Google Says "Let a Trillion Subdomains Bloom" - <AUTHOR> http://www.seobook.com/subdomains-google-panda

<comment><USER2> I'm not a big proponent of advanced SEO and mostly stick to doing the right things (proper page title, good content, easy to read/type links, use of H1, H2 etc.) I don't make 100 landing pages or optimize my apps/sites for SEO by using all possible synonyms for my keywords. I don't do these things because they do not make my content better or improve usability but simply try to increase search engine rankings.

> You follow best practices. You get torched for it. You are deciding how many > employees to fire & if you should simply file bankruptcy and be done with > it.

Anytime I read any SEO complaints against Google, I notice this huge sense of entitlement that the authors and commenters have, as if Google owes them something with respect to search engine rankings just because they might be paying for AdWords or some other Google service. You have the full right to complain if your ad campaigns do not work as advertised. But it's your own fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed their primary search algorithm which tanked your traffic. Sorry. Google does not owe you anything even if their statements are contradictory.

> And the truth is, this sort of shift is common, because as soon as Google > openly recommends something people take it to the Nth degree & find ways to > exploit it, which forces Google to change.

The author hits the nail on the head right here and even suggests the proper method:

> The only ways to get clarity from Google on issues of importance are to: * > ignore what Google suggests & test what actually works

Don't try to read too much into how Google works from a comment by an employee here or an official blog post there. Just do what your site needs to function properly and most importantly offer something that people want.

<comment><USER3> "But it's your own fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed their primary search algorithm which tanked your traffic. "

I used to work for an ecommerce site. Over 60% of our traffic and sales came from google. To handle those orders we hired people, then if we lost ranking in google we would have to fire them. How would that have been our fault?

<comment><USER2> > Over 60% of our traffic and sales came from google.

Because you did not diversify strongly enough. Certainly, Google is a great way to get lots of traffic but if 60% of your sales comes from a single source with whom you do not have a signed contract, it is your own fault if you cannot handle your business when the sales tank. It is no different than putting 60% of your investments in a single stock and seeing the company fail, wiping out 60% of your savings. Sure, you didn't cause the company to fail but you did plan very poorly. People keep blaming Google when this happens. But who told you to rely on Google for 60% of your sales, especially when you haven't paid them or signed anything with them with respect to search engine rankings?

Please note that my reply is directed more to the owners of the ecom site than you personally.

<comment><USER3> I think you missed my point. We can handle our business when google drops us, but the volume from google is large enough that it required hiring more people. If that goes away, we'd fire those people.

I agree with your larger point, but let's be honest, when people are shopping for things online they usually type it into a search engine (if they don't go to amazon directly). Depending on the type of product you are selling you may not be able to get around this.

<comment><USER4> A lot of the biggest brands see more "search" referrals that are just their brand name going through search engines.

As web browsers replace address bars with search boxes the search engines in a very real sense act like a utility the redirects the traffic flow through a page with ads on it. If you rank fine then no big deal, but if you don't show up for your own brand then that is brutal.

Of course most the sites hit by Panda were not hit so hard that they don't show up for their site name (unless their site was named after a generic commercial keyword where there were lots of other competitors already) but in the cases where it was a lot of those businesses were just hosed. It is yet another way to boost big brands...not only put weight on brand related signals, but make the generics more likely to get clipped by the algorithm at some point.

That forces non-brands to build brand assets & re-enforce them display ads and such. Google is even buying a ton of display ads that advertise display ads. And a lot of those ads highlight how display ads have increased branded search queries for the brands that are buying them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Matt Cutts wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things._

Matt Cutts isn't claiming here that subdomains are better than subdirectories, just that they are treated differently (which should come as no great surprise -- "different things are treated differently" isn't exactly a shock.)

Suggesting to someone that they try something different when their first approach doesn't seem to be working out is hardly revolutionary or headline- worthy.

But somehow this short quote manages to get a whole blog post hung on it, with the eventual conclusion that "the average webmaster is told to "sit and spin"".

The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between subdomains and subdirectories.

Also: _All we know is that it has been close to a half-year since Panda has been implemented, and in spite of massive capital investments virtually nobody has recovered._

Well, of course.

Panda was aiming to lower the rankings of certain kinds of content-suppliers. These sites weren't supposed to be able to just make a few changes and recover; they were supposed to be permanently affected.

Panda wasn't an assault course that Google built just so that a few webmasters could test their skillz.

<comment><USER4> "The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between subdomains and subdirectories."

That presumes that the algorithm behaves consistently across sites & that the author of the article has dozens of sites that were hit by Panda to do a variety of scientific subdomain tests on it.

Of course, neither of which are actually true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not feeling a whole lot of sympathy for the SEO crowd that caused the spam clusterfuck in the first place. Search results are better. That's all I care about. If your huffpo/associated content clone isn't ranking first anymore, cry me a river. When I google something it means I'm looking for an _informative site_ on the subject, not your useless crapfest.

Furthermore, this is now a few SEO articles I've seen hit the frontpage today with very few people in the comments seeming to like the article. Considering HN has a very respectable pagerank of 6 and doesn't use nofollow tags, could it be that we're getting spammed for backlink juice?

<comment><USER7> For backlink juice almost certainly not as the links don't stick around very long. For traffic on the other hand? That's a more likely possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What actual search results became worse _for users_ as a result of these changes? Anyone got examples?

If this is a matter of certain SEO-reliant websites being sent to the back of the line and not being able to figure out how to cut in front of everyone else again, well, _good_.

And the Google index is still plenty spammy, as we discussed just recently on HN. There was also an article about lead generation sites crowding out genuine local businesses for searches like "locksmith emergency portland". Google needs to be trying more changes, not less.

EDIT: oh, read some replies down the thread and feel the love for the SEO guys. I get it - heavy SEO and outright search engine spam at this point is more annoying than email spam ever was.

Here is a message for the SEOers: "Nobody wants to hear you complain. Nobody cares. Nobody sympathizes." I say we google-bomb that and make it the first result for "SEO". [That was a _joke_.]

<comment><USER4> AT&T made the same argument with their network as well. And the problem was that you couldn't see all the hidden costs baked into that _while it was happening_.

You could only see those sorts of hidden costs after the fact, when waves of innovation appeared quickly out of nowhere. Held back for decades, a half- century of innovation appeared in little more than a decade.

How do you calculate the cost of that? In Tim Wu's book titled The Master Switch [http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires- Borz...](http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires- Borzoi/dp/0307269930) he highlighted that AT&T example & asked a person to imagine some company deciding to hold back email for 10 years & trying to guess the incalculable astronomical costs.

