more reasonable against the Apollo cost of 170bn, but current Federal budget is 3.9 Trillion, 4.4% of which is 170bn.

So looking at NASA as % of federal budget we see 170bn per annum for best part of a decade, or close on 2 trillion dollars.

Whichever way we look at it, Mars will be pricey. And well beyond non state actors.

<comment><USER10> Good post, and well done for finding the numbers.

However the point of _Mars Direct_ was to avoid some of the endlessly- extrapolating-upwards budget numbers by avoiding big technology developments (building a giant ship in orbit / launching from a moonbase / exotic engine technology); making use of elements present on Mars to produce rocket fuel on- planet from a smaller feedstock sent from Earth; and making use of automation, by preceding each manned trip with an unmanned fuel-production vehicle, with there always being one more lot of return fuel than human crews on Mars.

I quite agree with "beyond non state actors" \- much of the above appears in _Mars One_ 's plans, probably because it's the only way they could even start to appear plausible on a below-shoestring budget. But for a state actor, or at least for the USA or some as-yet-unbuilt alliance of developed countries, Mars is possible with 80s technology, at a viable price. You don't need to multiply the numbers up forever, so long as you resist distracting proposals from those who in reality want funding for a moonbase, or nuclear rockets, or whatever other technologies that promise first you have to solve a difficult, expensive problem, then Mars is cheap and easy.

<comment><USER11> Well, I am not convinced. The Apollo program probably looked cheap and easy when JFK promised it. It did not try and create exotic solutions, but had to for example push the frontiers of chip fabrication just to get 72kb of memory on board.

I am pretty certain that some of the nice cheap ideas mentioned (automated fuel production?) seem simple in a lab on earth but making it work reliably after landing on Mars will take extra effort - even if the basic underlying technology is under grad level right now.

I will still say that the last closest thing humanity tried to Mars landing was Apollo, and 4.4% of federal budget per annum is a good proxy for the cost of a Mars landing. No matter how much tried and true technology you think you can bring in from elsewhere.

Of course I hope I am wrong and we have built most of the basics in Apollo and since. But ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's linked in the article, but worth reading:

* "Mars One Finalist Explains Exactly How It's Ripping Off Supporters": [https://medium.com/matter/mars-one-insider-quits-dangerously...](https://medium.com/matter/mars-one-insider-quits-dangerously-flawed-project-2dfef95217d3)

> _No money, no process, no explanation: An insider speaks out on the > hopelessly flawed scheme._

* iflscience coverage: [http://www.iflscience.com/space/whats-going-mars-one](http://www.iflscience.com/space/whats-going-mars-one) (HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250474) (81 points, 132 days ago, 23 comments))

</comment><comment><USER13> It doesn't matter if Mars One is a scam, the article makes a good point: Our sense of optimism, of pioneering spirit, of looking to the stars, has suffered greatly in recent decades.

If all it does is nudge people from looking forward to a now ubiquitous (in fiction) dystopic future, to again staring at the sky with wonder and possibility, it will be a resounding success. I wonder if that wasn't a large part of the point of the whole undertaking.

Also, regardless of whether the mission is ever launched or not, the article is interesting for being a science fiction story that isn't. I grew up with authors looking for the small human stories in spaceflight and star colonization, and now here's a true personal one, for real... Someone is actually thinking deeply on what it will be like for their own spouse to leave them for MARS. That this can happen now, even if this particular mission ultimately leads nowhere, is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mars One actually accepted applicants who were married? I'd thought I'd already lost all respect for them but somehow found more to lose.

<comment><USER15> Since Mars One isn't sending anyone anywhere, it doesn't matter if the applicants are married or not.

<comment><USER14> Sure, they aren't actually sending anyone, but they are pretending they are, and gullible people believe them. Accepting applicants who are married and screwing with their spouses' minds is incredibly ugly, even if it's just messing with people's heads and not actually separating families.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What an annoying article. I don't really see the point of it besides it being half humblebrag half swan song. All the actual information has been covered to death.

I do like the paroxysms of noble largesse regarding his wife though. Strangely cuckoldish.

<comment><USER17> Did you mean "BY GRABTHAR'S HAMMER, what an annoying article!" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No offense, but I just find this sad.

<comment><USER19> In what way? i find it sad that Mars One > family for some "nerds". Family is the real mission and the real heros are those who achieve that status. Family also has a greater social benefit. The OP talks about Mars One as the mission that has great social benefit. That's really sad.

<comment><USER20> Yeah who cares about saving humanity from extinction. Let's just stay here with out families and our 4x4's until we drown. Real heroes.

<comment><USER15> I fully intend to go to Mars, but someone "just staying here with their family" is just as noble a mission.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Loading pics from the middle - <AUTHOR>

The DOM is great and all but I'm increasingly frustrated by slow loading of images on mobile devices. Can some smart person figure out how to load images starting from their center? <comment><USER2> You could use "interlaced" or progressive images. (I don't mean scanlines like old TV signals.) GIF, PNG, and JPG use the same idea: it sends stores the pixels out of order, and progressively fills in the image all over instead of from the top down.

Interlaced GIFs use a three-pass system. Interlaced PNGs use a 7-pass algorithm. Progressive JPGs actually decompose the frequencies and send the "most important" ones first. [http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.d...](http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.div.6)</comment>


Vandals smash beehives, killing 500k bees - <AUTHOR> http://beta.latimes.com/food/sns-dailymeal-1865007-vandals-smash-beehives-kill-bees-wild-hill-honey-iowa-123017-20171230-story.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem like vandals, but more a competitor or someone who wanted to hurt them for something they did.

Destroying 50 beehives is a job.

<comment><USER3> My other thought was it was someone stung by a bee in the area.

<comment><USER4> It's winter. Someone was stung by a bee during bee season and has been stewing until now? Besides, whose reaction to a bee sting is to anger half a million more bees?

<comment><USER5> You have to make sure they get the message the first time.

<comment><USER6> "When you strike at a queen, you must kill her."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Smashing 50 beehives is a lot for plain vandalism. Smashing 1 or 2 you'd get the haha, but you'd have to be particularly motivated to go after all 50. Plus, you'd need at least some planning to not get stung.

<comment><USER8> > Plus, you'd need at least some planning to not get stung.

That is just what I was thinking.

Without a bee suit, attacking even a single bee hive seems like a very bad idea. Last year, I got stung by a bee that got trapped under the straps of my bike helmet, and it _really_ hurt. Plus, I had to remove the sting. And that was just a single bee.

EDIT: Yeah, I did not take the winter into consideration. When I got stung, it was summer. _facepalm_

<comment><USER9> It's winter, the bees were hibernating. They won't be able to fly for more than a second or two in the cold if they were warm enough to get going.

<comment><USER10> .

<comment><USER11> It happened in Iowa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't help but be reminded of this classic /r/legaladvice thread:

> My niece has gotten into veganism and animal rights. She basically destroyed > a bee farm near where she lives by sneaking in there in the middle of the > night, trying to release the bees and destroying all the hives and the > honeymaking equipment [...] She is not 18 yet but the cops are going to > charge her as an adult. They say she caused almost $100,000 in damage.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/3xalu0/texas_m...](https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/3xalu0/texas_my_niece_17f_purposely_destroyed_a_bee_farm/)

<comment><USER13> Are bee farms a target of animal rights activists? That's the closest thing to a credible motive I've come across for this incident so far. If so, the top comment from that thread sums up my reaction:

> Of all the animals to "free," she chose... bees... The insects that > basically go about a normal life in "captivity," except that they're more > protected from predators and other issues that could cause them harm...

