Inside the 74181 ALU chip - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2017/01/die-photos-and-reverse-engineering.html <comment><USER2> I think the XOR (or actually a XNOR) looks far easier to understand if it is drawn symmetrically, like the layout and its logic function suggests:

[http://i.imgur.com/OwLkx4A.png](http://i.imgur.com/OwLkx4A.png)

 _I plan to explain how the 74181 implements its 32 functions and fast carry in a future article, so keep watching._

I look forward to reading that, but meanwhile here is one guide to the 74181 which I found quite lucid (starts near the bottom, continues for 2 more pages --- the rest of the series on ALU design is worth reading too):

[http://6502.org/users/dieter/a2/a2_3.htm](http://6502.org/users/dieter/a2/a2_3.htm)

The key takeaway from that is, once you decide to make a carry-lookahead adder and compute "G" and "P", and add inversion to one (or both) of the inputs to enable subtraction too, you already have much of what it takes to compute all the logic functions too.

It would be very interesting to have an interview with the original designer(s) of the '181, although from a quick search I can't find exactly who designed it.

<comment><USER3> I haven't had time to write up my full explanation of the 74181's logical implementation, but I have a summary on stackexchange that you might find interesting: [http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/what- is-...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/what-is-the- reasoning-for-the-arithmetic-functions-on-the-74181)

The quick summary is the 74181 looks at first like they picked 32 random functions but there's a rational explanation why it has functions like AB PLUS (A OR NOT B). And the gate arrangement makes sense once you realize it's all based on carry-lookahead.

<comment><USER4> You are the author? This is spectacular reading. Wonderful work, thank you. I have a question above about the transistor rendering in the second pic but I just now read your stackexchange link and have another question regarding this passage in the SE link:

"The first half of the chip's circuitry computes the four 1-bit sums of A with f(A,B). (Specifically it is creating the Generate and Propagate signals that are used for carry lookahead. This lets the 74181 work in parallel, rather than using a ripple carry.)."

Can you elaborate on "it is creating the Generate and Propagate signals.", I thought that the electrical pulse that drove combinatorial circuit was simply just the clock input on the chip. And that this was propagated to the whole chip instantaneously similar to a broadcast. Do I have this completely wrong?

<comment><USER2> "Generate" and "Propagate" are referring to the names of the signals in the first stage of a carry-lookahead adder ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry- lookahead_adder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry-lookahead_adder) ). Generate is A AND B (AB), Propagate is A OR B (A + B). This is also where the AND and OR for the logic functionality comes from.

The '181 has no clock input, the outputs will change after some propagation delay whenever an input changes.

This explanation of CLA adding may also help: [https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Comb/look...](https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Comb/lookahead.html)

<comment><USER4> I see, this is very interesting. Thanks for the link and explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wired up 8 of these as a 32 bit ALU in preparation of building a digital calculator. The next step was wiring some 16 x 4 RAM chips to create 16 registers and then a set of latches to make an accumulator. I was "this close" to actually having a CPU before I completely ran out of steam on the project.

<comment><USER6> I just read _Code_ by Petzold last year, and have been meaning to try implementing the minimalistic little "CPU" he develops in the book, in actual hardware, and see if I can make it work. I have no idea how it'll go, but I'm having fun digging into this lower level hardware stuff. I've also been working on building a Z80 based microcomputer, so I can learn more about the low level architecture of a computer. Maybe not very practical, but tons of fun and very educational.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How timely, I was recently looking for a very simple microprocessor made with standard logic and found this: [http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/piscedu2.htm](http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/piscedu2.htm)

It uses four 74181s. I probably won't get around to building one, but it might be fun to write a processor simulator.

</comment><comment><USER8> I built a matrix multiplier with these (plus a TRW multiplier chip) back in the day. Designed the instruction set and wrote the microcode to implement it. Got it running at 40MHz, which was pretty impressive in 1980. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting :-) I own several ceramic ones of those. But I'm not planning to use them in the near future, instead my next project will be to create my own ALU using solely with 7400 NAND chips.

<comment><USER10> You can also go the opposite direction although its much slower by burning 4K eprom (12 bits is 4 bits of A, 4 bits of B, and 4 bits of opcode, 12 bits is a 4K eprom). Both modern eeprom or eprom or especially old eprom will be much slower than the old TTL implementations by maybe a factor of ten.

The interest in this design is modern eproms can be quite large, of course the largest ones are serial which is quite useless for this purpose, but 8 bit ALUs are possible.

<comment><USER9> It is an interesting approach to build a simple ALU or similar that is worth giving a thought. However, using only NAND gates is more of a fun thing to do :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really amazing. I have a question I am hoping someone can answer.

