Two capacitor paradox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_capacitor_paradox <comment><USER2> Its easier to think about this using the water pressure analogy. Imagine a large barrel full of water connected to another identical barrel. The first barrel is filled to the top whilst the second is empty. A valve is opened between the two barrels and they equalise with half of the water in each.

The initial energy is mgh and the final energy is 2 * (m/2 * g * h/2) = mgh/2 so half of then energy has disappeared. It is clear that work could have been done by the water moving between the two barrels (like in a hydro-electric power station).

<comment><USER3> And the resolutions are the same as in the capacitor example: either friction in the pipes damps the oscillation, or the inertia of the water keeps it oscillating between the two barrels indefinitely and half the energy is kinetic.

<comment><USER4> So how do we capture this 'resolution' in actual equations? Why aren't the equations revealing this to us?

<comment><USER5> The actual equations do capture it. It's just the simplified minimal equations that result in 'paradox'.

A full model is complicated by the fact that your capacitors have an internal series resistance and leakage resistance, and that the leads and circuit board traces have resistance and inductance. Just like the pipes and valve has some resistance to flow, and some water might leak out or evaporate, and the water has inertia and nonzero viscosity, and turbulence will turn some of the motion to heat, and depending on the phase of the moon, the time of day, and the compass orientation of the barrels, the water may be pulled into a picometers- higher tide in one barrel. When you say "they equalize with half the water in each" you don't typically mention that the phase of the moon may be a factor.

<comment><USER6> Still, picometers are very different from "half the energy in the system".

We do store energy in water towers for example, so it is pretty surprising and unintuitive that if you put two large water tanks, one full and one empty, _right next to each other_ , open a valve between them allowing their levels to equalize, then assuming there is no distance and you used teflon coated valves you lose... half of the energy as they equalize!

I certainly wouldn't have thought so. I'd have thought you keep 70%-95+% of the energy.

Actually the oscillation explanation didn't match my intuition at all, because I would have thought the water flows from high to low until the point of equalization and then stops flowing, without oscillation.

I get that this doesn't happen, but I would have thought it would!

<comment><USER7> In normal situations, you would not lose half the energy, or hydropower would be totally bunk (actually maybe not, considering the efficiency of burning fossil fuels…) But in this degenerate case, you cannot ignore the losses.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure? I was going to add that the intuition comes from demonstrations we might have seen, where in a series of tubes, regardless of shape, water will be at one level. As in this picture:

[https://www.physics.purdue.edu/demos/display_page.php?item=2...](https://www.physics.purdue.edu/demos/display_page.php?item=2B-03)

So is it not accurate to say that water does this by oscillating and throwing away energy as parasitic losses, until it equalizes?

Are you saying in general does a system of connected tubes NOT throw off lots of energy as it gets into the equalized state shown?

If it does, I think this fact should also be mentioned when teaching the "water seeks its own level" demonstrated above. (Called Pascal's vases.)

<comment><USER7> Here's a video showing water oscillating: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVEbh_COcRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVEbh_COcRY)

<comment><USER6> Cool! Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once got this question on an interview, and they didn't know I'd heard it before. So I pretended to figure it out during the interview. I gave him a correct answer after just a few minutes, and they cut the interview short and had me directly proceed to the HR office to proceed with onboarding. Two years later I told them how I already knew the question. I've been with the company for 6 years now.

<comment><USER9> Isn't that quite unethical? You are knowingly misleading a potential employer when you play games like that.

<comment><USER10> I once interviewed fresh out of college for a tech job at a big shop. When the interviewer got to the puzzle questions, they prefaced with 'And be honest if you've heard it before. We want to get one you haven't heard.'

Seven puzzles later of me saying, "yes, I've heard that one" and giving an short description indicating that I understood the solution, the interviewer became visibly upset/annoyed.

And so when they asked the 8th question I suddenly 'didn't know this one.' The interviewer was delighted. Of course I did know it already but pretended to work my way through it.

Got the offer, didn't take it because that interviewer would've been my boss' boss.

<comment><USER11> Similar story: I had an interview for an internship at a trading firm, in which they asked me several questions _that I wrote_ (for a math competition at my school). I took the honest route and explained that I had authored all these problems, leading to the interviewer getting so annoyed that they just cut the interview early.

Unsurprisingly, did not get an offer.

<comment><USER12> How about being interviewed using your own book, but the interviewer didnt notice authors name on the cover, doesnt understand the questions and butchers the problems? ;-) Happened to Elecia White (of [https://embedded.fm/](https://embedded.fm/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this should be called a paradox. It's just a case where the limitations of the model (ideal everything) is clear and leads to inconsistent results. Adjusting the model and making it more realistic, quickly clears up the "paradox". To me this seems like something one would use as an example in a physics lecture to show when certain assumptions are necessary and when they aren't.

<comment><USER14> the birthday paradox is also not a paradox. the namers of such things just like to use the word 'paradox' for some reason. it probably sounds more puzzling to initiates.

<comment><USER15> Good point. A paradox is something that produces an unexpected contradiction. It must be unexpected, otherwise any trivial false statement such as 2+2=5 would also be a paradox. Russell's paradox is a good example since no one expected a contradiction. The birthday paradox on the other hand does not produce any contradiction, so it's just a case of sloppy labeling.

<comment><USER16> By that description, the birthday paradox is a paradox for anyone who doesn't already know it. The instinctive answer is generally 1/2 the total.

<comment><USER17> _> the birthday paradox is a paradox for anyone who doesn't already know it_

It is a fate of any solved paradox. A paradox is a confusing paradox only to a point when you learn where the contradiction comes from, and how it does it, and how to avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This example violates one of the core assumptions of circuit theory, which is that you cannot have a node with two voltages. As soon as the switch closes, is the voltage at the switch Vi or 0v? It would be both, which is impossible. If you had some kind of component between the two then there would be a voltage drop across it, and you would get realistic results.

<comment><USER19> I mean, that is a simplification, and in the real world it really follows some sort of differential equation that just happens to be very fast. And the description on Wikipedia does seem to use an explanation based on this differential equation, e.g. see "When a steady state is reached".

<comment><USER20> The differential equation is still a model and not what's happening in "the real world", remember, all models are false.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's simpler than that. When you short a capacitor, where does the energy go? An ideal capacitor has an infinite current in that situation. Inductors have a comparable situation - when you open-circuit an ideal inductor, you get an infinite voltage.

In practice, you can get hundreds or even thousands of volts from inductors that way, which is how auto ignitions and boost-type switching power supplies work.

Similar problems come up in the idealized physics of impulse/constraint physics engines. Getting rid of the energy in collisions requires hacks to prevent things from flying off into space, a problem with early physics engines.

<comment><USER22> That's one way to solve it. More generally, thinking of edge cases or simplifying the problem is a good problem-solving strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Adding the second capacitor is equivalent doubling the area of a single capacitor. If you had a plate capacitor where the plates were extendable you could charge it and decrease the energy by extending the plates, which tells you that there's a force that is pushing to extend the plates. Of course there is--the charges on one plate repel each other and "want" to increase their spacing. If you do extend the plates there is a force times a distance, which equals work done by the charges, decreasing the capacitive energy.

<comment><USER24> This is a beautiful explanation, thank you!

It's also compatible with barbegal's hydraulic pressure analogy elsewhere in the discussion. A liquid- or gas-filled tank feels pressure (i.e. force per area) on the walls as the fluid "wants" to either (1) flow to a lower gravitational potential energy location, for a liquid tank in a gravitational field, or (2) expand in volume, in the case of a pressurized gas tank.

</comment></comment><comment> n-gauge Here's another one - put an oscilloscope across a capacitor and turn off the circuit it's connected too. Quickly short the capacitor with something, and watch the voltage on the oscilloscope as the capacitor discharges, remove the short and watch it start recharging slightly.

Where does this charge come from?

<comment><USER25> It's a non ideal behavior of a cap, and some dielectric types have it worse than others. I once made a sample-and-hold for a data acquisition system, and must have tried every type of cap in the bin until I found one that resulted in the least amount of correlation between subsequent readings. I think it was a polypropylene type. Mica was the worst. I don't think I tested an electrolytic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> FYI - this is a popular intro level interview question at semiconductor companies. This mechanism is the whole basis of how DRAM works, as well as the foundation of some cap sense technologies. Likely plenty of applications I don't know about, either!

</comment><comment><USER27> Explained here:

[http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/capeng2....](http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/capeng2.html#c4)

For an infinitely small resistor the energy is effectively a spark pulse coupled directly to free space, and half is radiated away in EM waves.

<comment><USER28> Not an electrical engineer, but I wish this was higher. Seeing the integral completely reframes the problem and the paradox vanishes. The intuition is that charge transfer is a linear system (half goes here, half goes there), but seeing the integral form shows otherwise.

Thanks for the great source!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In the true EE parts reduction fashion, you don't even need two capacitors. One capacitor plus a switch works out similarly - in fact it's an equivalent circuit. Everyone has an intuition for shorting a capacitor (zap!). When there are very few components defining a system, the parasitic components must be significant.

<comment><USER30> The spring/mass model works really well here, too. Connect two identical springs together between a pair of fixed walls. Pull on it so that one spring is stretched and the other is at its natural length....