One of the top comments in that thread, however, calls it a troll:

> A clear villain, a moronic crime, a clueless OP, and a legal question that > basically boils down to "can a person who is caught doing something illegal > be punished for it". This posts checks all the boxes for a troll.

The fact that I never heard about that case, while this is at least the third time I've come across this one (at half the damage) today, would appear to support that hypothesis.

Perhaps the present incident is just another case of life imitating reddit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If that company provides _any_ pollination services at all to local farms, the $50k is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of potential economic damage depending on what sort of crops they assist with.

How much damage does it take to, say, get the FBI looped in on this?

<comment><USER15> It has to be a federal crime. If the bees where pollinating across state lines, then there might be a case. An arbitrary dollar amount doesn't make something federal.

<comment><USER16> Really? I've heard of the FBI becoming involved in the investigation of a crime seemingly due solely to its large monetary impact.

<comment><USER17> Me too it was on x files

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > because insurers don't offer beehive insurance

This surprises me. Is it just a matter of "nobody thought to get into this market yet"? I'd thought this was the role that Lloyds of London already played. If a bunch of Black churches from Alabama had access to Lloyds of London back in 1956, what are the barriers to a farmer from Iowa in 2017?

<comment><USER19> Canadian here: the government offers insurance here for bees. It's not particularly profitable, so the gov't had to pick it up as a service.

<comment><USER20> if it's not profitable, what they should do is raise the premiums, not subsidize it by operating it at a loss.

edit: downvoters:

i'm all for the government running a insurance program if nobody is willing to, but it shouldn't do it at a loss. subsidizing beekeepers distorts the market to the detriment of other crops (that don't need bees for polination) and other polination methods (humans? drones?). it's the same with free roads subsidizing the trucking industry (trucks cause disproportionately more damage to the roads compared to what they pay in taxes) to the detriment of other transportation methods, and low cost flood insurance subsidizing housing in flood zones to the detriment of low risk areas.

<comment><USER21> Why? Does every single human endeavor really need to make a profit for someone? Can it not be possible that the Canadian government feels that a Canada with beekeepers is better than one without, and has chosen to allocate some of its money to make it a little easier to be a beekeeper?

<comment><USER22> Not _every_ human endeavor has to make a profit. However, _most_ do have to make a profit, otherwise total wealth decreases until we all starve to death.

If an activity doesn't make a profit, generally people unconnected with it shouldn't be _forced_ to subsidize it unless there is a really good reason, like specific and well-understood positive externalities to the activity.

I have no issue with people doing beekeeping (or skateboarding or painting or snowshoeing) as a hobby. But I see no reason I should be forced to do more work I don't want to do in order that someone else can do their hobby that they do want to do.

<comment><USER23> It's ironic that you're commenting on bee hive insurance, something that is essential in nearly every kind of food production, by claiming that the state offering it at a loss will lead to everyone starving to death.

If "bee populations are declining, we need bees to make food, we should encourage people to keep bees by limiting the amount of risk they have to take" isn't a really good reason, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER20> >we should encourage people to keep bees by limiting the amount of risk they have to take

or you know, by the beekeepers charging more for the service. if pollination is really that essential, they shouldn't have any problem getting farmers to accept the price increases. otherwise it's just another subsidy that distorts the marketplace (against other pollination methods, or crops that don't require bee pollination)

<comment><USER24> You can't possibly be comparing companies subsidized by the government and the critical natural importance of bees. This can't be real.

<comment><USER25> Honeybees are not native to North America. They actually may have a negative impact on native species.

<comment><USER24> Not only honey bees polinate crops. In fact there are thousands of bee species around the world and particularly in Brazil, where they produce honey and the european/african honeybees are non-native as well. I think we both can agree that the Amazon and Atlantic jungles and rainforest managed to be polinated just fine without the bees you talk about. When you consider only honeybees you know in North America you are artificially restricting the problem that is much more widespread.

<comment><USER26> When you plant tens of miles in each direction with a single crop that needs to be pollinated at a specific time there is no way for native insects to pollinate it well. Where would they live? What would they feed on the rest of the time? It's a green desert most the time then in need of massive pollination for a short, sharp period. Bringing in hives or other forms of pollination is how it gets done and it's done this way because it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The money raised is a fair bit more than the hives are worth, assuming everything was destroyed (unlikely). At least some bases, lids, mats frames and boxes are likely salvageable, and I'd guess most. Assuming the hives have been properly wintered, they are currently small, so there wouldn't have been much gear out there. Paying absolute top dollar would get those hives replaced would use about half that raised money. I had a look through Californian supplier sites. Eg $320 for a complete hive at [https://billsbees.com/products/bees-complete- hive](https://billsbees.com/products/bees-complete-hive) However a hive is unlikely to be needed, a $220 nuc would be fine, and could be split into 2 or 3 during the season quite happily and a decent beekeeper would be splitting them fast, reducing the cost significantly. Decent hives here have been split more than 20x this season (admittedly it's a very good season).

It is interesting to see the costs as they aren't too different from here, though queens are cheaper in New Zealand, and buying boxes of bees to dump into your hive isn't a thing here.

As others have said here, why was it done? Hive vandalism is a thing all over the world, but it's usually a few hives knocked over or mass damage by stock. Messing with 50 is unlikely to be much fun.

Edit: The story linked here isnt complete or very good. Yes, most the hive equipment looks salvageable though the bees are now dead. However a storage shed was broken into and vandalised, gear was smashed. Extractors and processing equipment can be very expensive and it's a hell of a mess in there. The focus on the bees is likely because that's what the beekeepers focused on. Having 50 hives killed when you have nursed them from a frame or 2, saved from disease, wintered etc would be heartbreaking. Yes, an extractor and store shed could contain very expensive gear but it's soulless steel and tools.

[http://siouxcityjournal.com/news/local/vandalism-destroys- ha...](http://siouxcityjournal.com/news/local/vandalism-destroys-half-million- bees-wipes-out-sioux-city- honey/article_b883044a-8df8-5b54-95a8-46afcb6c8624.html)

[https://www.google.co.nz/amp/whotv.com/2017/12/29/vandals- de...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/whotv.com/2017/12/29/vandals-destroy- beehives-killing-500000-bees/amp/)

</comment><comment><USER27> What I like about this is that they made a point of closing the donations and suggesting that people donate to other causes. They're not trying to ride this for all they can get, they got enough to let them recover (and maybe a bit more?) - and even if they did get a little more than absolutely required it's not like it's "take the money and run" levels.

</comment><comment><USER28> Heartened by this:

"Since news of the vandalism got out, however, Go Fund Me efforts on Wild Hill Honey's behalf have raised more than $35,000. Engelhardt posted to the company's Facebook page that the money would allow them to rebuild and start operating again in the spring."

</comment><comment><USER29> Too many beehives to believe for pure vandalism. I could believe one or two.

Imagine someone tipping 50 cows, or spraying 50 buildings. The high amount makes its weird.