In the bottom half of the second picture, in the rendering of the transistor, what is the long thin purple rectangle marked N+ above the P substrate's purpose?

<comment><USER3> The N+ rectangle near the bottom of the transistor is to reduce resistance because the heavily doped N+ conducts better than lightly doped N. The resistance from the collector through the N region to the junction could be several kohms. The N+ layer reduces this to a few ohms.

Why don't they use N+ instead of N everywhere? Less doping in the collector- base junction improves the breakdown voltage. It's also possible to extend the N+ region under the collector until it meets the buried N+ layer, which reduces resistance even more, but that takes another processing step. So it's all tradeoffs.

<comment><USER4> Thanks again. I have a tangentially related question if you don't mind. Do you know around when integrated circuits transitioned from using Bipolar Junction Transistor to MOSFET?

<comment><USER3> It was a gradual transition, with MOS integrated circuits becoming more popular through the 1970s, especially for DRAM and microprocessors. But there were still bipolar RAMs and microprocessors in the mid 1970s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to do such an analysis by yourself. How do you start and what hardware would you need to achieve such high quality images?

Edit: Nevermind, it's mentioned in the article. I thought you had to grind the layers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice timing - I just bought a couple of these from eBay last week to have a play with.

</comment><comment><USER13> The fast carry approach is quite interesting</comment>


2018 Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome_outbreak <comment><USER2> It is still unclear how the virus is transmitted from camels to humans. The World Health Organization advises avoiding contact with camels and to eat only fully cooked camel meat, pasteurized camel milk, and to avoid drinking camel urine. Camel urine is considered a medicine for various illnesses in the Middle East.[19] The Saudi Ministry of Agriculture has advised people to avoid contact with camels or wear breathing masks when around them.[20] In response "some people have refused to listen to the government's advice"[21] and kiss their camels in defiance of their government's advice.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_synd...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome)</comment>


JavaScript in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://glenmaddern.com/articles/javascript-in-2015 <comment><USER2> God, he makes it look good. The demo does give me a few of the ol' "too much magic" heebie jeebies, but frontend JS development is so badly lacking in compelling packaage management stories that I'm going to give jspm a shot.

Here's to 2015, I suppose.

P.S. Glen, if you're reading this, I really would love to see a youtube of a DJ hooked up to automatically synced GIFs. Don't be a tease.

<comment><USER3> For package management why not use Bower ?

<comment><USER4> Bower is great if you need to install jQuery or one of its plugins, or another very popular JS framework.

When you get into smaller modules, persistence, recursive or deep dependency trees, versioning, automated bundling (i.e. no manual "config" files), etc. then bower is not a strong choice.

A good writeup here: [https://github.com/bionode/bionode/issues/9#issuecomment-495...](https://github.com/bionode/bionode/issues/9#issuecomment-49566087)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My biggest issue with the recent additions to the language is that there's now a thousand different ways to do the same thing.

Iteration:

      for (var i = 0; i < y.length; i++) { ... }
      for (var x in y) { ... }
      for (var x of y) { ... }
      y.forEach(function(x, i) { ... })
      Object.keys(y).forEach(function(x) { ... })

Comparison:

      ==
      ===
      Object.is() (would have been a good laugh if introduced as ==== instead)

Of course, this doesn't matter much if you're a single developer. I've started writing a bit of ES6/ES7 and it's pretty cool. But it's going to be a PITA for projects built by many developers of varying experience levels. The nice things about smaller languages is that there's often only one way to do something, so when you write code or review other people's code, your mind is free from the minutiae and you can focus on the big picture instead.

It's a bit funny that it's when JS is, from the general consensus, finally getting "better" that I'm actually considering more and more switching to a small but well-built compile-to-JS language. I guess smallness and simplicity just matter a lot to me.

<comment><USER6> Object.is is a very silly addition to the language. It does the same thing as === except in the case of NaN and positive/negative zero.

I mean if you read a polyfill for it, it's such a silly bit of "functionality". And of course the name is terrible. Argh.

<comment><USER7> The new Map and WeakMap classes use Object.is() to determine if two keys are the same (otherwise it would be impossible to use NaN as a key to a map).

Whether this algorithm should have been exposed to users is debatable, but it exists for a good reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's interesting is that all of the 'niceness' seen is the result of a switch to the functional style.

Excluding the singleton class (which could have been a single function itself), you've got your map/filters in the gif processing, and encapsulation of async activities[0] through monads via promises.

Seems like JavaScript got good when it started embracing what functional programmers have been drowned out saying for years.

Looking good indeed.

[0] Async actions as a language-level construct, as opposed to a syntactic abstraction have always been A Bad Idea. Promises should have always been the default, and manually writing callbacks should have never been a thing.