Now, to be fair, I wouldn't say Google is anywhere near as anti-competitive as AT&T has been historically, but they have certainly grown more adversarial over the past 3 or 4 years. Compete.com shows over 5% of Google's downstream traffic going to Youtube & that traffic flow was up 18% in a single month...after lots of other user generated content sites got whacked. Think Youtube is different & better than the others? In some ways it may be, but if you read the comments below the video they are about as low quality as they come anywhere across the web. Something like 30% of Youtube pages have "Bieber" in them.

site:youtube.com search on Google = About 621,000,000 results

site:youtube.com bieber search on Google = About 203,000,000 results

The other big issue (at least inside the United States) is the large companies are not hiring that many people domestically...so most of the job grow _must_ come from small businesses.

A lot of the companies that were wiped off the search results were not "evil SEO spammers" of some sort, but rather small ecommerce shops & such. The drastic shifts in business do increase risks (perceived & real). How much innovation & economic prosperity that destroys isn't something that is easy to calculate.

I am doing better now than I was before Panda, however a lot of people who are not SEO experts who run small businesses just lost their business. As search keeps raising the bar on the number of steps required to be good enough to be in the game a lot of small businesses get torched, because who has time to know their craft & jump through 30 hoops for Google? Of course that is no big deal to the SEO pro who focuses on SEO...but to the small business who has to do everything from accounting to taking out the trash such a large shift in traffic & increase in complexity in search is devastating.

And, if we go back to why the update was even needed, it was primarily driven by Google funding MFA content farms/factories like Demand Media's eHow & "answer" scrapers like Ask.com.

I can show you one HUGE example of the search results looking nastier...check out some of Google's product search integration in the search results.

I just searched Google for "necklaces" and the products they showed cost $60, $8, $19, & $5. They are not widely representative of the diversity of the category, look ugly, and are generally of far lower utility than the affiliate sites & smaller specialty ecommerce sites that got torched & are now considered spam by "the algorithm".

There are also cases where some original content creators had their sites whacked, whereas the file hosting warez sites violating their copyright outrank the original source. Search can't create a much more damaging ecosystem then penalizing the creative sources & directly funding their parasites.

A parting thought here...we are generally the most unique where we are the most refined & we are generally the most alike in how we are vulgar.

As the web moves from specialty shops to big box stores (aka: big brands) a lot of that diversity & beauty becomes less accessible. Google is/was one of the few counter-weights to the big business walled garden interests online. As they place more weight on branding, they ultimately act much more like that they were trying to differentiate themselves from.

What is the long-term cost of less diversity & less economic specialization? That is how one needs to frame the above "what actual search results became worse for users as a result of these changes" question.

We are in the middle of a trend rather than at the end of it, so the answer is currently unknown.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this because I'm a "victim" of Panda, and this article did a good job of explaining the frustration I'm dealing with.

A lot of the commenters seem to feel that Google doesn't owe webmasters anything. I disagree. Every time a SERPs page shows up with my site in the results, Google is selling advertising on top of my content. I gave them permission to use snippets of my content in return for sending whatever traffic they think should be sent my way. It's a mutually beneficial relationship (though they definitely hold most of the power), but it's certainly not a gift. We can both pull out of the deal at any time, but there's no reason to since we're both profiting from it.

I run sites to help college students find jobs and internships. One is called One Day, One Job and the other is One Day, One Internship. Every day I write about a new company. It's usually 400-600 words and I talk about what the company does, who they are, why they're interesting, and what kind of entry level jobs or internships they have. I get thank you notes from readers every day. I've helped put dozens of people into jobs they never would have found without my help. I get a ton of praise from college career services offices. There's certainly a consensus that my content is extremely high quality, useful, and something that Google would want searchers to find.

I've made SEO an important part of my strategy. I've optimized my pages, reworked my site architecture, and built a ton of high quality links. I've also done a lot of keyword research to try and better understand the psychology of a job seeker whose main tool for finding jobs is the Internet. I've tried a lot of other marketing techniques. I keep coming back to SEO. It's the absolute best way to reach job seekers. I've always followed Google's rules as closely as possible. I keep up with what Matt Cutts is saying and what Google is posting on their Webmaster Central blog. I'm not trying to game the search engines, I'm just trying to make the most of the opportunity that they offer to expand the reach of my content.

One Day, One Job got hit by Panda on February 24th. One Day, One Internship was never hit. Because the sites are nearly identical (including a lot of posts that are 90-95% shared content), it seemed weird that one would get hit and the other wouldn't. I figured out quickly that it had to be some sort of duplicate content issue. For a long time Google has said that duplicate content was not something that would be penalized--they'd just filter out anything that looks to be a duplicate. I found that One Day, One Job would rank for job related queries, and One Day, One Internship would rank for internship related queries. Rarely would they both show up on the first page for a given search term.

The reason that I built two separate sites was that I thought it was the best choice for my users. Job seekers and internship seekers are looking for slightly different things, so why not build separate sites and e-mail lists for them. I'm not trying to manipulate anything. I'm just trying to serve two mostly separate audiences with very similar content. Google assured me this wasn't a problem--and if it was they'd just show the user the most relevant result.

Google messed up with Panda. Even though One Day, One Job always gets the content first, has more and stronger incoming links, and has been around longer than One Day, One Internship, it got the penalty. One Day, One Internship is not the canonical source, but Google thinks it is.

So far I've been unable to fix this. I tried linking all duplicated posts on One Day, One Internship to the corresponding post on One Day, One Job to tell Google that it was the original source. I gave this over a month to set in, yet saw no results. Now I've used rel="canonical" to give Google a strong signal that One Day, One Job posts should be seen as canonical. It killed my One Day, One Internship traffic, and One Day, One Job has not seen any benefit yet. I'm waiting to see if it will eventually start working, but I'm not very hopeful.

My next step may be combining the two sites. I'd prefer not to, but it might make the most sense. I probably should have built the two as one site from the start, but I liked the idea of having two separate, but connected brands. That decisions shouldn't matter as much as it does now.

I strongly believe that Google's search results are worse without my content ranking as well as it used to. Obviously I'm biased, but I think most of my site's users would agree. My traffic on One Day, One Job is down 30-40% from where it was, and I've generated thousands of dollars less in revenue than I would have without the Panda penalty.

I don't doubt that Panda had an overall positive effect on the search ecosystem, but it really sucks for those who have worked hard to play by Google's rules. The repeated contradictions have caused me to follow paths that I may not have otherwise chosen.

Traffic from Google is extremely valuable to me. I'm willing to bend over backward to get it, but how do I do that when they are completely unclear about what they want (or even worse when they're very clear about what they want and then they change their mind)? I've been through their "guidance on building high quality sites" (see here: [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more- guid...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on- building-high-quality.html)). I know that I've built an extremely high quality site. Panda was a huge setback for my business. 5 months later I still haven't recovered, though I've tried a number of things that one would think would work. What do I do? I can't give up on Google. It's too important.

<comment><USER9> I suspect I got hit by Panda too... we should know what are the basis for their classification or else, we're all in the dark. Asked here in HN but nobody answered so I'm guessing. The only clue I have is that after the "Panda hit" I'm on the 4th/5th page on the results on Google but still on top on Bing and Yahoo..