<comment><USER30> FWIW, it's an urban legend that you can (easily) tip a cow.

<comment><USER29> I buy meat from a farm directly. According to a couple of farm hands, drunk bored people still try.

<comment><USER31> The urban legend is that cows can't get back up on their own. Even if you tipped a cow (or 50), the cows could still just stand right back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's terrible that you can buy expensive security camera systems that still store the data locally so thieves can steal the evidence too. Even an old cellphone with motion detection and a cloud uploading app might have helped identify the people.

</comment><comment><USER33> It really takes a special kind of asshole to go and do something like this. I hope they are made to pay for this.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a thoughtless crime which obviously fills one with outrage on multiple levels. I trust in the Iowa state police to locate the offenders.

</comment><comment><USER35> I can't for the life of me think why anyone would think this is a good idea. Bees perform a useful service and are not inconvenienced as this is what they do anyway. Everyone wins. Then again there are people who don't care who gets hurt.

</comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps the bees died to some other cause (e.g. a mistake related to the cold), and the owners, fearing bankruptcy, embarrassment, smashed their own hives in a last-ditch effort to save themselves.

<comment><USER37> Possible… I'll go with the bees, after years of guilt for enslaving humans to care for them realized the only way to free the humans was to kill themselves, so they hired a hit from Craigslist to end their existence and free the poor humans from a lifetime of servitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just watched the last season of 'Black Mirror'\- the one episode with the Bees on it. Incidents like these surely triggers persons like me to think that somebody please start building artificial alternatives to bees and avoid the Colony Collapse Disorder from happening.

</comment><comment><USER39> I feel bad for the bees.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hope they hire security

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd be interested to read a followup in the spring, about where the GoFundMe money goes. Perhaps I am just cynical, but although it certainly could be senseless vandalism, it also checks the boxes for a "bust out", wherein a business is destroyed in order to obtain cash. Typically these are insurance schemes, but the GoFundMe angle provides the same result.

I hope the press attention causes the police to focus investigatory attention on it; I could imagine it simply being written off as a victimless property crime and swept under the rug, as so many things are.

<comment><USER41> The cynicism on HN is just jaw dropping.

<comment><USER42> There's no end of people who have such low morals they'll exploit any situation for their personal gain; such cynicism (or realism) is born by contact with such people and their actions.

People who would do the exploitation can also be inclined to expect others to be sociopaths.</comment></comment></comment>


A Checklist for Evaluating New Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.gustavwengel.dk/evaluating-new-technology <comment><USER2> If a technology is replacing an existing technology that a company is already using (Elasticsearch v.s Solr for example) the questions I ask are:

1\. How much work will it be to /completely/ replace old-tech with new-tech?

2\. Does new-tech give us advantages that outweigh that switching cost?

My rule of thumb is that new-tech can't be an incremental improvement on old- tech - if it's going to have a decent ROI when it comes to switching cost (and re-skilling cost and so on) it needs to be a HUGE improvement - either a multiplier of developer productivity or enabling features that simply cannot be built with old-tech.

The worst result - which I've seen far too many times - is that new-tech only 50-80% replaces old-tech - and now you have to maintain both.

<comment><USER3> > The worst result - which I've seen far too many times - is that new-tech > only 50-80% replaces old-tech - and now you have to maintain both.

i've seen this too, (in apps) where there are 3 different "reactive" libraries in use that all do the same thing smh..

my feeling is, if you are going to change out the technology, then to avoid said problem of maintaining both, is the change needs to happen very very quickly to avoid having to maintain the old one while getting side-tracked to implementing new features and the transition gets sidelined... its very difficult to pull off

<comment><USER4> Sigh... just yesterday I found code in a project I inherited where an Observable was returning Futures to the observer. It probably seemed like a good idea to whoever at the time but damn does it make it hard to follow what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Sometimes there's a technology that solves a problem really well in your > particular project, but which is really hard to understand or learn.

I have seen this problem too many times. Some team find a framework/language combination that makes their lives slightly easier in the short term and want to go for the new technology. But, they do not think about how we will scale that knowledge or what will happen if the code is moved to another team.

A couple of times I have been in the situation to have to re-write an application to the company common language (in one case Java, the other Javascript) because the receiving teams did not liked the technology and did not wanted to spend personal time learning something that was not valuable to them.

When a new framework is adopted, it is a commitment that we will train the developers and let them experiment, fail and learn until they take hold of the technology. It takes tame and the decision cannot be taken lightly.

<comment><USER2> One of my favourite observations about Python is that it's the second best language for basically everything - which makes it a fantastic default for an organization.

<comment><USER6> For small teams and small projects, sure. But you'd do well to have a settlers team behind your pioneers, rewriting in something more scalable.

<comment><USER2> Well designed Python scales just fine - ask Instagram or Pinterest.

<comment><USER7> Any good pointers to some of their technical blogs about this?

It's quite astounding that architectures their size are implemented with the "slowest language around". It would be very interesting to read in-depth how they manage to sidestep the performance problems (that are brought up almost always when someone mentions Python).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1st check: should start at Zapier integrations. No API integration with the other 600+ SAAS means the technology does not yet scale.

2nd check is there a link on the website for developers.

3th Are they hiring?

<comment><USER9> > No API integration with the other 600+ SAAS means the technology does not > yet scale

This is an extremely naive take.

I'm curious about how many people actually approach technology evaluations with this mindset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A big one for me is "What is the community like?". Especially for open source technologies. Do the contributors spend time answering questions? What is the general tone in the community, welcoming? Confrontational?

All the best technology decisions I have made have come with a strong friendly community.

</comment><comment> rooam-dev No 1 on my list is "how testable is the new technology?".</comment>


Three Introductory Textbooks I Hope to Read Someday - <AUTHOR> http://ghalib.me/blog/three-introductory-textbooks-i

<comment><USER2> I'm reading the Stewart series for Calculus, he moves to fast I feel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Concrete Mathematics is a new title to me, your buoyant thrill on Euler font and making a concrete floor() and ceil(), let me guess, Knuth? Sold me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is an excellent textbook for sure.</comment></comment>


The journey of a London startup, what I learned when my company failed - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@buro9/the-journey-of-a-london-startup-what-i-learned-when-my-company-failed-c67acd74b862

<comment> grey-area Thanks for the honest and detailed writeup of the life, birth and death of your startup. Shame it sank without notice here as I think it'd be interesting for the HN crowd - perhaps try submitting again at some point? Microcosm seems like a great idea which could have worked, so it's sad to see it die so early, and it's a sobering story for others (a company I'm involved in in London is looking at funding just now as it happens).

Any tips for startups looking for funding on seedrs (sounds like that worked out for you at least)?</comment>


Humanist among machines - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-we-need-arnold-toynbees-muscular-humanism/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thought this article was really interesting, giving space to reflect on the role of that humanities could/should play in guiding how technology is used. It does seem to be a message that society at large has forgotten.