<comment><USER31> Or release a ball bearing on one side of a U-shaped track. The ball ends up on the bottom of the track, where did all the potential energy go?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is effectively the same paradox some friends and I discussed in college. Another way of looking at it is:

If you connect an ideal voltage source through a resistor R to a capacitor C, the amount of energy required to charge the capacitor is CV^2 while the amount of energy that winds up in the charged capacitor is 1/2 CV^2. The other 1/2 CV^s is dissipated across R. This is unaffected by the value of R, even as R -> 0\. The only thing that changes is the charge time.

R = 0 is impossible for real circuits, but no matter how close you get you still lose half of that energy in the resistor.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hearing about this problem while I was taking a stats mech course (online from Leo Susskind) this reminded me more of energy / entropy relationship than a paradox. For example if we have hot and cold reservoirs separated by a divider in a bath, when we remove the divider entropy of the system increases when it reaches equilibrium. After reaching equilibrium, moving the divider back will not cause the two reservoirs to return to the initial hot cold state.

The system with 2 capacitors seems like a good analogy to a heat bath; when the switch is flipped the charge is divided equally between the capacitors when it reaches equilibrium. The entropy of the system has increased, and the potential to do work has decreased. The number of possible states the system can be identified in has decreased by half (it is not possible to know which side had the initial charge after the switch has been flipped). Flipping the switch back will not bring the charge back to only one side. While this line of thinking doesn't explain the physics of what is happening, there is clearly a (statistically) irreversible change going on which seems like the natural language is energy, entropy, and temperature.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone have a sense of how much the idealization of circuit design limits people's imagination when designing real circuits? Are there fruitful possibilities that could be explored but aren't because the abstraction doesn't contain them?

<comment><USER22> This question tests understanding of limitations of idealized circuits. Anyone with hands-on experience of shorting a capacitor knows about sparks and arcing that accompanies it.

<comment><USER35> "While in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wouldn't really consider this a paradox. It is a failure mode of the idealization you made in saying that wires and capacitors have zero resistance and inductance.

Even if you work by your idealization, saying wires have zero resistance means that every piece of connected conductor in the circuit is at the same potential (in the absence of a magnetic field) so saying you have two connected capacitors charged to different potentials is already violating your assumption.

You can find similar edge cases in almost every situation and field of study where you try to simplify things with an approximation, and most of them aren't called paradoxes.

</comment><comment><USER37> Got this question in an interview at National Semiconductor (out of MSEE school). I didn't think it was too paradox-y: we didn't work the math through fully but my answer of "start with the circuit with a resistor with value R and the energy will burn up in R; now recalculate as R→0 and the energy will still burn up in R (even though R is zero-y...". That seemed to satisfy the interviewer (who had not heard that answer before).

<comment><USER38> I think an interesting question following it up is, how do you transfer energy between capacitors then, without losing so much energy? (someone else asked if this is a fundamental limitation)

There are many alternatives. A good start is noting that the inefficiency is actually lower the lower the starting voltage difference:

V1 = V, V2 = V-dV

V' = (V + (V-dV))/2 = V+dV/2

We can define efficiency as the ratio of energy lost by the first to energy transferred to the other.

dU1 = U1-U1' = CV^2/2-CV'^2/2 = C/2 (V dV-dV^2/4)

dU2 = U2'-U2 = CV'^2/2-C(V-dV)^2/2 = C/2 (-V dV+dV^2/4+2VdV-dV^2) = C/2 (V dV - 3dV^2/4 )

n = (dU2/dU1) = ( V - 3dV/4 ) / ( V - dV/4) ~ 1 - 3/4 dV/V (for small dV)

as dV → 0, n → 1. You lose 3/4 of the fractional difference in efficiency, so for 10% difference your efficiency is ~92.5%, pretty great.

Now, there are indeed devices that change voltages without energy losses! (transformers, for example). So if you plug in a variable transformer that keeps the voltage close to the target, your (dis)charging efficiency can be arbitrarily high.

Of course, if your second voltage is 0, the efficiency must start at 1/3 no matter what (which can seem to imply this cannot be changed) -- but as soon as you have a small voltage you can start tracking it and keep efficiency high.

Challenge to the reader: Use quantum mechanics and thermodynamics to derive a fundamental limit of efficiency (which must be less than 1 at positive temperatures) :)

<comment><USER29> Inductor in series with a diode. The voltage differential stores energy in the inductor's magnetic field, which comes back out when the destination capacitor is at a higher voltage than the source capacitor. The diode keeps the process from repeating in reverse (oscillation).

<comment><USER38> Cool, but what if you want the voltages to be exactly equal (while keeping no losses)? :)

<comment><USER29> Dump the charge into a third capacitor, connect the two you want equal, and dump the charge back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I remember explaining how an NMR machine works to an EE person. They simply refused to believe me that you could inject current into a supercooled superconductive magnet and have it circulate for months at a time. The only way I could convince him it worked was to point out that slowly the system did loose energy and you had to go back and add more current.

</comment><comment><USER40> Try it in Spice with realistic small resistances and inductance. Every electrical engineer is taught, in basic theory: The voltage on a capacitor cannot change instantaneously. The current in an inductor cannot change instantaneously. These become much clearer when you write down the INTEGRAL form of the V-I relations.

</comment><comment><USER41> The problem with this is that once you close the switch, you get an infinite current (aka short circuit). Bad idea!

<comment><USER42> Yeah, with substantial amount of energy in that capacitor, that is exactly how you weld the contacts in that switch shut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> @surewhynat

Why did someone mod you down dead?

\- quote - It's an exponential function on the W=CV^2

let's say initially:

C = 1

V = 16

W = 1 * 16^2

      = 256

When the Voltage is split between the two capacitors, the voltage drops in half from 16 to 8, but because there are two capacitors you count them twice:

W = CV^2 + CV^2

C = 1

V = 8

W = (1 * 8^2) + (1 * 8^2)

      = 128

Where did half the energy go? People are saying it's loss in magnetic radiation during the transfer. But on paper it still seems counter intuitive, so it's called a, "paradox," instead of just how an exponential function works. Something in the universe makes the energy levels exponentially higher as voltage increases. More electric pressure (V) = exponentially more energy. Cool! \- unquote -

<comment><USER38> Correction: It's not exponential, it's a quadratic (or polynomial).

(I think the difficult part isn't to accept that some of the energy vanished from the system, it just contradicts our expectation from having supposedly no dissipation elements)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Without reading the solution: wouldn't this impossible zero resistance zero inductance ideal setup result in infinite frequency infinite magnitude oscillations? Add in some resistance and the missing energy goes into heat generated by the resistance on the way to equilibrium.

Edit: also when I think about it there is a little bit of additional energy in the open switch which is itself a capacitor.

Edit 2: for this circuit to stay the way it is in the initial state, wouldn't the open switch need to have equal capacitance to the capacitors? Or some kind of voltage generating field applied across it that is removed when the switch is closed?

<comment><USER22> If inductance is zero, there would be no oscillations.

<comment><USER44> That would be true if resistance were non-zero.

<comment><USER22> To get oscillations, you need to shift the phase by 180 degrees. Capacitance alone (without some inductance) can only do 90.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> A somewhat analogous effect/paradox in thermodynamics is the Joule expansion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_expansion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_expansion)

</comment><comment><USER46> This is another instance of those situations where "the abstraction is leaky". Relatedly, I've seen (unfortunately) a few textbooks which attempt to teach basics of computing and digital logic by assuming that gates have no propagation delay, or at least that's what their timing diagrams seem to show. It's very puzzling because a lot of sequential circuit elements rely on that in order to work.

</comment><comment><USER22> A real-world analogy is a brick standing upright on the table. If you topple it and it falls, some of the potential energy is gone.

</comment><comment><USER47> I knew nothing about electricity until I started studying for my technicians license recently. It was actually very interesting and I learned enough that I could actually understand this wiki article. It made me interested in studying for the general and extra licenses since they have more advanced electrical knowledge required.

</comment><comment><USER42> Funny thing is - this is exactly what happens many millions times every single clock cycle inside pretty much any modern(-ish) digital CMOS CPU/ASIC, with the right-hand-side capacitor being parasitic gate capacitance in the driven gate.

<comment><USER48> Which in turn is why your CPU needs a heatsink.

And why reversible computing can be done without using energy ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is an easy one. The assumptions are flawed. W = (0.5) x(C)x(V) is a back- of-the-envelope shorthand for a whole realm of formulas in the study of capacitors, and it doesn't work in edge cases like this.

</comment><comment><USER50> I learned that this is also why you should never connect batteries in parallel - the power will oscillate in much the same manner, draining away the energy and wearing out the batteries.

</comment><comment><USER51> The 'paradox' in this experiment lies in believing that you can have a voltage across one of the capacitors and zero volts across the other before you hit the switch. In other words, you can't have two connected locations resting at different voltages.

      </comment><comment>--| |</comment><comment></comment><comment>---|  |</comment><comment>----
         --- +6 -6 </comment><comment></comment><comment> 0  0 -----

                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ NOT POSSIBLE!

Two capacitors in series are equivalent to one (combined) capacitor, just like a bunch of batteries can be considered to be one (combined) battery.

<comment><USER52> You can definitely have a charged capacitor in series with an uncharged capacitor. They only act as an evenly-split combined capacitor if they _start_ at the same charge.