<comment><USER4> look in your web analytics. the dates that a lot of people saw sharp traffic declines are:

        Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
        Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
        Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
        Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)

source: [http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a- ranki...](http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking- factor-than-algorithm-update-82564)

<comment><USER9> My surge started on May 19 and it abruptly ended, actually plummeted last July 8. I still got first page results in Bing and Yahoo..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Did anyone else read a lot of anger/frustation in this piece?

From Matt's quote, I just got the impression that sub-domains are an option and that GBot treats them as logically cohesive groupings of information, I didn't see anywhere that he said subdirectories were suddenly bad.

Then the author went on about best practices and getting burned for them -- he'd know better than I would if that has been true over the longer term -- I just didn't interpret Matt's comment to imply all that.

Some people must have benefited from Panda... I still find plenty of junk in my search results, but it makes me sick to think that if they hadn't rolled it out how impossible it would be to find good content at all.

I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.

<comment><USER4> 'Some people must have benefited from Panda'

Largely 2 groups of sites did \- big brands & big media sites / sites with plenty of "brand" signal \- smallish sites that were too small to get clipped when a lot of the larger (but not BIG BRAND large) sites in their vertical got hit.

'I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.'

That is a great point...and in Tim Wu's book I mentioned above, he highlighted how this was the big fundamental strategic difference between Google & Apple.

The answer to how it all turns out is still a bit unknown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author's based his career around the ability to pervert search results - and apparently he's frustrated because this fucks up the results for everybody so badly that Google have to change their algorithm.

Sympathy? Not really. I hope he stubs his toe so hard they have to amputate his foot.

<comment><USER4> And I hope you stub your typing finger so bad they have to amputate both of your arms. :D

You sound much more clever than you are. Or was that backwards?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry, not feeling much sympathy for SEO types. Their purpose is directly opposite that of the average web user.

<comment><USER13> Yeah they are like marketeers -- a little may be necessary (Oh, our entire site shouldn't be in flash?) but more than that and you end up in a war of attrition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe this will force companies to build an audience with more legit methods like word of mouth.

<comment><USER4> The big content farming companies understand that they have to stuff the "brand" ballot box. Which is why Demand Media is doing all sorts of stuff with promotional sponsors & Aol is closing down many of their niche sites at the same time they are adding a celebrities section to the Huffington Post. Huffington has a green light to spam with authority after the Panda update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, let the trillion sub-domains bloom for this season. The next animal that will come around (panda?) will then decide their fate.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if I can create a trillion on my own and if that would help.

<comment><USER16> If your subdomains consist of letters and numbers, there are over a trillion possible 8-character subdomains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> God forbid people actually put useful content on their sites instead. :T

<comment><USER4> This presumes that the stuff that is ranking higher is more useful than the stuff that disappeared. That, unfortunately, is not always the case. A couple counter examples:

<http://www.seobook.com/huffington-post> <http://www.seobook.com/doorway- pages-ranking-google-2011>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Right now, it is much easier to create directories in a script. You can't exactly do that with subdomains yet because they are hosted on DNS servers separate from the http server. That makes subdomain structure intrinsically much more valuable - it's guaranteed to be created by a human.

Maybe the nextgen frameworks will incorporate an easy way to create subdomains via a script?

<comment><USER2> Nah, subdomains aren't any different from directories. You can easily setup wildcard subdomains and all of them run off the same code base. I can easily have username.mysite.com show the user's profile the moment a user signs up. No changes to any servers needed.</comment></comment>


OG Youtube Star "Onision" Banned from Patreon - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/26/20984785/onision-doxxing-patreon-deplatformed-twitter-youtube <comment><AUTHOR> Here is his theatrical meltdown after he got banned. It's really...something: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHDIq4b9vVQ&t=80s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHDIq4b9vVQ&t=80s)

There are allegations of relationship abuse and also that he groomed young fans and pressured them into sex, which is absolutely disgusting if true. Onision is the same guy behind the "I Am A Banana" song which was popular back in 2009: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH5ay10RTGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH5ay10RTGY)

It seems like every day brings us new evidence of the hot mess forming around Youtube personalities.</comment>


Americans divided on party lines over risk from coronavirus: Reuters/Ipsos poll - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-polarization/americans-divided-on-party-lines-over-risk-from-coronavirus-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN20T2O3 <comment><USER2> The USA is really quickly drifting away from our civilization. Way too many Americans have lost any connection with reality and have become Fox News zombies, to continued believing Drumpf was an accident or Russian hack.</comment>


C++ vs. Rust: an async Thread-per-Core story - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@glaubercosta_11125/c-vs-rust-an-async-thread-per-core-story-28c4b43c410c <comment><USER2> What library are you using? The pattern you are trying to achieve should be achievable in principle. This pattern is commonly called "scoped" threads (or "scoped" async tasks in this case) in the community.

The problem might be that if the executor you are using doesn't guarantee in its type signature, that the task you are trying to launch doesn't outlive the lexical scope there, the compile gets rightfully angry. There are some executors that guarantee that; see here: [https://docs.rs/async- scoped/0.4.1/async_scoped/](https://docs.rs/async-scoped/0.4.1/async_scoped/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was remarkably well written and reasoned. I would welcome more.

The author is correct that C++'s greatest weakness, and one that can never be fixed, is that other code can do things that violate the model your code depends on. It is not enough to have your own discipline, the rest of the system needs to observe the same discipline at interfaces. And there are many possible, correct disciplines to choose from.

Rust imposes one of the possible disciplines for memory-object management that enforces one set of non-negotiable tradeoffs and costs. You the programmer are relieved from choosing a discipline or discovering what was chosen, and from discovering that two subtly different ones were used in different parts of the system.

Memory-object management is not the only place where systems need a consistent discipline, but others can often be referred to it; and every program needs at least the one, besides any others.

Arguably the reason Common Lisp never took off is that practically nothing can be assumed about any other part of a system. C++ has enough forced consistency to drive adoption, but might better have had more. C++ has a lot more tooling than Rust does to capture semantics in libraries, so the library is the natural boundary for a discipline, and it is not unusual to find more than one safely co-existing, but it is also not unusual to find them not safely encapsulated, and in conflict.

Ultimately there is no substitute for sound design. Rust's limits help ensure a consistent design, but the cost in abstraction power is high.

<comment><USER4> Personally, I've written a few multi-threading implementations at various places and my accumulated wisdom is that any data received by threads has to be passed by values or be constant. Anything else is a lot of risk for little value.

I've also come to the conclusion that async/future are a bad idea for multi- threading. They're fine for managing mono-thread asynchronous events, but using them as a poor man's thread pool is begging for trouble. Among the problems are:

       - you do not know if the execution will be synchronous or not.
       - you often don't know and have no control on how many threads will be spawned.
       - it makes following the flow of data and execution much harder.