<comment><USER2> You might be interested in Neil Postman's Technopoly: [http://www.amazon.com/Technopoly-Surrender-Technology- Neil-P...](http://www.amazon.com/Technopoly-Surrender-Technology-Neil- Postman/dp/0679745408/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435254336&sr=1-1&keywords=technopoly)

It reasons along a similar vein.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers jazzyb, good to know.</comment></comment></comment>


Issues with Cross-Platform Version Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.ericsink.com/entries/quirky.html

<comment><USER2> A good basic summary of this would be "don't use anything other than basic ASCII in filenames." There are two very common desktop platforms (OS X, Windows) that have outright broken filename handling (OS X in particular has really odd rules for storing Unicode in filenames compared to, oh, the world). Anything requiring character encoding in a filename, much like a source code file, is a bag of hurt waiting to happen. I know there have been bugs in Subversion related to filename encoding issues, and it's been controversial in the hg world as well, where the formal solution is to treat filenames as opaque bytes because anything else becomes painful rapidly.

(Unsurprisingly, this problem shows itself in other places. os.listdir() in Python 3 returned Unicode strings, which is full of suck because on a Linux system filenames are bags of bytes, so two files in a directory could very well be in different encodings. Until recently (at least, have not checked recently) os.listdir() would simply silently ignore any file whose name didn't properly decode into a Unicode from the on-disk bytes.)

<comment><USER3> Quite right. The simplest solution at the level of version control is this:

        >hg add PRN
        Error: cannot add file named "PRN" - will cause cross platform errors.
        >hg add filename.
        Error: cannot add file ending with "." - will cause cross platform errors.
        >hg add "-rf *"
        Error: files cannot begin with "-" - will cause cross platform errors.

Most people will never see these errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be nice if he'd gone into a little detail on how to _solve_ these issues rather than just listing problems. Interesting stuff nonetheless, some of which I've been aware, some are news to me. (I've got a project using git but originating from a svn repo that I work with on Windows, Linux and Mac, which required a couple of contortions initally)

</comment><comment><USER5> > What if somebody creates a file named "-rf *" and a Linux user tries to rm > it?

They'll delete their working copy if the naive Linux user doesn't properly escape that. At the worst, they'll loose some recent changes and have to re- checkout. This is why you're using version control, right?

</comment><comment><USER6> > checkin a file with a name that begins with a dash. Now check it out under > Linux and try manipulating it with command-line utilities

        $> echo 'hello world' > -h
        $> cat ./-h
        hello world

what's the problem?

<comment><USER7> Try "cat *" and see what happens. This has more details than you ever wanted to know about filenames: [http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux- filenames.h...](http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux- filenames.html)

<comment><USER6> if I expected a filename with a leading dash, I'd follow the same convention as I did before: "cat ./*". You're link suggests the same thing.</comment></comment></comment>


First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous - <AUTHOR> http://joshimhoff.github.com/2012/05/24/abstraction.html

<comment><USER2> I'm starting to believe that people who disagree with your sentiments described here simply don't get it yet (I, for one, agree with just about everything you said). I don't mean that as a put-down and I don't mean that condescendingly. We're all learning at our own pace. But I think you are correct. Thanks for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Electrical engineers work with Kirchhoff's Voltage and Current Laws, not the nightmare that is Maxwell's Equations."

I have a strong feeling you are not an electrical engineer.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. I did not mean to suggest that electrical engineering is easy -- clearly, I know nothing about it -- but only that electrical engineering benefits from abstractions too.

<comment><USER3> Not using Maxwell's equations is surely not one of them :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer._

-Edsger Dijkstra

<comment><USER5> IMO use of abstractions is vital to any profession, not just programming. This is because of how the human brain is structured: we can only hold 5-9 things in our working memory at any time. In order to tackle more complex concepts, we have to chunk several basic ideas into one theory, which is a big part (though not the only part) of what abstraction is all about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article right up until the last sentence. If anything moves a scientist to prayer, he has been mislabeled.

<comment><USER7> My grandfather, David Fisher, has been writing an international radio program for decades called "Truth in the test tube". It's aimed at a general audience so it's not very in-depth scientifically, but the idea is to interview scientists who believe in God, just to get people to realize that they are not mutually exclusive. <https://www.twr.org/judyblog/?p=2789> Even if you don't agree with those beliefs, you can't claim that religious people can't be scientists.

<comment><USER8> Regardless of your persuasion "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" by Knuth is well worth a read.

[http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language- Inf...](http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language- Information/dp/B00855V2PY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337969459&sr=8-2)</comment></comment></comment>


Taking Advantage of Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/cyber-security/taking-advantage-of-critical-infrastructure-cybersecurity/#.VQgpGROhqcc.hackernews <comment><USER2> tl;dr version:

Slightly vague article on how sharing threats among the ICS community and reducing attack surfaces through obfuscation and active defense can protect critical infrastructure.

Seems like the start of a false sense of security if 'normal' network activity would remain unchallenged, based on the assumption that only welcome users would create a 'normal' fingerprint.</comment>


TEMLIB – SparcStation compatible in VHDL - <AUTHOR> http://temlib.org/site/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also check out this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp5L1_67swk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp5L1_67swk)</comment>


How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google - <AUTHOR> http://nenadseo.com/new-seo/# <comment><USER3> FULL DISCLOSURE:

Im an Expedia employee (inbound marketing director, covering SEO), although Im currently at the end of my notice period. (Im leaving in two weeks).

Also, I worked in the B2B division, nothing to do with the consumer side that this article references.

The author of the post linked above contacted me a couple of days before publishing it, to warn me that he would publish (quote: "damning evidence of expedia spam").

HOWEVER: If I wanted him to not publish it, he would "sell the post to the highest bidder".

That was what prompted me to post this on my personal blog: [http://webmarketingschool.com/big-brand-seo- spam/](http://webmarketingschool.com/big-brand-seo-spam/) and for the record, I told him to sling his hook reference to extorting money out of anyone in exchange for not posting stuff about their backlinks.

No doubt that is why I got singled out in the article. You'll notice that at the top I get mentioned as being in charge of this stuff, then right down at the bottom, he mentions that in fact Ive got nothing to do with it.

I'll let you all draw your own conclusions.

<comment><USER4> I would trust this post if you could at the very least provide some evidence that he did contact you and that you are leaving because to me, it seems like you're just a employee trying to pin the blame on him and do a little damage control.

The fact that you're the Marketing Director at Expedia makes it even worse (if you are lying).

EDIT: Okay, I just did some research and this person's company is extremely fishy but I would still like to see some evidence.

<comment><USER3> Proof Im leaving? Check the date on this post on facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/mogmartin/posts/10151730878862337](https://www.facebook.com/mogmartin/posts/10151730878862337)

As for pinning blame on the author?

Hardly...

Im not debating anything he said, other than calling my name out.

Its not my place to deny OR corroborate any claims against a division that I NEVER worked for, of a company that I no longer work for! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just a few emails I usually get from Expedia.

"In fact, the article can be about any topic related to your blog, just mentioning at some point something like "find coupon codes for Expedia", "get some deals in Expedia".. Do you think that would fit in? Doesn't have to look very spammy (we don't want that either). What do you think?

About the price, how much would it be a post like this with maybe 2 links? "

AND

"I'm looking to place a link this week on the homepage, but can I ask when the link for expedia.co.uk expires on your site?"

These are just two examples. There are plenty of these. BUT it does appear that they are now hiring quality bloggers to write on their own blog so perhaps things have changed.