Your diagram is wrong. Let's mark out some contact points:

      ---| |</comment></comment><comment>-| |---
        A   B     C   D

Voltages only exist _between_ points. To measure against ground, part of the circuit has to be connected to ground. Ground is a point like any other.

So when you measure A at 12 volts above B, it doesn't mean B is at any absolute voltage. If only one capacitor is charged, then A can be 12 volts above B while B=C=D. It works out fine.

If you attach ground to B or C, then A is 12 volts relative to ground, and B and C and D are all 0 volts relative to ground.

If you attach ground to A, then A is 0 volts relative to ground, B and C and D are all -12 volts relative to ground.

If you somehow attach ground to the midpoint of A and B, then A is 6 volts relative to ground, and B and C and D are all -6 volts relative to ground.

None of these are impossible. Nothing goes wrong until you try to close the switch.

</comment><comment><USER53> What experiments were done to settle the question which property of the "non- idealized" models is the dominant one?

</comment><comment><USER43> My brain hurts, is there a simpler version?

<comment><USER52> Yes there is, and it's listed at the end.

You have an ideal capacitor, charged to some voltage. You connect both ends, which empties it.

Where did all the energy go?

The answer is that there's no such thing as an ideal capacitor or an ideal wire. There are a few effects you can't avoid, but most importantly there are tiny bits of internal resistance that usually go ignored. In a short circuit, they become important, and will turn all the energy into heat.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Newscatcher API Beta – JSON API to search for relevant news data - <AUTHOR> https://newscatcherapi.com/docs <comment><USER2> Cool, I've used Webhose and NewsAPI, but it's always good to have another structured news feed option.

The one thing that sets these services apart is the ability to provide the full text of the articles vs. a snippet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but it is quite of illegal to redistribute the full article text.</comment></comment>


App.net: or why you shouldn't copy a successful company - <AUTHOR> http://kerr.io/app-net-or-why-you-shouldnt-copy-a-successful-company/ <comment><USER2> Sigh. One of the most discouraging things of Internet 'Culture' is to be the person who said "X is a failure" first, as some sort of street cred. Come back in a year or two or three and _then_ tell me its dead, but a couple of months in? Really? Hard to plot a trend line with one data point.

<comment><USER3> <http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is not under-usage per se, but hype. Caldwell's soapboxing about Twitter's failure to live up to its potential raised expectations, but didn't provide a solution to the chicken-egg problem. I'm sure Caldwell & co can build a great API and app platform, but that all becomes relevant and compelling only once App.net can grow a community a respectable fraction (1%?) of Twitter's size.

Of course, as noted elsewhere, it's too early to pass judgment - but it's also a good reminder that unless you like throwing around $50s (<http://ihave50dollars.com/>), App.net won't matter to you for a good while yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Early Reports indicate that App.net is not generating very much user engagement. In fact, most of their 10,000 daily posts come from about 250 users, a far shot from Twitter's 150 million users and 350 million tweets._

That's not a fair comparison. How many users did Twitter have a month after launching?

<comment><USER6> The number of users is irrelevant when measuring user engagement, at least when it is defined as the article describes. (But comparing early app.net versus a more mature Twitter may be relevant.)

To calculate user engagement they should take the number of daily posts and divide by the number of users (so with these numbers, for Twitter it is 350 million/150 million = 2.33 and for app.net it is 10,000/[# of app.net users...20,000 according to the study linked to by diego] = 0.5. This isn't necessarily the best metric since somebody could easily write a bot that makes several posts per second, which could skew things considerably. (I don't think anyone cares about how active peoples' bots are.)

It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users.

<comment><USER7> _"It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users"_

It's not only possible, it's certain. The average Twitter user doesn't tweet very much. I don't know if it's 5% or 1% that's responsible for half the tweets (I could find out), but it's definitely a small minority. This is expected for every content-based social network.

[http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of- july-20...](http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-2012)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite part of this is that he criticizes App.net for copying but is using a Wordpress themes that copies Svbtle and does so pretty blatantly with the WP-SVBTLE tag at the bottom left

<comment><USER9> It's a theme that you otherwise would not have access to unless you're part of the elite few that are actually allowed to post at Svbtle. I like the way it looks, personally.

It's on Github: <https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle>

And from that page:

 _Isn't this unoriginal?

Yes, in the same way svbtle is unoriginal. See the original ["inspiration" for svbtle] (<http://drawar.com>) _

<comment><USER10> The Atlantic Monthly has a theme that is only available to people the Atlantic Monthly has hired to blog for them.

The purpose of this theme is not to capitalize on the same design ideas as Svbtle (that's what the DRAWAR.COM link alludes to). The purpose of the theme is to dilute SVBTLE.COM because the author is so insecure that not being invited to a group blog makes them bitter.

A willingness to publish under one's own name using this silly WP-SVBTLE theme says way more about the author of the blog than it does about Svbtle.

<comment><USER9> >A willingness to publish under one's own name using this silly WP-SVBTLE theme says way more about the author of the blog

The Atlantic theme looks like a fairly generic news website, to be honest.

That said, wow. You are reading _a lot_ of personal bias into choice of website theme.

I was planning on grabbing this for my personal one just because I really, really like how it looks. If it's going to tick off people who over- extrapolate, so much the better ;)

<comment><USER10> I think it's a very bad idea to use this theme for your personal blog, regardless of what you think of Svbtle. But if you want your choice of blog theme to compete for attention with your ideas, that's your call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my mind, app.net is _incredibly_ interesting, but not because it is like Twitter. If app.net is going to be successful, it is going to be because they become very not-like-twitter, by becoming critical infrastructure that applications can easily talk together with. In my mind, app.net's competitor isn't Twitter, it's HTTP.

</comment><comment><USER12> OP is missing the point. I don't think App.net is going out to be a Twitter replacement. I don't think App.net requires the critical mass or wide spread popularity that Twitter enjoys.

Its a niche product that is serving a very particular purpose. I wish that some blogger or journalist would try to evaluate App.net on what its setting out to be, not comparing it to Twitter.

At the end of the day, App.net will be a paid service. It's not fair to compare it to Twitter. There is some overlap, but for the most part this is a different market segment.

<comment><USER13> I must have missed something. What is the very particular purpose that app.net serves? What is it supposed to be used for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Im not convinced that app.net needs to beat twitters numbers to win. If they continue with the paid membership model, then they can carve a nice niche in the developer community.

Not related to his point, but he isn't actually part of Svbtle, right? Not that it really matters, though I bet that annoys the hell out of dcurtis.

<comment><USER15> Isn't Twitters success mostly attributed to its mainstream user adoption? I'm not sure how app.net can survive on a niche developer community if that community is building on top of a platform that caters to itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All social networks suffer from 90/10 rule (90% of the content is generated by 10% of the users), so this really isn't surprising.

Other posters have mentioned this as well, but I think Twitter has too much momentum. Someone trying to do the exact same thing from the end-user perspective isn't going to be able to compete.

</comment><comment><USER17> Apart from the fact that it's extremely early days for App.net right now, this article assumes that Twitter will remain as it is now, and not deteriorate further with significantly increased levels of advertising and spam. App.net will likely become increasingly attractive as Twitter becomes more "manipulated" to deliver on those promised eyeballs.

I've paid up for App.net because I have a zero tolerance policy to advertising, and I don't want to be involved with services that have their primary business model built around marketing and advertising. In this case App.net is not aping Twitter, because Twitter will never indulge the idea of a world without advertising.

<comment><USER18> You also do not read magazines, newspapers or watch television?

You also do not use Google or Twitter (this isn't you? <https://twitter.com/scott_to_s>)?

<comment><USER17> Yes, that's me. And no, I don't watch terrestrial TV, or read magazines.

Yes, I use Twitter now, but I'd like to move away from it, especially if it continues to move in the direction that it's going... hence my subscription to App.net and my comment that you're responding to.

The fact that I have a Twitter account means that it is curretly useful for me, but it doesn't change my stance on advertising, which I do not tolerate. I also use Twitter via a client that does not pollute my stream with advertising, but this cannot last.

I'm quite happy to pay for a service that doesn't advertise or sell eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am not a paid supporter of app.net nor have I seen what they have built to date but I'd put money on app.net evolving into something different than what it is today. For those of you who paid into supporting app.net, I think you paid into the people behind app.net and not app.net itself. Give them time to flesh things out before you critique.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why are you finding problems with app.net instead of focussing on it;s good parts and possibilities. You say and talk about some fundamental differences with companies facebook and apple, but why should anyone believe your assessment. Future can not be predicted in the world of technology and app.net has a good chance like any other company.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm glad Tim Berners Lee built a protocol instead of a platform.

</comment><comment><USER22> >For an end user, App.net looks exactly like Twitter and it won't improve their experience in any relevant way that will make them want to switch.

The whole point of App.net is to be an API for other apps to be built on. The "Alpha" app or whatever is a twitter clone, but that doesn't mean that every app built on it will be.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not enough payment methods available. I would have an account if they would offer paypal.

</comment><comment><USER24> twitter irritates the least with ads. The same thing for linkedin or facebook would have been a lot better. Wait.. where is diaspora?

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, I guess the NFL season has started - here comes the _Arm Chair_ quarterbacks.