What I've come to rely on is the trinity of:

       - a thread provider (non-committal name, we all know it's a thread pool behind the scene), which provides the threads of execution.
       - a work item provider, which provides the input data to the algorithm.
       - a worker provider, which provide workers that receive a work item, execute an algorithm and produces a result.

Then something gets executed when all three are united. For the curious, the reason to have a work item separate from worker is that it allows the worker to be long-lived and re-used and, most importantly, allows containing heavier data. For example, a cache. The work item are light and are just the necessary data needed to process one... work item.

I've also sometimes divided the work item into two parts: a work item and a context. The work item is the changing data to be processed while the context is the almost constant data, and can be shared. (For example, configuration data.)

<comment><USER5> That sounds a lot like how the linux kernel manages it with its workqueues data structure, which gets consumed by kworker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There should be a way to define an async executor API that works like Crossbeam's scoped threads API, so that the executor lives inside a fixed scope and is guaranteed to clean up any outstanding tasks before the end of that scope. Then it would be safe to accept references to longer-lived values on the stack. My guess is that there's not much demand for such an API outside of toy examples, though. (Does anyone use `crossbeam::scope` in production? It's a beautiful and important concept, but it seems to occupy an awkward performance point of "I care enough to worry about heap allocations, but not enough to use a thread pool.") EDIT: Ah, just saw GolDDranks' similar comment.

<comment><USER7> There are, but you often run into limitations in praxis.

For example you can take a look at tokio::LocalSet::{block_on,run_until} which require neither 'static nor Send or Sync. But then spawn_local does require 'static.

Same is true for smol where we have smol::block_on, smol::{Executor,LocalExecutor}::run and here too we have the limitation that calling spawn on a LocalExecutor requires static.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's an incredibly long-winded way to say "don't think of reference counting as a (potentially-avoidable) cost; think of it as an _investment_." Then you, too, can be happy, as long as you don't think too much about it.

<comment><USER9> Sometimes the response you get from someone after _telling_ them something and _showing_ them something are different.

Those who already agree with the point probably think it long-winded. Those who would argue the point if told it probably appreciate the nuance the context provides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Man, that c++ code triggers my hatred of lambdas. Instead of a hopefully descriptive function name, whose code I can peruse separately from trying to understand the enclosing code, I have to understand every goddamn line in real time.

lambda more than 5 lines should be a compile error.

Why not move C++ towards readability instead of enabling laziness in the guise of features ?

<comment><USER11> Do you hate the C++ syntax for lambdas or the concept of lambdas?

<comment><USER10> The concept of anonymous blocks of code in the middle of a flow annoys me. I fully appreciate that sometimes they're useful, but like everything else in C++ there is a way to misuse them horribly and you will run across code bases that do it eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or, you know, actual garbage collection (generational, JVM-style)

<comment><USER13> If you compare Cassandra and ScyllaDB, the garbage collection causes serious problem with 99.9% latency.

<comment><USER14> Only because Java is yet to support value types.

In languages like Nim and D, where all C++ allocation mechanisms are available alongside a GC heap, there are plenty of ways to improve performance.</comment></comment></comment>


Desert Farm Down Under Grows Food Without Soil, Groundwater, Fuel or Pesticides - <AUTHOR> http://weburbanist.com/2016/10/27/desert-farm-grows-food-without-soil-groundwater-fuel-or-pesticides/ <comment><USER2> That's like the coolest thing ever. Seriously, if you can grow vegetables and legumes at scale w/o tapping groundwater it would be an amazing development.</comment>


Facebook = Fail - <AUTHOR>

uCentric.org WIN!
We know that many HN readers are Fb Fanboys, but we have just finished successfully testing our new secureNet social communication and sharing framework which starkly exposes Facebook's Auschwitz-like approach to personal privacy and makes Google redundant for (intelligent) personal users.
Results:
\100% secure
\100% user pwned and controlled \100% IP secure with FULLY ENFORCEABLE copyright (in most civilized countries) over content \100% you-centric \0% middlemen \0% robots, spiders, crawlers and unwanted "guests" \0% monitoring
\0% tracking
\0% filtering
\0% probing
\0% assF77ing - EVER!
Codename: Communicado Release:
Private Alpha - really soon! Public alpha - in about 2 weeks to sort gi Beta - Before end 2010 Launch - >Beta && <Jan 21, 2011
PS: Diaspora, MyCube, Appleseed, etc, etc, etc = meddling-middlemen = FAIL = you just don't get it.
PS: no more alpha testers needed thanks. <comment><USER2> On the plus side, Facebook actually loads.</comment>


Ask HN: why every HN android app fails at searching HN? - <AUTHOR>

I couldn't find any HN android app which works for searching posts... Has it to do with API changes or what else? What are you using to read and search HN on your mobile devices? Thanks. <comment><USER2> There seems to be a danger of a recursive loop as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you refer to my duplicate posts it was my fault (well, Hacker News 2's app fault, since it was not notifying me of the posts being submitted), deleted them.</comment></comment>


Hundreds of billions in cash sitting on the sidelines - <AUTHOR>

There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars parked in cash that aren't doing much to increase productivity and improve human welfare.  In short, there is a tremendous savings glut, with most of that money outside the US, mostly from sovereign wealth funds.
However, every day there hundreds entrepreneurs and startups that are being starved of any funding, large or small. There is a disconnect between all this money available and difficulty of startups to raise capital to bring new ideas into the economy and better society.
I realize many ideas brought by entrepreneurs are questionable, but there should be a better way to allocate capital than it is currently done. <comment><USER2> The startup climate has been and still is changing for a multitude of reasons, and funding is changing along with it. Agencies like YC make the barrier to entry lower for a lot of companies. This is not to say that it is easy at all, but good ideas/teams/people coming to the surface is getting more and more common when compared to the past.

Look at mattmaroon's slides that are on the front page right now. They outline a lot of problems and why they occurred. People are understanding what goes well, what doesn't, and why.

</comment><comment><USER3> are there really that many good ideas that are unfunded?

i think the advent of these seed watering ventures like Y-Comb and Techstars, the industry is getting the saturation it needs.

maybe instead of just seeding startups, someone needs to work the other side and convince venture to invest. squeeze both ends and they meet in the middle kind of deal</comment>


The Art of Travel (1855) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://galton.org/books/art-of-travel/galton-1855-art-travel-1st.pdf <comment><USER2> This book has one of the best tables of contents I've read in quite awhile. I love how you can see the outlines of British imperialism starting to emerge as you get further into it -- at first it looks like it's organized in this very methodical way with the opening sections on "Fire" and "Water," but then you notice that there are whole sub-sections with instructions for "Secreting Jewels," "Poacher's Work" and "How to dispose of Guns at Night."