<comment><USER6> Isn't this very similar to what RapGenius just got penalized for? Only difference seems to be Expedia is not providing anything in exchange for the crappy linkbit like RG was offering to.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is similar but more sophisticated. With RapGenius, taking action was easy because the company admitted what they were doing and all the evidence was in the open. Also, the links were clearly spammy.

With these examples, the links are clearly spammy to a human but a little less detectable by a bot. And -- this is crucial -- there is no evidence yet linking these bloggers back to Expedia. Google will have to do a little more digging to figure out the nexus and analyze the quality of Expedia's backlink profile before they can slap a penalty. My guesstimate is that there's a 1 in 3 chance there will be a penalty and a 1 in 10 chance the penalty will be public.

<comment><USER8> It's no secret that a lot of Google's reviews are manual[1] and popular websites like Expedia and RapGenius aren't reviewed by bots. This post and the one about RapGenius shows it's too easy for them to influence the algorithm. Like you said RapGenius got a manual penalty because they were openly flaunting their spam and giving Google a bad name in the process. Expedia does it more descretely and spends millions on Adwords so they won't have to worry.

[1][http://searchengineland.com/google-now-reports- practically-a...](http://searchengineland.com/google-now-reports-practically- all-manual-actions-136822)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is sad that an article with actual content towards the end has so much filler to start with. I think this post would be a lot more impactful if it started out as

"Hey, you want to know who else pays bloggers to link to their site? Expedia.com, here is some proof:"

I can understand the author's frustration, and he brings good points to the table, but the first quarter or so of the article is neigh unreadable.

<comment><USER10> I see no proof or mention of paying bloggers for links.

<comment><USER11> Why did they do it then? The links weren't topical and they weren't affiliate links. Is it that hard to figure out the motive?

Edit: Are they using http referrers so reward the correct affiliate?

<comment><USER12> Unlikely and besides it wouldn't even work because they're guest posting on other domains than the one they own or would have registered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This just adds to the list of why to hate Google.

Basically if you are either a big brand or a spammy company or have a nimble operation, you can afford to do grey & black seo. If you are a small business/ up and coming company white seo practices are the safe choice.

<comment><USER14> Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted. This happens to people every day. Only unlike Rap Genius, there is literally zero way to communicate with somebody at Google unless you manage to get a popular thread going at HN.

I'm happy this Rap Genius incident happened because it's driven some attention to how Google's business actually operates, how poor their algorithms actually are, how arbitrary their search engine actually is, how poor their customer service practices are, and many other similar ideas.

Granted, these are monumentally hard problems to solve and Google still does it better than anybody else, but it's good that some attention is directed here because there are numerous problems with how ranking in Google currently works.

<comment><USER15> > Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're > at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted

This rather suggests that what you're calling "white hat" is a slightly less white shade than you may think. After all, who exactly is defining what "above board" is here?

You're talking as though Google has some kind of responsibility to you. They don't. You are not their customer. Their customer is the searcher, and they have every right to do whatever they like with their results to give what they think is the best result for the searcher.

I'm getting pretty tired of this attitude (generally among "SEO" people) that Google is some sort of public property.

<comment><USER16> Google had a monopoly and exerts market power over the internet. They legally _do_ have a responsibility to the public.

I'm getting pretty tired of the attitude that they have no responsibility to anyone other than those who buy advertising from them since it's blatantly false.

<comment><USER15> > Google had a monopoly and exerts market power over the internet. They > legally do have a responsibility to the public.

Not really. Certainly not a responsibility to abide by the whims of random people who want their content ranked higher.

And if we decide to burden them with "responsibilities", what about their responsibility to keep my search results free of spa^W SEOers' crap?

<comment><USER16> All monopolies with market power have a responsibility to the public. It's a matter of policy and law.

You're right that they don't have a responsibility to abide by the whims of random spammers, but they also don't have carte Blanche to use their power to regulate the internet as they see fit.

The 'it's their product so they can do what they like' line is simply not correct. When they take action like this they need to be scrutinized carefully and we as the public most certainly should debate the merits of their actions and their effect on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _You know all those bloggers /SEOs at MOZ giving webmasters tips and tricks > on how to rank higher? Well, they never said: "Guys, you gotta do basic on- > page SEO, buy quality links and you will rank higher, that's all you need to > know." Instead they keep selling stories how their clients rank using "white > hat" SEO._

GrantTree is ranked pretty high against our competitors on several keywords that are important to us. This was all entirely through whitehat SEO within about a year of setting out to do it. We've just written lots of high-quality content on our blog, and then contributed genuine, original articles to other sides and got them to include a link to GrantTree or to one of our topic sub- pages (like [http://granttree.co.uk/tax_credits](http://granttree.co.uk/tax_credits) ) in the byline. We've never bought links, nor will we ever buy links.

Now, GrantTree's context is not super-competitive like, say, Expedia or RapGenius... but we do have competitors. So competing with good, well- structured content and genuine contributions to other sites _does_ work - <USER2> least in some contexts.

Also, I'm frequently on the receiving end of these "your blog/site/whatever is awesome and we'd love to publish a high-quality article on your blog and we'll even pay you for it" emails, and as far as I'm concerned they are spam. I never even bother replying to them.

I'll be happy if Google nails those spammy bastards to the wall - both the paymasters and the so-called bloggers.

(Note: this makes no judgement on the claim that Expedia is partaking in this)

<comment><USER5> Curious: Would you still write the article if the link was nofollow? And what links are you requiring in the byline? I'm very suspicious of any company asking to "guest post".

<comment><USER17> > _Would you still write the article if the link was nofollow?_

Typically I've written the article _before_ passing it on to someone, so in those cases, obviously the question doesn't apply. In the latter case, if someone asks for me to e.g. write about tax credits for their site, then it's only polite for them to allow us to include a byline without nofollow.

> _And what links are you requiring in the byline?_

Hah, whatever I can get :-) Depends on the site, obviously, but if I can get links to some of our topic pages with the right text, I'll go for that! (e.g. [http://www.ec1capital.com/blog/rd-tax-credits- explained](http://www.ec1capital.com/blog/rd-tax-credits-explained)).

We don't "ask to guest post" as a company, though I've offered to write some good original content on occasion, but only in person and with no pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I used to own and run two popular travel sites and have been contacted by a third party to place Expedia links for under $400/year on both sites.

Even though the third party had nothing to do with Expedia (besides emailing me the particular anchor text and URL), the fact that I was only ever contacted to put Expedia links and no other sites in the 5 years I've been running them made me think that they were Expedia shills.

(this is obviously a throw away account)

</comment><comment><USER19> Funny how Matt Cutts was all over the Rap Genius article on HN right after it came out and he's nowhere to be found here. Must be the millions Expedia spends on Adwords, or my cynicism, one of the two.

</comment><comment><USER20> So an SEO "firm" (around since 2010, but their domain was registered in November?) is exposing secrets of SEO, which they imply is the secret sauce to getting to the top. What's the end game?

<comment><USER21> Matt Cutts has said Google is trying to break Blackhat SEO's spirits. That tactic appears to be working and this post is a result of that. The author is not trying to build their brand or position themselves. Rather they are sad and angry. To them the situation feels unfair and they want to make the big abusers feel the same pain they've experienced.

<comment><USER22> I think it's awesome that Google busts as many blackhats as they can. I don't want blackhat seo to be what I need to engage in in order to be successful. I'm reckon I'm better at creating value than I am at link building, so it suits me.