What did you expect from App.net. I think you are suffering from setting your expectations too high. It is designed to fill a niche - and it actually has a more sustainable financial outlook than Twitter.</comment>


Canon has ended sales for its last film camera – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/31/17412708/canon-film-camera-ended-sales-eos-1v <comment><USER2> My Canon 50E ( _Elan II_ in the US, I think), dating from 1996 or thereabouts, remains my all-time favourite camera and despite being 35 _mm_ film-based I still use it regularly. It's the camera I _really_ learned to compose a shot on and concentrated on B&W film I could develop and print myself. It's sad to see the his epoch come to a close.

<comment><USER3> The Elan was my first serious camera and I enjoyed using it and I took some beautiful images with it but when the original 5D came along, after swallowing hard about the price before buying it, I've never looked back. Nostalgia is good for some things, photographic technology isn't one of them.</comment></comment>


Chrome Disses Developers - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=33056

<comment><USER2> I actually think the Chrome guys are doing the right thing here. We got everyone to agree that Ctrl-T should create a new tab, consistently, in all browsers, and users should be able to depend on that behavior. If you need a full app-like HTML experience with no interference from browser UI, use an embedded rendering engine like PhoneGap.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a silly title.

Keyboard shortcuts are a major pain in web applications, you are inside the window manager with their shortcuts, the browser with their shortcuts, and the web application with their own.

If your application has "tabs" then you want to use the standard tab shortcuts, however the user may also want to use the browsers shortcuts (this has annoyed me a lot in cloud9 which doesnt let me close the browser tab with Ctrl+W)

I cant think of the best solution for this, I dont think chrome disabling access to them is going to help much though, but I can see why they did it

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I think this is a good thing. It doesn't matter whether it's a crappy script disabling the right mouse button for "copyright reasons" or an equally crappy script thinking that it should disallow me opening a new page or tab via the keyboard.

Neither behavior is acceptable and I consider it a very good feature of Chrome that it gives control back to the user in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER5> Chrome has every right to reserve certain key combinations. Chrome OS doesn't have any function keys, so alt+f4 can't work, and Ctrl+W is really useful. Likewise users expect that Ctrl+N and Ctrl+T do what's expected. Windows has the right to reserve Alt+F4, Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Del and since browsers are essentially operating systems now, they have the right to reserve certain key combinations.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually, Google just tried to prevent developers from hijacking common key combinations users want to be consistent between browsers.

I expect ^N to be "new window" regardless of the site I am visiting. If I had an app that rewired it to mean something else, I'd file a bug.

</comment><comment><USER7> What isn't clear, but seems implied, is that Chrome developers have reserved these shortcuts for use with Chrome itself. Google seems to place a high importance on keyboard shortcuts for their applications. The list of shrotcuts for GMail, for instance, is impressive. It would seem though that most of the developers complaining on that bug report are using control+[key] to demarc the border between editing and issuing commands. Google seems to make heavy use of cursor focus to allow compound commands (press this key, then another key) to demarc that same boundary. I'm not sure who is right or wrong, but I can't blame Google for directing development along these lines to suit their own purposes.

</comment><comment><USER8> tldr = Chrome won't let js capture certain key combinations like Ctrl+T, to provide a consistent usable experience for users.

A few developers are upset.

Personally, I applaud Chrome and think they made the right call. If I'm on a web page, and press Ctrl+T, I want a new tab.

</comment><comment><USER9> I started using Chrome _pretty much_ the day it came out. I don't know what exactly drew me in, but something made me keep coming back to it.

Just a couple of days ago, Firefox 5 came out, and it's the same thing. I like the new 'spaces' and 'pinning' of application tabs. Additionally they've adopted the 'tabs on top' and a neat new 'firefox button' to eliminate the dropdown menus. It's pretty slick.

Until Chrome comes out with these enhancements, I think I'm sticking with FF5.

Good thing too... I don't agree that this bug should be a "won't fix" ... so now, in addition to having become drawn to FF5 anyways, I can feel smugly superior for leaving :)

<comment><USER10> In Chrome too, you can pin tabs, the tab on top has been there since the start and even the 'normal' menu style ditched in favor of single settings button.

<comment><USER9> Oh! I'd never noticed tab pinning in chrome. Thanks. I agree that the FireFox is just copying chrome's style, but their "spaces" still gives them a slight advantage in my mind.

If chrome adds a slick tab groups management system, I'd probably switch back pretty quick. (it might not have been obvious, but the 'smugly superior' comment was a joke)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Overly dramatic title.

<comment><USER12> Agree. Wondering if this is enough reason to flag.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't look marknadal is an astroturfer. I think the simple feedback we are giving is quite enough for him to adjust his attitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The tone of the comments on the linked page are overwhelmingly shrill, angry, hostile, and even conspiratorial e.g. "That makes this problem even more cynical[sic]…" And the title of the HN submission ("Chrome Disses Developers") is little better.</comment>


Is Google Voice finally getting the love it deserves? - <AUTHOR> https://neosmart.net/blog/2014/google-voice-finally-gets-some-love/

<comment><USER2> Eventually only a data connection will be needed for mobile communication.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with this domain? - <AUTHOR>

I bought itmustsucktobefat.com and now I don't know what to do with it. Any suggestions what kind of site I should make with it? <comment><USER2> I don't think it looks like a very good url. What is your point in its use? To help or judge?

Having suck in it means I (just me) would probably never take it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think is too long domain name and uses the word suck (it could be bad for SEO i think).

Also google will be filtering health content farms, so thats not an option.

a blog about fat people the succeded to lose weigth?

</comment><comment><USER4> The obvious question must be asked: what was your initial plan with that domain?</comment>


Rate our App: Briquette for Mac - a new, native Mac Campfire client - <AUTHOR> http://briquetteapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice. A couple of us at G5 are giving it a try. We like the reply feature and left sidebar showing all the rooms.

A few issues: at some point the font size in my reply text field got too small to read. And several times I got the spinning beach ball. I'd like to be able to resize the right-hand column with the names of folks in the room, too.

Overall, though, I'd have to say I like it.

Just shoot me an email and I can send you more feedback from the rest of the team next week.

<comment><USER3> Yes, we've known (and been enraged by) the font-size changing bug as well. Not sure what the deal is with the beachball you've gotten intermittently, but there are a few updates in the pipe (waiting on App store review process). One of them allows you to resize the left column to your heart's delight, as well as fixing the strange styling issues in the message box when pasting rich- text. After the update, you should no longer be able to inadvertently change the style of text presented in the message box.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's still relatively early in development, but we're excited for our 1.0 release, and there are a ton of new features in the pipeline! It's built in MacRuby (a very fun experiment!) and uses 37signals' API, as opposed to scraping their web content.

Here's a few promo codes for the first ones to get to the thread :)

X77L3REXW9RL

7H97F4F7TRAM

W4LAAHKRTT7F

XKP7HYWN7KHR

L4JMW6ENWWE4

<comment><USER4> Awesome. I'll definitely give this one a spin at the office.</comment></comment>


Beware of the Tricks Used By Clients To Manipulate Freelancers - <AUTHOR> http://smashinghub.com/beware-of-the-tricks-used-by-clients-to-manipulate-freelancers.htm <comment><USER2> As others have pointed out already, the article is perhaps not the greatest. But it is a fun short read nonetheless.

I think the section on Fear struck home the most where she wrote, "This technique is being used by every other person. The best way to get something done from other person is to from a fear in him of losing something that is very important and this is exactly what most clients or employers do. From the fear of getting fired or staying out of work, people agree with working on the terms of manipulator."

Walk away power is so vitally important either as a freelancer, agency owner, or even an employee. This is where managing personal finances and business finances to the point that you do not _need_ their money _right now_ is very huge.

Also interesting about this point is that it goes both ways. Often times the client needs the developer more than the developer needs the particular client. Sometimes they realize this and other times they may not. That's just all part of the big game of life, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to jump on the bandwagon, but I dismissed this article a few paragraphs in. Horribly written, terrible pictures and didn't really present the information I was after.

"One way to trick freelancers with little or no time, is to write an attention-grabbing headline and follow it up with nothing. Job done..."

Bah.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh man, those stock photos... I had to make sure I wasn't at angelfire.com.

</comment><comment><USER5> By running over the headings while attempting to ignore the pictures, this does look like it probably has what I was hoping for -- at least some good information as a warning to newbie freelancers regarding what to watch out for when hiring clients.

However... yeah, as noted in other comments here, I can't see how anyone would get through this and take it seriously enough to let it impact their professional lives given the poor writing, editing, and the copious amount of garbage framing what might be a few good pointers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah some personal experience would benefit the article probably. Although the manipulation techniques described aren't the worst I've come across. One time a "client" said they didn't have money to pay for the done work, the guy claimed he had to sell his car to pay me.

Obviously when I refused to send the work without payment the money arrived the same day (it was a subcontracted thing, so I guess they really needed it as well).

</comment><comment><USER7> Intriguing title, but without anecdotes the whole article feels hollow.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ugh, the writing in this article is atrocious. Between the (low quality) stock photos, flashing ads, and poor writing, I'm wondering if this site is some sort of content farm.</comment>


Containment gets harder every day we delay - <AUTHOR> https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/dont-be-italy <comment><USER4> "So far, successful mitigaions in China/Korea have involved near-complete shutdown, very early in the epidemic, around the time of 100 confirmed cases."