As an aside, my all time favorite table of contents from a travelogue is Sven Hedin's _My Life as an Explorer_ which features gems like Chapter 24, "I Discover 2000-Year-Old Cities in the Desert," Chapter 61, "I Become a Shepherd," which is followed up by Chapter 62, "A Tibetan Captive Again."

Anyway, thanks for posting, this seems like an interesting read.</comment>


Rupert Murdoch and Google Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/10/rupert-murdoch-and-google-part-2/ <comment><USER2> Vastly underplays the downside, I feel. The worst-case scenario isn't that News Corps sees that it's a bad idea after a few weeks or months of experimenting with a Google-free world - the worst-case scenario is that common sense wins out for once, the loss of Google indexing kills off readership, News Corps companies are brutally battered by sudden obsolescence /and their competitors fill in the void/.

It takes, what, two weeks to instill a habit? How long will Murdoch stubbornly refuse to give grounds on the issue?

<comment><USER3> Thing is, newspapers are _already_ taking a battering.

1) Sticking with the status quo is obviously changing their business for the worse.

2) No one in the entire world has solved the huge reducing revenue problem for content producers, so we can't say there is a better way for sure yet.

3) The web seems to have a short memory. It's all about now, not about then. If they change back, I don't see much changing for them.

I personally think that sticking everything behind a registration wall with no external indexing, while selling ads to go alongside their content _should_ be a better model.

It's essentially what facebook does, and it seems to be working for them. Google is great for the user, but not for the content owner used to large revenues for said content.

Edit: Thinking about it, google really do "own" the worlds content; they monetize it for extremely little effort on their behalf. I love this, and so do you, but from a content producers point of view it's horrible. They used to be in control of distribution & now have to give a significant portion of the revenues they once had to a company who merely index the information, or others that make near-automated efforts to aggregate it. The only way they can _possibly_ get back that revenue is to wall the garden.

<comment><USER4> I really don't see why they don't wall the garden, but leave a window for the spider to see into the garden.

Let Google index it and advertise it. Let readers see the adverts and pay for the full content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I pay for a subscription to Murdoch's WSJ, and get a paper copy delivered every morning as well as online access (cost is huge, $400/year). Even so, I read most WSJ stories because I find them linked from Google News where I have lots of special news-search sections defined. I just don't have the time to page through 75 sheets of paper every day (as I did twenty years ago), or poke randomly around the WSJ's very slow and poorly-organized web site (vastly inferior to NYT). If Murdoch's WSJ disappears from Google News, it will disappear from my world and very likely I'd just end my subscription. More subtly, when the WSJ writes about me (very occasionally), most of the value to me comes when their story is chosen to be placed outside their paywall and can be linked freely; if WSJ stories become uniformly inaccessible, there will be little incentive for sources to cooperate with WSJ reporters and columnists.

</comment><comment><USER6> As soon as I see a paywall, either on a news site or an academic site, I just go elsewhere. Murdoch might enjoy a short term boost in profit if he forces readers to a paywall, but longer term he's just making his content irrelevant to most internet users (which is just about everybody these days) and so would lose media mindshare.

</comment><comment><USER7> uh, sounds to me like you have the upside and the downside mixed up there. Them not taking control of the news market by realising they have already lost it sounds like an up to me.

I'd rather have the power of where people find information in the hands of a company that responds to popular opinion than one that responds to the US government at will.</comment>


'We Need to Clean This Up': Clinton Aide's Newly Public Email Shows Concern - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/politics/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-emails.html <comment><AUTHOR> The newest Wikileaks demonstrates that Obama lied when he said he learned of Clinton's use of her private email server when the American public did. He received emails from her private email address according to the hacked emails.

So, apparently Obama lied to us.

But furthermore, when he received these government emails from her private account (hrcoffice.com ?), he knew that she was risking national security and breaking laws doing what she was doing, but he did not report her to the FBI or anyone having to do with security.

EDIT: This story [1] linked to by the NYT article, Clinton's senior aide said that Clinton "could not use a computer." and did not know her own email password, having to rely upon aides.

PCs have been ubiquitous for 35 years, how is it possible?

[1] [http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton- emails...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-emails- fbi-228607)

<comment><USER2> Maybe he is lying, maybe not, but I would hardly say this is proof. Most mail programs today default to showing the name of the sender, not their address. Even if he did see the server name, I would imagine he has many more things on his mind.

And, let's say he did know she was using an outside server -- that doesn't mean that he would have any reason to suspect that she was sending classified info through it: in fact, only a tiny handful of emails containing classified information have been recovered.

<comment><USER3> She had apparently talked to Colin Powell about how to handle information and it seems like the advice he gave her was to just try to not send or receive any classified data and that's what it looks like she was doing as there weren't any emails that contained classified headers or footers that I know of (which are how you generally would know if something was classified). I doubt Obama knew she had classified information on the server unless he dug through all of her actual emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think Colin Powell gave her that advice. The reason is that he and others know that all government business, whether classified or not, must be on government servers because by law, there must be a record of all government emails. Again, by law, this information can be disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests, something which Clinton wanted to avoid.

<comment><USER4> A quick google would reveal that he did in fact give this advice:

"He did write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department," a Powell spokeswoman said.

Read more: [http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/colin-powell- hillary-c...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/colin-powell-hillary- clinton-emails-227861#ixzz4OKFJlh00)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is a file? (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/what-is-a-file/# <comment><USER2> This is a very wordy paper that basically just says: People want to own their pictures (and associated (Facebook) comments/likes) and similar and want to know what happens when they delete them, and ownership may be the most important aspect to visibly preserve.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the problem when somebody creates something simple that just works: very quick there will be a lot of other people trying to add to it "just a little thing" and then you have a lot o complexity. It only stops when nobody can figure out what that thing became.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice, but change the concept of a file, and you'll run into all sorts of interoperability problems.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but it will have to be done eventually. A lot of the pain in modern programming is trickle down from bad systems abstractions we're stuck with from Unix and its contemporaries.

<comment><USER6> bad system abstractions? Can you elaborate on what a good abstraction other than a file for a operating system would be?

<comment><USER7> Just have persistent objects (or strongly typed values). LaTeX documents, tables, images, videos, songs, computer programs, etc. have very little in common, so why make them all files?

<comment><USER6> File is an abstraction that provide a consistent semantics on what operations can be performed on a piece of arbitrary data/resource that the operating system can expose. Nothing prevents you from creating another layer of abstraction that work with your various objects.

I would love to see your proposal on a unified semantics of all these possible "strongly typed values" that the OS can expose.

<comment><USER7> Please read this: [http://thomas.enix.org/pub/rmll2005/rmll2005-shapiro1.pdf](http://thomas.enix.org/pub/rmll2005/rmll2005-shapiro1.pdf)

Because EROS processes survive system shutdown, no file system is required to provide persistence. The operating system instead implements a transactional block store with only two kinds of objects at the disk level of abstraction: pages (which hold user data) and nodes (which hold capabilities). Human naming services (directories) are provided by applications that act as directory servers. EROS does not have any notion of a "file system root directory" or a universally shared file system at all. An EROS system is simply a very large space of objects that are connected together by capabilities. Surprisingly, the resulting persistence implementation is both simpler and faster than a conventional file system.