That said, Google are not doing a very comprehensive job of busting blackhats. Even some of the cases that an algorithm should be able to easily detect are not being punished in the same way that RapGenius was. This essentially leaves everyone in an awkward situation. You can't compete using whitehat methods because your competitors are using blackhat methods and Google is turning a blind eye. You end up with two options; (a) lower your standards and start using blackhat methods, or (b) hope that Google will eventually punish your dodgy competitors and buy traffic from Google in the interim.

<comment><USER23> This is probably the best argument in favor of that "break the spirit" strategy then: if you've little-to-no hope of actually putting a dent in the shear _volume_ of abuse by way of penalties, making the _existence_ of penalties (and the behaviors that lead to them) as notorious as possible might be the next best thing... Make associating with such SEO tactics appear too risky for any valuable brand, and cut off the funding for them with FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am a bit confused about the argument about Expedia not being penalized because they are spending on AdWords, wouldn't great organic rankings reduce their paid budget? And if Google penalizes them for legitimate reasons I doubt they would cut their AdWords budget.

I am sure Matt will provide more info soon especially after what happened to RapGenius.

<comment><USER10> Google did research that shows having organic rankings and paid ads, boosts your click rate significantly. So, it would be a mistake to stop advertising if you rank well organically. [http://www.google.com/think/infographics/organic-impact- on-p...](http://www.google.com/think/infographics/organic-impact-on-paid.html)

This is nothing compared to what RapGenius did. This is a low quality, but legit link building tactic.

The author claims the articles are poor quality, but they aren't. The only red flag is commercial keywords as anchor text, which Penguin today does a good job of discounting.

<comment><USER25> Why is this legit? It seems bullshit to me, as an outsider, just another way if gaming the system.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I don't understand how a company essentially paying bloggers to create links to their site is a legitimate method of ranking in a search engine. That sounds fundamentally broken and far from 'organic'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This kind of SEO hack seems hard to fix with an algo. One way might be to target "content" creators like Abby and Jennifer as they probably use Google+ (and probably other social networks) to promote their work. By targeting the writers and giving some penalty to everything they write as well as the site where the article is published, these sites will need to verify how good the writers are before accepting the guest post.

I believe avoiding targeting the big brands is for the better since giving bad reputation to the brand linked on these articles would backfire with false articles against competitors.

<comment><USER10> This is what Google was hoping too accomplish with AuthorRank.

Penguin is also discounting many of these links that have commercial keywords as anchor text. (I wonder if these links even help them.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's weird when you realize how much stuff that seems organic is really just a massive ploy/effort by a company or PR firm. I think even Paul Graham had an article about PR firms related to the comeback of the 'suit' haha.

One wonders how safe HN will be from this. Inevitably if something can generate views or $$ then someone will have an interest in gaming it.

<comment><USER10> This is and always has been the nature of Business. Long before search engines or the internet came into being. People will do whatever they can to get exposure, publicity, and a competitive edge.

All marketing is a Ploy if you really think about it, and businesses for intents and purposes is just an investment vehicle and marketing is how your turn over that investment.

Heck news media a ploy for corporations.

Someone has to Pay the Bills and Keep The Lights On

<comment><USER29> It wasn't too long ago that calling someone a "corporate shill" meant you were parodying tinfoil hatters. It's funny how quickly things change.

<comment><USER30> It was always a valid point and has been going on for a very long time. There was a concerted effort awhile back by PR companies to attack anyone calling out their corporate shill accounts, mostly done heavily by Microsoft on engadget and slashdot among others. Popular industry blogs like communities- dominate have also been a historical hotbed for shill accounts. It's nothing new and generally any furious backlash you see against people calling it out is more of the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Once you start giving penalties for this kind of behavior, then you open up the possibility for really black hat people using this against their competition.

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems that this is an awful thing that google is doing, but I really couldn't get very far in the article before getting tired of the author's unintentional schtick - the following is where I stopped:

"They don't buy links? They don't bribe bloggers? They don't sell links on MOZ? Yes, you're reading right. SEOs sell links on MOZ. But we all know this. It is so obvious. But MOZ is not the topic of this article.

And this is not going to be an article; I would like to look at it as a report. We will make a report about huge companies (we will start with one company), ranking for tens of thousands of keywords using black hat tactics. "

<comment><USER33> I almost stopped there, but the examples afterwards are pretty much spot on

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looking forward to see how Cutts spins this.

</comment><comment><USER35> This isn't paid linking-- it's an affiliate/referral program. Expedia isn't paying for the link, they're paying for the conversions generated by the link. Every OTA does this, and it's how the mass of travel sites that aren't OTAs make all their money.

This is all Google's fault. Most travel sites used to try to generate good content, and then buy SEM to their content and use OTA search widgets to monetize via affiliate programs. But Google decided this was search arbitrage, and stopped approving SEM landing pages that were monetized by affiliate search, so people have had to resort to text links, in the hope that someone will click and they can drop their cookie and get paid.

NB: I used to work for a site that was at the time owned by Expedia.

<comment><USER5> This is definitely paid linking. I own a very popular travel website and friends with other popular travel related sites. I can confirm that Expedia has contacted us to purchase links. It's not really news and very well known in the travel community. Often their pay is as low as $10 for a link.

<comment><USER36> This is what always frustrates me about these discussions. There will be a long, article citing many sources and someone will simply say "thats not true" without seeming to have any knowledge at all of what they are talking about. Later on, someone like you, with actual facts, contradicts the other person and I wonder why someone who had no idea what they were talking about definitively shot down a well thought out point in the first place at all...?

<comment><USER37> Paid links and paying for conversion can be different pricing structures, but the fact is they are either paying someone in house or for contract to create links to the website through blog. This is common, as blogging, especially if the blogger can get the article on a legitimate website it has value. They can pay in many set rates by volume of work to performance of the links.

Another thing is the website owners can be paid to add new content to the blog via an in-house SEO grunt, who has to add a number of links and space them out based on expected. I.e. one link per blog. They will edit over or add to the actual bloggers content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Google is a goverment of internet. To be a good citizen is to pay taxes. You pay taxes - you have a chance.

You try to avoid taxes - you get squished.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is why i don't follow what Google say about "correct" SEO. I just do what i know works for me.

</comment><comment><USER40> SEO articles often leave me with the same feeling I get when I realize I've stepped in dog poop.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd really like to have a place where we can report those dubious "SEO companies" who are sending spam e-mails to website owners offering to write "guest posts", so they and their practices can be scrutinized better by the community and perhaps search engines.

For example, slap-up-media.net spammed us today, offering to pay us to publish guest posts written by them. I'd really like to know who their clients are (but would not risk accepting their offer out of curiosity).

</comment><comment><USER42> A friend of mine used to work for one of these paid content agencies. Her job was to set up a few Wordpress blogs a day while writers filled them with content. Apparently, among their clients were lots of large companies. It seems, though, that after Google's crackdown on duplicate/fake content etc. they had to take a massive hit in revenues. They've since let most of their employees go and have - so far not very successfully - been looking for a new business model.

</comment><comment><USER43> As Google moves away from relying on pagerank, it will make such schemes less effective, and people will need to try harder to game Google.