From what I read, South Korea shut down almost nothing but had widespread testing available, including drive-through testing where people could sit in their car, get tested and receive the results via SMS next day. They also had the ability to very proactively search and locate people that had been potentially exposed to the virus via credit card transaction/location data.

<comment><USER5> But SK also published that location data online for all to see, something the US cannot do because HIPPA. People would make fun of those with the virus, such as one man who was tracked to a hotel associated with prostitution.

<comment><USER6> Public safety aught to trump HIPPA

<comment><USER7> So should we publish lists of everyone who is HIV+ in our cities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As Italian I can confirm you guys should hurry and close everything down sooner. I would however prefer the title said "don't be like the Italian government" instead of just "Italy".

Not everybody here is behaving like a moron, luckily.

<comment><USER9> What's the point in closing everything down? What happens when it reopens? Will the virus admit defeat and run away?

<comment><USER10> To assume good faith in your question: the point is to slow the spread, and to flatten the curve so that the hospital system is not overburdened and that as few people as possible that need emergency critical medical care fail to receive it.

<comment><USER11> So what does that mean in the long run? After virtual lockdown is lifted? A resurgence in winter?

<comment><USER12> \- If we can reduce / avoid overloading hospitals, people who get it after the lockdown will get better treatment and will be less likely to die than if they got it now.

\- Over time, we will come up with more effective treatments and perhaps a vaccine. We will likely also have more equipment like ventilators and protective gear at our disposal.

\- More people will have had it and built up some level of immunity, and "herd immunity" means it will not spread as quickly.

<comment><USER13> Herd immunity won't make a significant difference until half the population have had it, and a vaccine could be a year away (if ever).

<comment><USER11> This also all assumes that the virus won't be quickly mutating. If it is, vaccines and herd immunity will have diminished efficacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For people who are curious what living in China feels like now (video uploaded Mar 14th), from a Japanese director living in Nanjing, China: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM)

Things are getting back to normal, with tons of precautions.

<comment><USER15> Wow they pretty much thought of and solved every case where human contact could be possible. The elevator transportation in particular is pretty clever. Those Chinese cities are incredibly mobile. I can't even imagine how long it would take any US city to get to that point if ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not to downplay the importance of containment efforts I think there is something uniquely bad about Italy's mortality rates and something really good that the Germans are doing.

Based on the Johns Hopkins CSSE data for March 13

On March 13 Germany had 3675 confirmed cases and only 7 deaths. Adjusted for respective populations Italy was at this stage 9 days before with 3089 confirmed cases, by which time it has already seen 107 deaths. This projects 21x COVID19 mortality rate for Italy over Germany - what gives ?

Italy's outbreak is concentrated in Lombardy so maybe weighing for the population of that area rather than the entire country is more appropriate which means Germany is currently 16 rather than 9 days behind Italy but with mortality in Italy still being 13 times higher than Germany.

Possible explanations:

Italy's 3089 confirmed cases 9 days before are selected for severity - <USER2> people who arrived with acute symptoms were tested, whereas Germany's 3675 are the results of more proactive testing and are dominated by mild or non- symptomatic cases that would have passed undetected in Italy.

Italy squandered some of its hospital capacity on first-diagnosed-first- hospitalized basis regardless of severity and began triage too late wheres Germany does better job prioritizing hospital vs home treatment from the start.

9 days before Lombardy's hospitals were already over capacity with 3089 confirmed cases while Germany's still aren't today. Germany has 2.5x the hospital beds per population than Italy, let's assume this holds for ICU beds as well. If capacity is the sole/dominant factor in this and we say that 9 days before Italy was already over capacity with 3089 cases than Germany will have reached a similar over-capacity at around 10k confirmed cases in a few days and then its mortality rate will begin to climb.

<comment><USER17> Italy seems to have been a bit blindsided by the fact that it's home to a rather large semi-legal Chinese population [0], to a point where there were direct flights between Rome and Wuhan prior to the Italian government shutting down air-travel to China [1].

The German response has been rather decent, freeing up lab capacities and using private labs to scale up already solid diagnostics capabilities, which helps prevent cases from going terminal. [2]

As somebody working in German healthcare, outpatient care to be specific, we've already seen hospitals free up beds, by releasing non-priority patients to ambulative home-care around 2 weeks ago.

Starting this week schools will remain closed, Germany is going into lock-down with limited border travel and offering companies "unlimited loans" [3] to get through the resulting economic downturn.

[0] [https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news- analysis/fir...](https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news- analysis/fire-exposes-illegal-chinese-factories-italy)

[1] [https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/italy-suspends-visa- is...](https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/italy-suspends-visa-issuance-and- all-air-traffic-from-china/)

[2] [https://apnews.com/ad9a6af47c3b55fd83080c9168afaaf4](https://apnews.com/ad9a6af47c3b55fd83080c9168afaaf4)

[3] [https://www.businessinsider.de/international/coronavirus- ger...](https://www.businessinsider.de/international/coronavirus-germany- offers-affected-companies-unlimited-loans-covid-19-2020-3/?r=US&IR=T)

<comment><USER18> Chinese links didn't matter. Patient-0 in Europe was tracked to Germany in January. The most affected Italian areas do not have a particularly large official or unofficial Chinese population - but have massive economic and social links with Germany. The areas where the Chinese concentrate, like the Prato mentioned in your first source, saw _no_ cases - they all voluntarily self-quarantined as soon as the emergency exploded in Wuhan, and kept that discipline going.

Italy simply pays the price of a very elderly and weak population, coupled with a decades-long shrinking of public healthcare. Even in Lombardia, one of the best regions for healthcare, intensive-care units in public hospitals were instructed "in peace time" to run close to capacity as much as possible, in order cut beds and save money. This is how we ended up with less than a third of the capacity of Germany, and when shit hit the fan, it wasn't enough.

(Also, Germany is kinda fudging the numbers. They don't record deaths as Covid-related unless covid was absolutely the only health issue a patient experienced. That's not how victims are recorded in most other countries.)

<comment><USER19> Looking at German news, most reported deaths are reported as having prior complications or having died of other related illnesses, so the blanked statement about "don't record deaths" is clearly not true. If you have sources that it's happening partially, I'd be interested in those though.

<comment><USER18> It was reported in Italy (obviously in Italian) [https://twitter.com/Paolo_Tumolo/status/1237018245552582657/...](https://twitter.com/Paolo_Tumolo/status/1237018245552582657/video/1)

There are other reports of hundreds of deaths that were simply not tested for the virus, whereas in Italy they've tested pretty much every death since the outbreak in February. Considering that Patient-0 was infected at the end of January, the theory that there might be some under-reporting going on is not unrealistic. Germany probably just had the capacity to deal with this "under the radar" for longer than Italy.

This is hardly unique to Germany, btw - each country has adopted different methods to test and report, it will likely take time to get some decent convergence at European level.

<comment><USER19> Cases slipping under the radar, sure, I expect that's happened everywhere to varying degree. But also quite different from not reporting someone that's known to be infected "unless covid was absolutely the only health issue a patient experienced".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To be honest, at the start of this epidemic it wasn't that clear how dangerous the virus was or how easily it would spread. First it happened to Wuhan and we all thought that it wouldn't happen to us, then it happened in Italy and we still thought that we would be fine.

Thinking that it won't happen to you won't make it go away unfortunately, your country isn't special, if no drastic measures are being taken like full quarantine this will happen to you too.

My country is in full lockdown and still a lot of people don't see the gravity of the situation. People dismissing it as less dangerous than influenza are misinformed.

<comment><USER21> This pretty much describes the approach Japan is taking. We're special, it doesn't apply to us, it won't happen here. Deeply ignorant approach. I've got a family - including a mother-in-law with a pre-existing lung condition - <USER3> worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is just a general comment about all of these (really quite nice) data visualizations: they're based on confirmed cases.

Given the many issues with the limited availability of testing this of real concern as it makes it much harder to judge the accuracy of "X days behind", etc.

<comment><USER23> Also this is very different per nation. E.g. Germany has labs in most university clinics and a tight network of private commercial labs, which are nearly all able to test for COVID-19, while the situation in Italy regarding tests was much much worse, so they didn't see it comming at all.

So how can one really compare the numbers between nations when their testing capabilitied are so different?

The ground truth is certainly deaths - if you know the mortality rate if the virus you can infer from the number of deaths how many people had been infected at some point in the past.

Of course it would be much better to have an idea how many people are infected _now_ , so you can base your decisions on it..

The dangerous thing about viruses is that they grow in a logistic curve and the first part of that curve is exponential. So things can grow out of proportion literally overnight, like they did in Italy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Forecasting Germany as if it were Italy isn't entirely fair, given that Germany has only had 9 deaths with 5000 confirmed cases while Italy had close to 200 deaths by the time they managed to confirm 5000 cases.

As far as I can tell the situation does seems to be developing at the same rate, but going by the confirmed deaths I'd place Germany about 2 weeks behind Italy, not a mere 7 days. Which for exponential growth matters _a lot_.

Edit: Also note that forecasting countries as if they were South Korea has the opposite problem as the fatality rate of South Korea has remained low compared to other countries (though not as low as Germany's and those of Scandinavia).