You can actually go further, and dispense with the operating system too, by running an image-based programming language, such as Smalltalk or Lisp, on the bare metal. Device drivers and other essential functions of operating systems then become part of the language.

<comment><USER8> I read the paper, and it appears to describe a scenario where users don't even own the computer---they just rent time on a computer run by somebody else (known today as the "cloud"). Also, it seems to describe a silo of applications where moving a file across applications becomes a significant action. I'm reminded of a story of a person, who, when asked to copy a file, loads up the application that made it (in this case, Microsoft Word), opens the file (from the harddrive) and saves it in a new location (the floppy drive), not even aware that one could just "copy c:file.doc a:file.doc".

It does not seem like a system I would like.

I'm also skeptical of image based languages (but I'm willing to admit I am biased towards files).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We are still stuck in the past:

1 - Machines use a Unix filesystem model even cruder than the Multics model it was derived from

2 - Network services and especially micro services essentially use an object model (mostly JSON)

3 - And with phones, sandboxes, containers and security concerns, applications are reverting to file silos (where a given app's data won't interoperate with other applications). This happens at a macro level too where the FBs of the world understandably want to rope you into their "walled silo".

Is it even possible to embrace a more flexible and powerful model at this point or are we stuck?

<comment><USER10> For the majority of people, the benefits of Facebook's walled garden approach are cheap, immediate and easy to understand. The disadvantages are only problems for a minority. What's more, Facebook can afford to hire a whole marketing team to promote its approach.

Until someone can show concrete benefits for the masses, we will continue in the current direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love the file hierarchy. Miss it on my iPhone.

<comment><USER7> Objects are linked to each other in different ways, so some kind of database (I prefer graph databases) with a proper search engine aware of different object types (instead of just grep) would be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The first suggestion for a way forward is perhaps the most obvious: it > entails rethinking the role of metadata. [...] But metadata is also now > becoming central to what users understand as a file, though they might not > always think of tags, comments, playlist information and so forth as > metadata. For what a file is is now often bound up with the things added to > it, not only by the originating user but by others too.

> Consider for example, behaviours reported by [5]. In their study of > teenagers and their virtual possessions, participants reported that part of > the value of photos posted on Facebook was the metadata associated with > them: comments and 'likes' were so pertinent that they were sometimes > printed out alongside photos and pasted onto bedroom walls as a collection. > This materialisation of the digital is indicative of a difficulty associated > with the current technological landscape.

> It is not clear how one would digitally export a Facebook photo in order to > view it in this way with another computer program or application, and this > remains so despite recent innovations in the Facebook service. Yet it is not > surprising that users should want to treat these entities in the way they > treat a file. If they can upload their photos to Facebook, and given that > they do so the photos are file-like objects, why can they not download them > again, while retaining the value they have accrued, but still with the > benefits of file-like properties? Although it is now easier for users to > export their data from Facebook, these exports, once represented simply as > 'a file' on a hard disk, lose their potency.

Certainly what we don't need is more meta-data attributes on files.

IMO one should either

1\. Create a simple file format that bundles the contents of a post. For example a zip file with the media, comments, and likes and such, or

2\. Have the post (for example as JSON) and media in separate files and store the references to the other files in the post, sort of like in HTML. Perhaps have the computer system be able to extract such references and let you easily operate on files that "belong together".

They even mentioned databases and relationships earlier, and grouping files together in different ways.

\---

> This bundle, this new 'file' type, is not merely a complex data type; the > important thing from the users' point of view is that it is a mirror of the > social life that the file enables.

I have no idea what they are trying to say here.

If you create a file format like I said that contains all of the data that made up the original post then you can represent that at a later point and you can choose to render it just like facebook would. Surely that's exactly what the users want?

\---

> However, this immediately raises complexities. For instance, images posted > to Facebook might be copied not only by the person who posted them, but also > by others. In these circumstances, should these others be able to copy the > metadata, the tags as well as the thing-itself? If so, what of the rights of > the owner or, if you prefer, the maker of the initial file? When people copy > an originating file, would they be creating a new file or would their new > entity be a version of the original one? Is there an order of precedence > that we are proposing and ought this to be reflected in the concept of a > file that might apply?

Bits don't have color. [http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

Trying to accurately track origin of a post is going to lead to nothing but trouble.

Don't try to build a technical solution for something that is not a technical problem. If someone breaks copyright laws you take them to court and sort it out there.

>It seems to us that there is a distinction that ought to be made between things that are put on the web, which the originator wants to have file-like properties (even as that thing develops a social life once on the web), and those things that are posted that the user does not want to have file-like properties. The properties we are thinking of have to do with questions like whether ' making a copy' means making a copy, a version of the thing itself, or having and owning (as it were) the originating thing itself and all that has ensued in that thing's social life.

WHAT??? Just, WHATT??? Are they purposely trying to ruin the internet? It's not up to one person to decide in which manners others copy it or not. Once again, if someone is doing something illegal, take them to court. And if they're not doing something illegal, don't try and restrict what other people are trying to this.

Fuck this. No, really. I'm done reading that paper.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I first started using computers, I did so on Microsoft Windows 95. The first applications that I used were Netscape Navigator and MS Paint, as well as a few games. Being a child when I was introduced to computers, I did not have any notion about what was going on inside of the computer at all. All I knew was that there was a screen, a mouse and a keyboard, and that I could click on things on the screen and I could type on the keyboard.

The first time I was confronted with the notion of a file was certainly when I had painted something in MS Paint and I had clicked the save button. I think I had been told to not click "My Computer", which makes sense -- you don't want a child to accidentally move, delete or rename files on your computer. Hence I had no notion of the file system. All that was know to me was the desktop, the start menu, and a select few programs accessible through either icons on the desktop or in the start menu.

I had played a couple of games on the computer, and in those I could save the game and then the next time I could resume the game someplace near to where I had last been -- or rather, I could have my father help me resume the game. So when I managed to save the painting I sort of expected that it would just show up on screen the next time I started MS Paint. When it didn't I was a befuddled for a moment but I just concluded that I didn't understand what had happened and didn't give much more thought to it. I think this is pretty typical of how most children treat situations that confuse them.

This is user level 0. You are able to move the cursor and to type a little bit on the keyboard and to run some specific programs, but that's it.

During the next few years I learn how to work with files in MS Paint and other specific applications.

However, not all files are equal. If I try to open a file that was made in one application with another application it will often either result in an error message or in garbage on the screen.