<comment><USER10> I think most SEOs agree that as long as links are what connects the internet, they will be an important ranking factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This and the Rap Genius stories go on to show why algorithmic search (aka Google search) is not going to last another ten years. It probably already does, but more and more Google algorithms will include lots of ifs and buts.

There is definitely some room for fresh approaches to content discovery, knowledge indexing, and finding answers. New startup(s) or Google rediscovering itself?

</comment><comment><USER10> I see no smoking gun here or evidence of paid linking, or even link schemes. I just see legit guest posts, that could just as easily be meant to drive referral traffic.

Ironically, Tampa is where BlueGlass was located before they went bellyup.

Personally, I think articles likes these are fine for SEO. The articles are NOT PAID FOR and while the links might not be totally organic, you could certainly argue it adds some value to the post. (i.e. expedia's app is a good app for finding cheap airfare.)

Google has announced several times that they are going to crack down on poor quality guest posting, and I think expedia should be a little more progressive in their anchor text (i.e. linking with a brand name, url or even not linking... but just mentioning the brand name could help their rankings.)

Bottom line, Good offsite SEO today is a more polished version of this...

Step 1: Create Linkable, shareable, emotionally charged content.

Step 2: distribute your content socially.

Step 3: Do outreach to bloggers and journalists to get exposure to their audience, and perhaps attract links...

That being said, aside from the overly optimized anchor text, this is legitimate link acquisition and its what all SEOs do today... They create content and try to get distribution far and wide.

These links and posts could just as easily be traffic generation strategies, not SEO strategies.

<comment><USER45> I smell bacon.

"A little about me... I am a search marketing consultant,and I love everything about marketing and emerging technology. Growth Hacking is my strongest skillset, especially when leveraging search engines."

While I'm not sure that what you're doing is technically astroturfing, it's still equally as dishonest.

First, none of the links described in TFA match your "guidelines" to "Good offsite SEO", so even by your own admission this is not "Good offsite SEO".

Second, there is no such thing as "Good offsite SEO", since any "offsite SEO" is by definition either link farming or gaming the system. The entire point of the Penguin update (if I'm not mistaken) was to prevent quite literally all "offsite SEO" so google can rank your page according to _your_ content, and so they can reliably weight incoming links. If an incoming link (that is not on your site!) has been SEO'd then by definition it is not an organic, quality incoming link.

Third, you state "this is legitimate link acquisition and its what all SEOs do today", which undermines the entirety of your post since link acquisition is by definition not organic, nor does it produce "quality" inbound links.

But hey, since "its what all SEOs do today" it must be kosher.

Edit: Just to address your last point (not to pile on or anything, but I feel like it's important), I'm pretty sure this is a willful conflation of two totally separate concepts. Since, you know, everyone who's ever done any sort of SEO knows that if you want to drive traffic, but not pay the penalties for link farming, you use rel="nofollow". Which Expedia/ the blogger did not do.

<comment><USER10> "While I'm not sure what your doing is astroturning, its equally dishonest"

I don't even know what that means. But, that was written close to two years ago... I have since moved on to content development and traffic strategy. Still, Whats wrong with being a search marketer and knowing about link building strategies that are legit. Why is building a site that inherently attracts links, not both legit to google, and a growth hack?

I think your understanding of Penguin, or Offsite SEO are misinformed. Creating great content and proactively seeking exposure to that content is perfectly white hat and within Googles guidelines. Using No Follow is for PAID placements, advertising and advertorials. These posts were none of the above. Blogger outreach without incentive (i.e. content they chose to feature because it adds value to their audience.) is a bedrock of content marketing and inbound marketing, and traffic generation, and I would do these things even if Google and Search Engines never existed.

Bottom Line, distributing quality content through outreach is a legitimate practice that all GOOD seo's engage in, and whether you like it or not, its in Googles best interest as well for content creators to be incentivized to create more content, which comes about through growing an audience, which comes from exposure to other publishers audience, and search engines.

<comment><USER45> If you really don't want to take my word for it, Google explicitly states how the links that TFA addressed are _clearly in violation of Google 's Webmaster Guidelines_:

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356)

"Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines..." (3rd bullet point)

<comment><USER10> I dont see any evidence that this was a large scale effort.

As another poster pointed out as well, these might be affiliate links dropped by a widget like skimlinks,etc...

<comment><USER46> you can use NerdyData to search links like those directly on the sites source code: [http://d.vncs.me/T864](http://d.vncs.me/T864) [short link, HN mess the full link]

<comment><USER47> Wow, NerdyData seems like it can be very useful sometimes, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I thought this was understood across the board. I'm interested to see how the conversation plays out though.

</comment><comment><USER49> Martin MacDonald's thoughts on this subject (Big Brand SEO Spam): [http://webmarketingschool.com/big-brand-seo- spam/](http://webmarketingschool.com/big-brand-seo-spam/)

</comment><comment><USER50> How is it any different from offline world of business? Seems like big businesses with resources always go that extra mile to compete with other big businesses. The small businesses are usually the collateral damage.

</comment><comment><USER51> how bout we look into nenad who looks like they are really active on a "blackhat SEO forum" and gets tons of links from there. seems legit.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm nearly halfway through and I must say this is being a very good read. Great piece of investigative journalism.

</comment><comment><USER52> Looks like Google might have reacted, I googled 'cheap flights' and Expedia is not on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER53> I can demonstrate that Microsoft sells links.

<comment><USER54> Go on then.

</comment></comment><comment> lisp-and-seo It is very simple: Expedia is paying over a billion $ annually for ads, Google is giving them a buy one, get one free deal.

Google is only having "SEO scheme" problems with freeloaders, like RapGenius.

To site Wikipedia: "Don't be evil" was the informal corporate motto (or slogan) of Google. Key word here is was.

<comment><USER55> This is what you get when you take the shortcut of moving away from a strict algorithmic ranking: obvious abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Because of its large inventory of information

</comment><comment><USER57> brb gonna declare bankruptcy (google ads are reallly expensive and lots of bot/garbage clicks)

<comment><USER57> I wish there were a way to delete since now i'm gonna get negged to death and I will probably need to make a new account

<comment><USER20> There is for a short time. If your account is only 3 days old I guess nothing of value is lost :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple 2D car physics with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://pakastin.github.io/car/ <comment><USER2> Happy new year, everyone

[https://imgur.com/a/AIxvWUh](https://imgur.com/a/AIxvWUh)

<comment><USER3> I had a good one, but I moved it to my other monitor and it got cropped because ShareX doesn't know about HDR and blows out white pixel color ranges, but you get the idea [https://i.imgur.com/cYbxStI.png](https://i.imgur.com/cYbxStI.png)

<comment><USER4> Can we all stop using imgur now? It's been like an hour, one of those images has been flagged as adult content and the other is 404ing. postimages.org is good

<comment><USER5> what do you recommend using instead? I don't know of any good alternatives

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> not 100% related but is there any good information source on the web to learn how to build a good car simulator ? I've looked around and it's not very helpful. Usually I end up with physics courses which always repeating the same things. But not much about about : pneumatic (especially how they influence the overall speed), independent wheel modelling, suspension, mass shift, frame deformation, ...

I've checked the source code of torcs but it seems quite simple (although the results are very convincing).

My goal was to model a (indoor) kart.