<comment><USER25> Right now the official explanation is that we're quite good with testing and isolating cases so far, which would mean that the confirmed count right now is much closer to the actual count than in Italy (or the US).

On Twitter the opinion seems mostly to be that the death cause is doctored.

I'm kinda hoping for the first, right now, because the projections aren't pretty (even if we're a bit further behind Italy). We only now started shutting down schools, and most events and even that is spotty as every state does its own thing and sometimes even every city.

<comment><USER24> To be honest at first I found it _suspiciously_ low, but now that the Scandinavian countries are very low as well it would require quite the conspiracy to keep this up.

<comment><USER26> Conspiracy not needed.

It's winter. Old people die from the flu. Viral pneumonia. Without RNA tests the causes of death aren't entire trustable.

Consider the US: the numbers are low because we are under testing people. Significantly under counting.

<comment><USER23> The German virulogist who developed the first test for COVID-19 speculated that based on the numbers Italy must have had more deaths earlier on, but might have mistaken them as old people dying from the flu (which happens all the time and therefore didn't raise any eyebrows in the medical system).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I submitted this as a new story but it's worth repeating here: here in Seattle, we're already Italy [0]. The hospitals are having to provision ECMO machines based on demographic prognosis, and the respirators are probably only a couple days behind. Presumably this will be the situation in every major American city 2 weeks from now.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/scott_mintzer/status/1239290389963714562](https://twitter.com/scott_mintzer/status/1239290389963714562)

<comment><USER28> Wow not giving ECMO to BMI 25+ is really something.

I am fairly skinny and it wouldn't take much for me to reach 25.

They should consider revising the cutoff especially since Chinese people can be of thinner frames. 25 may be slightly overweight for them but normal for others.

<comment><USER29> I don't understand, you want the virus to not kill people with >25 BMI to accommodate US standards?

I don't think they chose these criteria because they just hate fat people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As an Italian living in one of the red areas I feel it's pretty hard to do better than Italy in the west if you are hit first

South Korea had Seegen almost single handedly testing the population, China is not a standard of what a liberal democracy can do

We did everything we could, I've been staying home for 3 weeks as of now, but we couldn't predict the virus spreading from the hospitals of small cities hitting hard on the elderly population

80% of the deaths are >75, 98% are >65, the avreage age of the deceased is 79.4 years old but if we look only at women their average age was 84.2 years (South Korea life expectancy is 82 years) and we counted every death as a coronavirus related death if the patient tested positive, but most of them died for pre-existing conditions, while other countries are not counting them if other conditions where already present (and I imagine old people at the hospital are there because they are already ill)

So I must say that despite our own indiscipline, bad luck was a very strong factor in what happened

BTW Spain is already looking worse than us at their same day

<comment><USER31> Where we can do better than Italy is learning from your experience and taking measures earlier: we aren't first.

Even measures less aggressive than your lockdowns would be _more effective_ if they were simply taken earlier.

This isn't a criticism of Italy. Getting the political will to shut things down when there are few cases and no deaths is extremely hard. But the experience of Italy is showing all of us what our unwillingness to do so will cause.

<comment><USER30> But I bet nobody will, because you know nobody wants a lynch mob looking for them

UK is still having giant music shows with thousands of people, Germany is not counting people with previous conditions, France had even a smurf convention (sigh!)

We all have a family member living in one of the EU countries and are all calling home sick worried because nobody is doing anything because "The Italians, any old excuse to, you know, shut down everything and stop work for a bit and have a long siesta." (it's not a joke, a British TV personality really said that)

So maybe be like Italy and not like everybody else this time.

Seriously, I've been confined 3 weeks and am fine, but my friends calling me from abroad are crying for help, because they want to come back, but can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just so I'm clear...this analysis assumes the same amount of assisted breathing devices per capital as the Italian health Care system?

</comment><comment><USER33> Italy last is a special case - not that everyone else doesn't need to take exceptional action. To be sure social distancing, closures of places of congregation is in order, and safety practices like washing hands often are necessary. But Italy is a special case...

\- Italian leather manufacturing is by and large run by Chinese ownership today.

\- Many of the employees in these shops are from China as they will work for much less.

\- Italian population skews very old - a very vulnerable population.

\- Italian culture has close families that meet near daily, have generational family living together, and populations are proximal.

\- The wide Chinese population in north Italy went back and forth to infected areas of China during the Chinese New Year.

\- When they came back there were many "patient 0's" in the region.

\- Because of this, numerous exponential functions were set off at the same time.

\- Because of the closeness of Italian culture the virus had the necessary engine to propagate.

It's not Italy's fault. They got a perfect storm here. They are managing the best they can.

<comment><USER34> > _But Italy is a special case..._

That's trivially disproved by simply taking JHU daily data of Italy and other countries, and plotting it as date x log(cases). You can see that most Western countries follow the exact same path.

<comment><USER33> We don't even know what "cases" really means. So many people have been infected and not tested by this point. It is estimated over 200k have been infected in the USA and have not required medical help or felt symptoms.

Italy has had a more rapid and intense breakout coupled with a vulnerable population and social customs that spread things more quickly.

I'm not British but their strategy of lock away the weak (old people and other vulnerable) and let the young/healthy take the brunt and burn the virus out is pretty smart. Unless in reinfected of course.

<comment><USER34> I'm not buying the British strategy. I feel they're trying to do a suicide burn[0][1]. But with insufficient testing coupled with all that's unknown about the virus - including how long the immunity lasts - I don't think they can control the infection rate anywhere near well enough to pull this off.

\--

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585289)

[1] - [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/what-is-a- su...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/what-is-a-suicide-burn)

<comment><USER33> Possibly.

The question I ask when I see these graphs indicating "days behind Italy" is why is Italy ahead? As if cities like NYC didn't have anyone from Wuhan enter while sick?

We all had essentially the same "day 0". We are moving much slower than Italy. There are other reasons (and not Italian incompetence) why they are in a greater crisis than others in the West.

Most countries are well ahead of them in this regard. The UK strategy is sound in that you don't need testing - the hospital numbers indicate and can be extrapolated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How are California and Washington "behind" Italy, when both states had infections reported before Italy? Sorry, trying to understand the methodology here.

Or are you just basing this off of raw case counts?

<comment><USER36> I'm sorry to sound so cynical, but I have never seen so many statisticians and virologists pop up on the internet drawing all sorts of graphs and estimates.

For all we know this person got their numbers by just guesstimating. Most countries have differing "exposure vectors" so to say, which means that just comparing other countries to Italy is nonsense.

<comment><USER37> >> never seen so many statisticians and virologists pop up

The same people were prominent internet economists and political scientists just a month ago. They have many talents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> After 21 days, what happens?

Do we lift the quarantine? Relax it a bit? Stay in quarantine indefinitely?

What does the model look like for that? Without a full picture the initial strategy could make things worse in the long run.

<comment><USER39> That's what I'm asking myself too. It's way too early for any kind of herd immunity, and you only need a handful of people who have broken the rules (or simply due to delayed intrafamilial infection) to have a few infectious people back out in the wild, and we're back to square zero.

Is the plan for a lockdown to completely eliminate the disease? Are we hoping the heat of the summer will stop it? Or does flatten the curve really mean that eventually 60-70% of the population will get infected. If so, we're in for a rough 2020.

<comment><USER40> The numbers I've seen so far are assuming 40% to 70% total infections over the next several months.

The current efforts are just trying to take some energy out of the first wave of hospitalizations, to buy time for more supplies and staffing and to get the current infected out of health care as new cases come in.

After a few weeks, it may turn out that hospital capacity and more widespread testing allows some restrictions to be lifted. Or, it may turn out that the situation in the US is far more severe than expected, and the restrictions will only worsen by then.

I'm hoping for the former but betting on the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I agree with the content. I wonder whether the title "Don't be Italy" still holds. US might be past the point already where Italy was locked down.

</comment><comment><USER42> China had people dying in the streets, but we're now at the point where the quarantine has had effect, so it's successful mitigation. They also initially quarantined only the area of the initial outbreak (Wuhan), and only later expanded lockdown measures to most of the country (covering 800 million people at the peak, IIRC). And of course the quarantine leaked enough that the infection spread to the entire world.

But sure, thank you CPC, a model response from a model government.

<comment><USER43> > And of course the quarantine leaked enough that the infection spread to the > entire world.

It spread prior to the quarantine being put in place.

> at this point it's run its course, so it's successful mitigation

Only ~80,000 people out of 11,000,000 in Wuhan were infected. For a disease this contageous, that we don't have herd immunity for, that's hardly 'run its course'.

<comment><USER42> I'm not saying the quarantine had no effect. What I mean is that there is a time delay between when the quarantine is put in place and when you see the detected infections start decreasing. China is now at that point, but it's like all commenters have suddenly forgotten what happened before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> For UK people: here is a discord server were we are trying to share information regionally and locally (teachers, students, professionals etc.)

[https://discord.gg/prydRc](https://discord.gg/prydRc)

<comment><USER10> Gatekeeping access to critical health data based on agreeing to the Discord ToS and Discord's anti-anonymous-access policy is harmful. Please consider Mattermost or a mailing list so that everyone can participate.