This TIED my notion of a _file_ to _specific programs, and to the content that is shown on screen_ for the LONGEST time. It is a bit difficult to explain what I mean here but I think that to the majority of the population of a whole, this is what a file is to them. They view a file as an icon that you can open in a SPECIFIC program. And they call that file a "<name of program> file", or they call it by the extension, but they have no idea, or they have the wrong idea, about what is the contents of the file. If you give a regular Windows user two files which are both named say .dat, (a commonly used generic file extension for data,) then they will think that those two files necessarily must be of the same kind "somehow" and that they are to be opened, both of them, with some specific, unknown program. This is bad and harmful in my opinion.

Likewise, I was quite confused for the longest time about "My Documents" and "My Pictures". I was confused by why things were being put in "My Documents" by default when those things were not things that I considered to be "documents".

Furthermore it was quite mystical to me for a long time how "My Computer" could be on the desktop at the same time as my desktop was under a folder that was within "My Computer" itself. This however is not a _huge_ deal. Just yet another thing that didn't make sense to me while I was trapped with the graphical representation of the system.

The paper is arguing a point of view that a different abstraction should be used than the hierarchical file system. I agree to some extent but not for the same reason perhaps.

I think that the desktop metaphor is inherently harmful as a first introduction to computing. The desktop is fine ONCE you've understood how the system works from a bit of a different point of view (though perhaps NOT _necessarily_ a _lower_ level as such), but until then the desktop metaphor will trick you into believing very many things that are simply not true, and which are going to come back and bite you in ways like those mentioned in the paper.

As for the doing away with the hierarchical file system, I agree. Throw it out. I enjoy Unix, but I don't hold the hierarchical file system particularly dear. In fact, I think Unix has some very powerful ideas, and it sucks a lot less than Windows, but Unix is just a local optimum and nothing more.

\---

Finally, on a bit of a different note, I'd like to state how I tend to think of files now.

To me, a file is data. Often that data will have been structured in a particular way, and sometimes it will have been structured in no particular way. A valid python program has a structure that allows the python interpreter to execute it. A text file that someone wrote using a plain text editor has a certain encoding but no structure beyond that. A file that was created by putting random data into it will not have any structure. A file that was corrupted will have some data that does not conform to the intended structure.

I am aware that the order of the bytes and their property of being one single, continuous unit, in persistent storage might don't match the order that is presented to applications by the operating system, but in my use of computers this has not yet mattered so I choose to ignore that fact. So I too am living a bit of a "lie" with regards to how I think about files, I admit that.

Some files are not really files, but they are convenient because they offer you a simple interface to some useful functionality. I am speaking of course of /dev/urandom and friends.

Regular files are representations of "something". Like a text, or a photo, or anything else that you can create a meaningful representation of. You can load the data into a program as long as that program has been programmed to understand the structure that is used in the file that stores your representation of your data. If the program that you would like to use does not understand that file format you either convert the file to some other format if an acceptable conversion is possible with an existing piece of software. If none exists, you implement it yourself, either into the program that you are using, because it's open source as is the vast majority of the rest of your software, or as a standalone program that does just conversion, in both cases you are able to do this because the file format is sufficiently simple, or at least the subset of the format that you need is, and the format is open. If you are using proprietary software (including using multiple pieces of proprietary software) in combination with proprietary file formats, then either

1\. The proprietary piece(s) of software is/are able to do _absolutely everything_ that you need to do (or at least, you think so), or

2\. The data is not sufficiently important to you to warrant building better tools yourself, or

3\. It's so difficult to build these tools that you don't have an alternative. For example, the data might come from very complicated equipment that you couldn't build yourself even if given a million years to do so, and the data is so complex that you aren't able to understand it from inspection nor from reverse engineering, or

4\. The requirements changed (see also point one about thinking that the software did everything that you needed it to do), or

5\. You've done fucked up. You didn't do your research and now you've stuck with this. (See also point one about thinking that the software did everything that you needed it to do.)

Anyway, once you've loaded your data into a piece of software that is able to read it, something happens, and it brings us back to what we were talking about.

\---

Once you've loaded your data into a piece of software that is able to read it, or "opened a file" as is often the way that this is achieved, I would argue that you are not operating on a file. You are working on the data that was in the file. This is a very important distinction.

When you hit save, you are not saving the file. You are requesting that parts of the application state to persistent storage. Again, a very important distinciton.

If people knew this and understood this, computers would make more sense to them. They are right in the paper that the mismatch between what developers, computer scientists and others think of as files is the cause of a lot of the kinds of problems that people have when they are dealing with files.

But where did the users gain their misinformed ideas about files from? I've said it already, I think the desktop metaphor is to blame. Again, it's an ok metaphor _as long as it 's not the only metaphor_.

</comment><comment><USER13> October 1, 2011

<comment><USER14> Thanks, added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "We suggest that one aspect of this adaptation is to encompass metadata within a file abstraction"

I thought File Streams would be the ideal place for metadata, except as I read elsewhere, the metadata isn't transfered when you export to the cloud. And didn't Microsoft try and fail at such with WinFS. I guess it's easier to write papers than actually build the thing. No doubt whoever does actually succeed in writing one will have to pay Microsoft a patent license.</comment>


Making a Google Wave-like History Slider - <AUTHOR> http://tutorialzine.com/2009/10/google-wave-history-slider-jquery/ <comment><USER2> Very nice, coherent tutorial on a new widget!

</comment><comment><USER3> You mean etherpad-like slider?

<comment><USER4> I recognize that you're making a point about which of the two came first.

Nevertheless this one, while dragging, makes discrete jumps that correspond to change events in the document. This makes it more like the widget in Wave. The one in Etherpad continuously follows the horizontal movement of the mouse, and jumps to the nearest discrete change point on mouse up.

I like the movement in Etherpad better, though. I might like it better if both were combined so that the real slider made continuous horizontal movements, and a shadow-pointer made discrete jumps while dragging.</comment></comment>


Get lost in immersive, psychedelic coding art - <AUTHOR> http://sdt.bz/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=66392

<comment><USER2> Yawn, demo scene has been doing this since the mid 80's with personal computers and digital art pioneers like Charles Csuri ( [http://www.csurivision.com/](http://www.csurivision.com/) ) were playing with super computers, since the early 80's, late 70's. Nothing to see here.</comment>


Finally Google PR updated - <AUTHOR> http://www.gettingmorevisitors.com/2008/04/30/finally-with-a-google-pr/

<comment><USER2> My newish blog got a PR4 yesterday, this is with 10 PR5/6 blog post links, a .edu link, a blogroll or two, and a whole lot of reddit links.

And... be careful. Generally this audience doesn't care about SEO topics, so continually submitting your SEO blog is an easy way to get banned.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Post about google finally updating their page rank + what to do to get and maintain PR</comment>


Foxconn to employ 1 Million Robots - <AUTHOR> http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/30/2355258/Foxconn-To-Employ-1-Million-Robots?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

<comment><USER2> There are two stories on this currently posted to HN, this one, and the one at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827882>

I have no idea which will get the discussion, if either, but it might be worth trying to make sure any discussion doesn't get unnecessarily split.