<comment><USER7> I was vehicle physics lead for a couple of games that sold very well, but are not considered racing sims. Happy to answer questions as best I can.

What is missing from Torcs? It looks like a pretty good place to start, it has independent wheel modeling, and suspension, and mass shift of the car (I suspect it can handle mass shift of the driver if that's what you're after).

You can probably model frame deformation yourself by building a frame in a physics engine out of flexible parts and/or joints, but I'm skeptical that it's worth the effort when modeling indoor karts, I'm not sure they flex enough to matter, but it depends on exactly what you're trying to do.

The car physics my team built was made on top of the Bullet physics engine, so Bullet handled integration and collision dynamics, and we added transmission, braking, suspension, wheels, etc.

It's definitely worth asking yourself how good you need the simulator to be, and how serious you are about this. It's a multi-year project to get something "good" and/or better than Torcs. I would tend to agree with their answer to the FAQ question "should I start my own racing sim project?" [http://torcs.sourceforge.net/index.php?name=Sections&op=view...](http://torcs.sourceforge.net/index.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=30#c1_10)

<comment><USER6> That's a very good answer. Torcs is good but somehow the code is not 100% clear to me (I didn't catch the independent wheels simulation for example).

Flexing frames maybe overkill, you seem better placed than me to estimate that.

The FAQ answer address the difficulty of running an OSS project. It doesn't address the difficulty regarding the physics (which, I understand, maybe even more mindbending).

This is a hobby-level project. Nothing serious. I'm more interested in understanding the maths and physics. Having watched hundreds of races (my kid drives), I've seen behaviors which are pretty specific to karts (I guess). For example :

\- driver mass shifts do matter (pilots constantly use them)

\- karts jump when taking corners too fast and too tight (they usually slide, but when it's too much, they do jump, and decelerate...)

\- turning wheels left/right very fast is used to brake during pit stops.

but you're right, I may be out of my league here :-)

<comment><USER7> By all means, go for it, just do it with eyes open, it's a lot of work.

The other thing I'd add is that the physics models is only half the battle. The car and track geometry is critical to making an accurate simulation. It's easy to get wrapped up in the car physics and forget to deal with the angles and bumps and materials and temperature of the road surface.

Cameras are huge too, if you do anything other than a fixed interior cam. A naive follow can behind a car can totally undo all the physics.

Good luck!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > multiplayer

before you venture there I suggest you move the control code outside of the physic code, abstracting car inputs into a throttle, brake, steer structure which is piloted by inputs elsewhere and feed into the physic update tick along with the car state, or it'll make exceptionally hard to build input prediction and lag compensation further on

<comment><AUTHOR> Multiplayer is live now!

<comment><USER9> funny that you give multiplayer to people and they will use any chance they get to display creativity. look at all the pople trying to draw with their tyres!

<comment><USER10> We all know what everyone is trying to draw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Penis is pretty popular :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love it. Reminds me of playing with similar car simulations in Flash when I was at school.

Now just make it isometric with collision detection and use maps built with this (currently also on the front page):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923940)

<comment><USER12> Serious vibes of Absolute Drift here, a very zen indie car game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah! But this one is open source ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great and inspiring. Every few months I spin up a socket.io server and attempt to make an RPG. I get about as far as having the character move around the screen and then usually give up :D

<comment><USER14> I do a lot of making games just for the fun of it. Good advice I heard is that you're making a game _or_ a game engine. Pick which you care about most and focus on that.

I found that phaserjs is a good engine but you still have to do a ton of stuff that other engines give for free. Chiefly, the rich game dev UI that Unity, Godot, Unreal, etc. all have. Don't be discouraged by the different languages. Programming is like 15% of game dev and you can easily make a fun first RPG using examples and stack overflow, and get comfy with a new language along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Project page: [https://github.com/pakastin/car](https://github.com/pakastin/car)

</comment><comment><USER16> That is totally amazing! Have played it for 5 minutes on my phone now :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, great! Planning to add multiplayer support soon btw.. ;)

<comment><USER17> It would be nice to see something like cursors.io mmo. Sadly they abandoned it, as that dead stupid agar got more traction and ad views.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm..let's see!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How long would it take to make the whole screen one color (excluding the red car)? And what is the best strategy: driving in circles or fast alternating between gas and brake?

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's see :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I see that it works on mobile but u can not for the life of me figure it what the control scheme is. I just touch the screen and the car and to randomly move.

<comment><USER20> Figuring it out is part of the fun ;)

(But spoiler, it's just about moving relative to where you start touching... press then move up the screen to go straight.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love how instantly hackable this is... clone the repo and serve the directory localy and still connects through websockets, no npm crap in the way. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, but I blocked connections outside main domain to keep it clean.. Started to see trains, moving sprites etc :D

<comment><USER21> :( ah well, was fun while it lasted. I was the "HN" sprite :P

<comment><AUTHOR> Looked fun, I was just worried about game performance and server bandwidth usage..

Both frontend and backend are open source and work straight away without bundling, if you want to fiddle around:

[https://github.com/pakastin/car](https://github.com/pakastin/car) [https://github.com/pakastin/car-ws](https://github.com/pakastin/car-ws)

Pull requests also welcome! ;)

<comment><USER21> > Looked fun, I was just worried about game performance and server bandwidth > usage..

Yes, that turned out to be a legitimate concern... later on I saw people go a step further and write entire sentences out of cars... they probably didn't realize but it was effectively DoSing your server and preventing anyone else's socket emits getting through so all you could see is the text.

I guess it's a difficult balance if you want to allow playful hacking but don't want to be DoSed. (BTW it's easy to bypass the origin restriction by just injecting code into the browser), perhaps a better restriction would be a max sockets per session or IP, that would still allow some hacking but reduce chance of DoS intentional or not.

Anyway I changed tack to try implementing some basic bots in smaller numbers. Was fun to see how people interact with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The physics is really nice! Played with it for couple of minutes and even managed to drift/draw "2020" trace on the ground :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's pretty cool! Just fooling around with this made me think about replicating it with an Elixir backend.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shouldn't be too hard, current backend is here: [https://github.com/pakastin/car-ws](https://github.com/pakastin/car-ws) :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great work @pkstn! Works surprisingly well on a touchscreen. Really enjoyed deck of cards as well :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :P

</comment></comment><comment> n-gauge Good work! Q: How well would multiplayer work if you used webRTC data sockets instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure, since you'd need multi to multi connection, not only single to single..

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I spent more time than I care to admit zooming around on this page

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is very cool and fun! and its only one page of js code!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, very simple..

<comment><USER26> haha

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't meant as joke, it actually is quite simple demo :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wonderful! Please add some sounds for drifting :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Networked spirograph simulator :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is nice. It would be cool to have an option of rendering the controls under my thumb?

<comment><AUTHOR> True that, I'll add those!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice, but I do feel like it's missing a set of tracks from the other set of wheels.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, let's see how it evolves!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Multiplayer is live now!!! :D

<comment><USER31> At least on Chrome on Android it is now broken for me (previously working fine), as dragging to steer scrolls the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Should work now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice, can we get tracks too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good! :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like it how those patterns reveal different screen sizes/resolutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, true :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Drifting is awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is! :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> it's pretty cool and fun

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add multiplayer soon, hope it's even more fun then!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's fun! Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>