<comment><USER44> Sorry what I mean, is for people (most of whom are gamer demographic at the moment).

To chat and share information, support

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Korea will have to remain on alert, forever, as their population has no established immunity. A vaciine may never come - there is no influenza vaccine (it mutates every season).

Plus, there are grim, yet economic, benefits if the sickest and most elderly die from Coronavirus, in the form of long-term savings on pensions and healthcare. This should be taken into account in strategic national planning.

The UK approach seems the most sensible - keep the economy and society functioning, and recommend that the most vulnerable practice self-isolation. Better to isolate those who are not participating in the productive economy (ie. the sick and elderly) than the entirety of the population.

<comment><USER46> German here.

Cannot disagree more strongly with your point! No, the economic benefit of "having the sickest and most elderly die" should most definitely _not_ be taken into account in strategic national planning.

Every life is precious. This line of thought is exactly what lead the Nazis to murder hundreds of thousands they considered an economic burden.

Never forget.

<comment><USER47> Yes, that's explicitly considering to kill 500k old and vulnerable persons, as for the official doc leaked to The Guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk- cov...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk- covid-19-strategy-questions-unanswered-coronavirus-outbreak)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I live in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona. Since we get 1.5 million tourists a year, I expect things here to be similar to large cities in the US elsewhere.

Most friends in town have adopted a fairly complete social distancing protocol in the last few days. This happened abruptly, no one seemed to be doing it a week ago.

While social distancing helps, we should have had testing infrastructure in place much sooner. I am happy to blame Trump, and democratic and Republican Congress critters for that. A good six minute interview: [https://twitter.com/azeem/status/1238734048018792449](https://twitter.com/azeem/status/1238734048018792449)

EDIT: I posted this comment hoping to see comments from other people in the US on whether or not people were largely social distancing in their communities.

</comment><comment><USER49> Don't be patient 31

[https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA- CLUSTER...](https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA- CLUSTERS/0100B5G33SB/index.html)

(but really, in USA too late, everyone is out and about coughing on each other)</comment>


Shortest SEO Guide - <AUTHOR> http://lifedev.net/2011/03/shortest-seo-guide/ <comment><USER2> _Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site._

Thought experiment: Ok. I just wrote a page offering to give away 20 bucks to the first thousand people that read it. Let's say I am rich and can afford to give the money away. Can't get any more interesting and traffic-worthy than that, right? Heck, this is the kind of thing you'd want to send links to your friends, right?

So tell me where it is.

SEO is marketing, plain and simple. That means that there is an active component to it -- sharing links on HN, phoning some friends, making some posters for the dorm. Whatever.

The value of what you output has nothing to do with some sort of inherent quality. It has to do with how many people you can expose your content to and what ratio of those people are going to like what they see enough to give you a link.

SEO is not quality. It's popularity. People don't link to you because you wrote great stuff, they link to you because they like you, are a fan, want to look cool, etc. These are all things that you actively have to go out and cultivate.

To say it's all passive is to miss the entire point and to pander to the audience. With all the keyword optimization going on with that page, and the fact that the entire tone of the article is pitched directly to HN and hacker- types, I can't help but feel that author knows better. (I don't mean that as a slam. Perhaps I am the guy in the audience that spoils how the magician's trick is done. If so, I apologize)

<comment><USER3> "SEO is not quality. It's popularity"

Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so called "optimizations" useless.

Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a black box function _string - > URL[]_). SEO is looking into how SEs work and trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more towards "Content is King".

<comment><USER2> I've been observing SEO for several years, and out of all the things I've learned as a technologist, SEO is the most frustrating. It's consistently murky and unpalatable to me as a programmer because of it's lack of logic. And as far as pointing out how it works, I'm not happy with the state of affairs. I've simply decided that I'm going to talk frankly about how I understand it. Maybe you guys can straighten me out. I see so much posturing on SEO -- even by the guys who claim to be "shooting straight" that it's discouraging.

The problem you have is that you are trying to describe a system that has no specification. That is, there is no testable definition of "best content" that is repeatable and applicable to all users. After all, this was google's entire schtick -- the reason everybody thought it was cool was because they managed to hack the problem better than anybody else had up until then. But there is no solution. It's not that kind of problem.

One of the reasons SEO drives me nuts is that the concepts we are so used to in programming, "black box", "answer", "best content", "user", etc -- don't really have firm meanings in the way we would like them to. Yes, it would be awesome if there was a little magic box that told me what to do (or gave me all the answers) but -- and this is important -- even if there was, _it wouldn't be a black box_. We live in a digital age. Anything that can be put into code is instantly commoditized.

There is another assumption here that is equally slippery (aside from the fuzzy nature of all the adjectives and the impossibility of making the system opaque), and that is the idea that somehow one can determine content quality mechanically. That's like saying you can pick the "best" painting at an art show by using some kind of hand-held scanner and an image-processing algorithm. Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic. We are not machines.

We keep wanting Search Engines to work like the library: go to the card catalog, pick a topic, find authoritative sources. But they keep working like the dance hall: show up with your best suit, make some friends, and work the crowd, become popular. That's frustrating. But as one SEO expert told me in a recent interview[1], if you don't use social signals (popularity), how else would you do it? This is the way we've been judging content since 3 guys sat around in a cave looking at mammoth drawings.

[1](If you have time, you might want to listen to the interview. I tried to touch on this exact subject because I know how touchy an issue SEO is: <http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video> )

<comment><USER4> > Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic. > We are not machines.

Here's a thought experiment for you, then: imagine that someone builds a product called TheBestSearchForYou, where you step into an advanced MRI machine and think your query. Then:

1\. Your brain is copied into a billion virtual emulations, each of which then sees a single page from the TBSFY's index.

2\. TBSFY then measures (through whatever destructive, invasive process is necessary) which em had the most positive response _according to their own utility functions_ (which are all the same as yours, mind.)

3\. TBSFY returns to you the page that gave "you" the strongest positive response.

4\. Then the ems are stopped and deleted, because—since you're going to be a slightly different you the next time you make a query—it's useless to keep them around ;)

I would say TBSFY adheres to the definition of an "optimal" search engine, however infeasable. The actual question it raises, though, is how closely TBSFY's results can be _approximated_ by a company that knows increasing amounts of personal information about you.

<comment><USER2> This is a fascinating line of discussion because such a simple question generates such unforeseen complexity Here we're only three or four comments in and we've already brought in an MRI and a supercomputer. :)

But once again, there are assumptions you are making that I'm not ready to go along with. The biggest one is that I know what is good for me -- that I have a set of criteria (even if un-describable) that can be replicated. The beauty of real-world interactions is that there is a mix of happy and sad, interesting and boring. Sometimes the guy you meet at the gas station says something off-hand that you think about the rest of the day. Human social interactions require an element of randomness. As a social animal, I need to interact with a machine that also has social needs, not a machine that is trying to make me perfectly happy.

That's a big deal, because if you're looking at this as some sort of optimization function, yes, we could somehow come up with a system that would optimize your happiness, or emotional reaction, or whatever. I'd argue that places like HN and most social sites are early attempts at optimization. We will continue to get better.

But let's say I'm angry. Some guy in a clown suit cut me off in traffic. You know what would make me happy? Seeing a bunch of clowns on fire, that's what. But do you know what I _need_ to consume? Something that reminds me that all people are human and deserve respect. I would absolutely _hate_ consuming that material, but a week from now, a month from now -- anytime but right now -- I would tell you that it is the right thing to do.

In fact, this optimization process is a grave danger: we risk becoming zoned out in little echo chambers where the only thing we consume is the rock candy of me-too, feel-good content.

It's a tough, probably intractable problem, at least until we come to terms with what the nature of the optimization needs to be. It would not surprise me to discover that the optimization that is best for the species as a whole and the optimization that makes me the happiest are two completely different things. Not good.

<comment><USER4> > It would not surprise me to discover that the optimization that is best for > the species as a whole and the optimization that makes me the happiest are > two completely different things.

That is absolutely so--thus the need for a complex <http://singinst.org/upload/CEV.html>, rather than a simple one which just averages everyone's utility functions together.

<comment><USER5> That was a pretty dense read, at least for me. I particularly liked two parts, though they may not add up to the meat of the paper:

1\. "If you find a genie bottle that gives you three wishes, it's probably a good idea to seal the genie bottle in a locked safety box under your bed, unless the genie pays attention to your volition, not just your decision." Nice. Grown up version of some cartoon plots.

2\. The description of spread, muddle, and distance. Very relevant to political theory.

If you are able to compose a tl;dr of the entire paper, that'd be awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting that in this post about "Simple SEO" he does a bunch of "advanced" things that aren't mentioned -- highly optimized page Title and URL (which appears intentional as it does not match the blog post title), post title optimized for social media sharing and CTR, a version that's too large for most blogs so that bloggers will link to it (with optimized mouse-over text to boot). When he references on-page factors and then says "I used to worry about these above factors" -- well, it feels a little dishonest to me.

<comment><USER7> Or, what he is saying is that the "advanced" things you notice pale in comparison to the real value of content.

<comment><USER8> +1 - Notice he finishes with this:

"Sure, optimizing page titles and header tags within posts can help your chances of ranking highly. But the biggest boost that you'll get comes from getting links."