As I type this, the other submission has a useful comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh well, at least Robots can't commit suicide.</comment>


Rate my name  - <AUTHOR>

Hello all, I have been working on a service that is a platform for events (posting, sharing, receiving, etc.) and although the site is almost in a launch-able state, I don't really know how I feel about its name. Currently, the name of the site is, "Eventricle". To elaborate on the underlying meaning of the name: just as the ventricle of the human heart disperses blood to every part of the body, "Eventricle" disperses events (analogous to the blood) to a large social community (analogous to the body), hence the name; "eventricle", a ventricle for events. On one hand, I like the name because it has a significant meaning, but on the other hand, I feel like the name may be too complicated. Any thoughts on the name are much appreciated. <comment><USER2> People that don't know what a ventricle is or don't immediately make the connection will probably think something else. Assume the worst. Maybe to them it sounds like "Event Testicle"

It's all around very weird, probably doubly-so for non native english speakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> true, in hindsight I really didn't "assume the worst" as much as I could, thanks for the tip

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I hate to be blunt but the first thing I thought was testicle. Not what you want the first impression to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> blunt is good, I prefer the honesty. thank you for commenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that it would probably be mis-spelled as eventrickle if it was read outloud.

However that works on several levels, a steady even trickle of events through to you, plus when you say it, it still sounds like ventricle. Eventrickle.com is available too.

The only issue is that Eventrickle is associated with IV drips and medical products. I guess you could turn that into an amusing strap line. Eventrickle.com - drip feeding you the best events info.

Anything ending -icle makes me think of icicle anyways. Not quite as bad as Event Testicle, but still!

I'll do a bit of research and throw a few avail event based domains your way.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Even trickle"...sounds like having a pee. And I agree it also sounds like a part of your gonads.

How about focussing on the benefit the site delivers - "Invitem" / "Invyta" / "Invitemall"

</comment><comment><USER6> I agree with the comments being made here. The name is difficult. When you create a brand you need a hook for which customers can remember you by. Considering the events angle of your project might I suggest the following: www.eventelo.com, www.eventello.com [the mis-spelling version] or www.eventelio.com these names trip off the tongue and can be remembered easily, plus they are currently available - be quick if you are interested in them

<comment><AUTHOR> definitely interested in those names, ty for the feedback

<comment><USER7> This might also be available as it gives me an error when I try to go to it:

<http://eventflow.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Germans on the committee wanted the new car to be called the "Global Krupp", to emphasize integrity of engineering and tradition, the French preferred the hip and modern "Rapper", and the Italians "Caprice". They settled on the "Crappee", which was well received on the continent... unfortunately 80% of the car's sales were projected to be in the UK, where the name reminded them of shit.

\- Ben Elton, "Gridlock", paraphrased.

</comment><comment><USER9> Way too complicated, doesn't have any flow. I wouldn't make an analogy for a social network to the physical aspects of the human heart; the heart may be a fascinating organ, but most people don't want to think about a slimy organ when they are online. If you really like the heart connection, try something less detailed, like eventbeat or eventflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> the heart connection is irrelevant, it was just something that seemed like it could work. Thank you for commenting, you helped confirmed my suspicion that the name is indeed too complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not a big fan of the name. Conjures too many references to peeing and testicles. Besides, it's a mouthful and could be hard for people to spell. It's cool that you're trying to have the name actually be meaningful, but I think it's almost more important to have it be catchy, easy to say and spell first. Good luck on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree with the other posts; too complicated. Plus, some people are grossed out by blood.

The name of your startup is definitely lower on the list of priorities when preparing to launch. I noticed eventyo.com is available. Just register something simple like that, and get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Dillon Edwards Investments (google it and you'll get the joke).

Coming up with a non-word name sounds like your task here. The word "event" doesn't portmanteau up well with anything and it doesn't contain comfort phonology the way, say, "blackberry" does.

</comment><comment><USER13> My rule of thumb when naming anything:

If you have explain it, then it's too complicated

If you're going to go the pun route it needs to be something easy and, as much as I hate to say it, dumbed down.

</comment><comment><USER14> You're joking right? Eventricle? As a non-native English speaker I can tell you that this name is a big disaster.

</comment><comment><USER15> All I can hear in my mind is "Event Trickle" and I think about golden shower conventions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> well, based on everyone's feedback I think it is apparent that I will NOT be using the name eventricle... I think the most important lesson to be learned here is the value of perspective</comment>


Users Given Less Than 24 Hours to Decide Fate of Ethereum - <AUTHOR> http://aakilfernandes.github.io/users-given-less-than-24-hours-to-decide-fate-of-ethereum <comment><USER2> The cynic in me is starting to wonder if all these articles about Ethereum are nothing more than PR releases.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure PR releases are supposed to be positive =) This is pretty negative.</comment></comment>


Facebook app reviewing process now takes more than 6 to 8 weeks… - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/iRc6Fmk <comment><USER2> For what permissions?</comment>


Modifications in Apache .htaccess file for web application security - <AUTHOR> http://www.0x000000.com/index.php?i=567&bin=1000110111

<comment><USER2> Interesting way to block some attacks early. I'm curious to hear how many people use .htaccess like this for security. Seems like these attacks would be blocked regardless if you keep your server patched and use good application design/development principals (like never trusting user input, not using GET queries for destructive operations, etc.), no?</comment>


Show HN: AirMapView – An Android Library for Maps Without Google Play Services - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/airbnb/AirMapView

<comment><USER2> This is great! I wonder if Google will prohibit access to Google Maps tiles in the future for working around Google Play requirement?

<comment><USER3> I'm sure if they do the fallback implementation could just as easily be OpenStreetMap. It's really great to see this open-sourced though. It seems like it would be a common problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are also currently working on adding OpenStreetMap as a map provider, so that could also be the fallback instead of the web based solution.

<comment><USER4> How much of the world from OSM could you fit on a 128GB SD card?

<comment><USER5> All of it 4 times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is also OSMand that uses OpenStreetMaps and allows you to download tiles for offline access (which is wonderful if you're overseas).

While I realize AirMapView is a library that you can include in your map, I wonder how difficult it would be to modify OSMand to do this, which would be able to leverage the offline maps as well

<comment><USER7> Not to mention at least in Western Europe OpenStreetMap often has much better maps than any competitor. The routing isn't as good yet but that's getting better quickly.</comment></comment>


Spotting a Craig's List Scammer - <AUTHOR> http://fvrit.com/archive/2008/06/06/spotting-a-craigs-list-scammer.aspx

<comment><USER2> It's 'Craigslist', not Craig's List.

/sorry, not trolling, consider this a preemptive troll strike to save you some grief later on.</comment>