This is something _everybody_ who's spent any time researching SEO knows, but way too many people ignore it - probably because it's time consuming and _hard_. All the on-page stuff is relatively straightforward. Inbound links are at least as important as anything you do on your own site.

Like Ted Dzubya says: "Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO."[1]

It's much easier to tell your boss/client that you spent 25 hours doing keyword research and tweaking page titles, headings, the body copys keyword density, adding keyword targeted landing pages, and a/b testing the signup button colours, keyword optimising navigation and menu labels - instead of spending 3 days getting overwhelminghy rejected asking other people to put links to your "content" on their site.

That's mostly why it works. "Page rank" is successful precisely because it's harder to game than any of the on-page stuff you can do (anyone remember the keyword meta tag? What a quaint idea! It's quite a nice reminder of what the internet used to be, back before spam was invented...)

[1] [http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack- science.htm...](http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the ecommerce company I work for, I keep repeating this in terms of SEO:

"Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work."

Does creating a link farm hidden in the sitemap create value for users? What about spamming articles on ezines with no valuable content? Ha.

</comment><comment><USER10> Google itself stated something like: "build the best website and we'll change our algorithms if needed".

It's an endless game between Matt Cutts his team and SEO spammers but I bet long term on the first one.

</comment><comment><USER11> My little site (regional) gets 150k visitors & 2-3M page views per month on average. About 70% of those visitors find us through search. Our goal is to lower that number, but at this point it does not bother us. We know that it is in all search engines best interests to keep us at the top of the search results because we are the most relevant website for our topic/services...all of the search engines recognize this and one of the search engines knows this because they count our page views for us.

We SEO our site to make it easier for the engines to know what we are about...but we do not bother with much of the deeper stuff (all the onsite relational linking strategies).

The goal of every search engine is to deliver relevance. Be relevant.

</comment><comment><USER12> I run a site (gamexplain.com) and have had a fair amount of problems getting our SEO up to snuff. We've followed a whole lot of the fundamentals espoused by people like the author of this article, but we still struggle with the incoming links, and that has hurt us somewhat. We don't really want to spam our articles to every aggregator and blogger under the sun, though maybe that's what we should have been spending our time on rather than trying to write informative articles that stray from the norm of what you might see from other gaming sites.

Quite honestly, the best way for us to get incoming links in this industry, is to write articles that I would not consider "quality content," but rather inflammatory, misguided, or just plain offensive. In the past, articles that fell into these categories have even garnered us attention in the academic community, so take that as you will.

</comment><comment><USER13> Getting 50% of your traffic from search isn't a success, that's actually kind of bad (depending on the details of course, which weren't given).

<comment><USER14> Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER13> A typical site that does well in Google gets 70-80% of their traffic from search.

No details were given about the other traffic sources, so getting only 50% of your traffic from search sounds like a failure to me (that, or a meaningless statistic).

<comment><USER15> That is true if you don't promote your site on social media sites. If you do, and have interesting content, you'll regularly hit front pages and your analytics will look like a series of horse ears. When you get up to 100,000 page views in a single day from sites like Reddit, it's pretty hard to have 80% of your traffic coming from organic search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not controversial at all. "Content is king" is almost an SEO standard (with EGOL as its herald). Meta: The proof is the article itself. It's some age-old tested SEO wisdom in a controversial/trollish linkbait sauce. In the world of SEO this article is but an annoying splash.

"Make sites primarily for users, not search engines". Anyway, it is a point that really needs to be repeated over and over again, so for that the article maybe has some merit.

Yet I fear it may inspire another rash of linkbaitish articles linked on sites like these, where the purpose behind the content isn't to inform the user (about doing whitehat SEO), but to get the user to link to it. If these fastfood social links were all that counted for determining quality and authority on the web, icanhazcheeseburger and top 10 lists would outrank us all.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is perfect.

Yes, there are ways to game the SEO system, and lots of companies make this their reason for being.

But for 98% of the common website-owning populace, SEO is most simply about publishing information that people want and find helpful. You can spend your time whoring for backlinks, or generating content. One is valuable to your target audience, the other isn't...

IMO, the more advanced SEO tactics are for when you have built a foundation of content and can then concentrate on making some of the farther corners of the Internet aware of your content.

Granted, I'm not someone who labels myself an SEO expert though.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Great content gets you like 95% of the way. The advanced, fiddly tactics are for the other 5%.

<comment><USER19> _Great content gets you like 95% of the way_

File this away next to "A good product is 95% of marketing" and other patently untrue things engineers like to believe.

Quality content and linkable content, for example, are not coextensive sets. You could write the world's best guide ever to cross-stitching school uniforms (did I just make that up?) and you'd get less links than DHH gets for _not_ cursing during a Rails keynote. If you're doing SEO and you haven't figured out that linking behavior is very different in different audiences, I'm as worried for your future as I would be for a salesman who was doing high-touch enterprise software sales for rooms full of third graders.

There are also easy ways to shoot your great content foot off, and I really wish I could pull in examples from clients here. Hypothetical example: suppose a YC-style company is founded by a noted industry expert who has a great personal brand. They produce a ten-page guide to a particular new technology their startup uses. The guide is, far and away, the best quickstart guide on the Internet with regards to that technology.

Q: Their startup benefits from this a) a lot, b) a little, c) virtually not at all?

A: I don't know. Where did you post it?

Q2: Come again?

A: Like, physically, on which page does that best-in-class guide exist?

Q3: Oh, our Posterous / Github account / etc.

A: _facepalm_

<comment><USER18> Not an engineer. You can't promote something that sucks.

<comment><USER20> _You can't promote something that sucks._

Perhaps, but I think 'patio11's point was that even if the product is great, it could be worthless without the right marketing/promotion/SEO/etc.

So you could be anywhere from 0% to 100% of the way there with just a great product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've only got one word for this guide: Refreshing

</comment><comment><USER22> An analogy to this guide's strategy:

 _Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door._

Which parallels YC's golden rule:

 _Make something people want._

In general, I agree with both of the statements as solid business advice. After all, nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Make a good product first, and then market it.

Although I do have to slightly disagree on one point. If you've built a better mousetrap, or made something people want, how do you let them know? The general strategy seems to be "let the product speak for itself." The same advice is prescribed in the article: write good content and let it speak for itself.

Well, good content is critical, I agree. Gunning for rankings on crap content is a sure way to fail. But it's lazy to leave it at that. You must let people know that your content is there to link to. Post it to newsboards and forums. Gather a following on Twitter and let them know. Market it. The real gem from the article is that the difficulty of the sale and the quality of the content are inversely related. Make quality content and the sale will be easier... but you still have to sell.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've done a lot of SEO and this really nails it. But my own form of the very most important rule of SEO is slightly different.

It is, "Build links to content that people will want to link to."

The reason for this different wording is that in my experience, you can have highly linkable material, but without a critical mass of attention, it will get limited results.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems exceptionally misguided and short-sighted. The example the author cites is for his blog. 50% of his blog traffic comes from search engines; he doesn't do SEO, therefore SEO is a waste of time.

Has the author ever attempted to land competitive keywords in competitive markets? Has he tried bringing in direct sales leads through organic search- engine results?

People who are really good at SEO can show legitimate improvements in sales from their SEO tactics. It's not simply a matter of "if you build it, they will come". Yes, maybe they will, but when?

Does it make more sense to write awesome content about, let's say, vitamin supplements, for four years, get a nice following and hope that some people buy from you? Or does it make sense to try to jam your site onto the first couple of results for "vitamin suppliments" on Google by employing some of the SEO tactics the author considers a waste of time?

</comment><comment><USER25> I wouldn't say that this is complete advice, but it's the most important principle. Many of the people who have the worst trouble with SEO have sites that nobody would care about, such as real estate agents.

</comment><comment><USER26> a couple years old, but still the best guide to seo: <http://powazek.com/posts/2090>

"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn't work"

</comment><comment><USER27> I've always been one of those "Field of Dreams" SEO guys. "Build it and they will come."

</comment><comment><USER28> awesome, then i just create the createst magazine ever and make it language header dependend.

oh, googlebot does not use language headers? well an seo could have told you that........</comment>


Ask HN: Was Parse emails database leaked? - <AUTHOR> I hope this is good place to ask?
Today I got multiple spam emails with title
[test] Facebook Analytics for Apps: Create App Events
First from
firstname.lastname@example.com
Then From
email@example.com (in header)
through
potomac1050.mktomail.com
To all my parse-specific accounts  (firstname.lastname@example.com) - I have multiple (2..) for private and work-related things.
As those email addresses were Parse specific, I think I haven't shared them anywhere else.
Did anyone else got spammed? Searching through Google and Hacker News doesn't yield any results
Thank you for reading!
Ps. Is this good place to ask? Where else would you suggest I should direct my questions to? <comment><USER2> Ah, I'm really sorry about this. No, the database was not leaked. Someone just misconfigured the email system and accidentally sent this out to the wrong audience. I'm sorry!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for update! Good to know and hopefully that makes other calmer too.</comment></comment>


Exploring the frontiers of happiness - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html

<comment><USER2> Some ideas from this talk are similar to ideas from the book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413915>

Bernoulli formula (on expected value) has an interesting flaw which leads to the St. Petersburg paradox <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox>

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome Talk! Really enjoyed it. Feel so dumb now :)</comment>