<comment><USER9> Except for immutability. It's still nowhere near the norm.

<comment><USER10> I'm working on a JS stack that leverages React, es6, functional style programming, and immutable data. Check my profile for more info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great screencast – lots of detail in a short period. No messing around, it also shows how an optimized workflow should look like. The audio/video quality of the screencast was extremely good as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> What will SystemJS+JSPM give me over Webpack? Just curious.

Webpack also supports ES6 modules (as well as CJS and AMD) when used with 6to5 transpiler, and has a lot of great features like splitting code into bundles, figuring out the best way to split dependencies based on module size, and asynchronously loading missing chunks.

<comment><USER13> Haizz, I've just learned to use Webpack. Now comes SystemJS+JSPM. There are just too many new tools, workflows and different ways of doing things in Javascript world.

<comment><USER14> No, because SystemJS+JSPM does nothing to invalidate your Webpack knowledge. It's still an active project that works just fine for the needs of many developers.

<comment><USER15> This is a trite response. If it does something significantly better than it _does_ do something to invalidate knowledge in a defacto sense, at least for the caring craftsman.

Not that there's any point complaining about it either though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aside: "A DJ using Ableton Live, a huge bundle of MaxMSP emitting a UDP stream of beat information (courtesy of the immensely pro Cade), a UDP ➝ WebSockets server, and DJGif pulling hundreds of GIFs off various Tumblrs to beatmatch <x-gif> on two projectors makes for a hell of a good show."

Does anyone know why he wouldn't have used the midi clock from Ableton (or other DJ software) to a "midi->websocket" server?

<comment><USER17> One reason might be that MIDI clock is just a repeating, identical message. It does not contain any position information (like where the next bar starts). To get positional information relating to beats and bars, you need to use MIDI Song Position Pointers, however these use a 14 bit counter which will typically overflow after about 10 minutes. In short, long-running musical clock sync over MIDI is problematic.

For syncing sound recorders, MIDI Time Code (MTC) is usually used, which works fine for up to 24 hours, but doesn't contain information about bars and beats, so unless the system receiving the MTC has a-priori knowledge of what time locations will correspond to bars and beats (which it typically wouldn't have in the context of a live performance), MTC can't be used for this purpose.

<comment><USER16> Sweet! Thanks for the detailed run down. As a DJ myself, at my residency we have a random splattering of strange movie clips that we just play and they are never beat matched but mentally something "always" hits a beat when you are watching it. I guess he's going for stuff actually changing in musical time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For anyone building projects utilizing GIFs, check out the GIPHY api.

[http://api.giphy.com/](http://api.giphy.com/)

Here's another project using GIFs and beat matching:

[http://www.seehearparty.com/](http://www.seehearparty.com/)

Some other cool projects:

[http://giphy.com/labs](http://giphy.com/labs)

</comment><comment><USER19> What advantages does this offer over the more mature ecosystem that surrounds browserify?

<comment><USER20> From what I can tell, it means you no longer need to write/maintain gulp scripts and you don't have a build step during development

<comment><USER21> That's assuming you want all your scripts to be loaded on the front end asynchronously which seems to be only for development. For production I think you'd still want to compile this all down for a faster load time. From the jspm page: "For production, use the jspm CLI tool to download packages locally, lock down versions and build into a bundle." So I think you're correct that there'd be no build step for development but you'd still have some sort of script being run, whether it be gulp or otherwise, that builds it for production use.

<comment><USER20> yep, the point though is that having a build step during dev adds some overhead (which can easily go into the several seconds range in my experience) into the type-save-reload cycle, which is exacerbated by hit-reload-before- build-finished-so-need-to-reload-again pattern.

My understanding is that this tool removes that entire class of annoyances, and gives a no-hassle live-reload ES6-enabled environment on top.

<comment><USER19> Substack's essay applies as much to this tool as it does to webpack:

[https://gist.github.com/substack/68f8d502be42d5cd4942](https://gist.github.com/substack/68f8d502be42d5cd4942)

Importantly, overloading require like this:

      var collections = require('npm:lodash-node/modern/collections');
      var $ = require('github:components/jquery');

... means that you can't publish this module to npm and have the require statements work as expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like an interesting workflow, but I think I still prefer using a compile-to-js language like CoffeeScript over the use of shims. I know it's a silly thought, but to me, shims sort of violate the separation of responsibilities between the user and the developer. If I, as the developer, want to write more concise, scalable, and convenient code, it should be _my_ responsibility to spend my development resources to convert that code to something the user's browser can understand.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would love to hear more about djgif

<comment><USER24> There is a link to the repo in the article which might be helpful.

[https://github.com/geelen/djgif](https://github.com/geelen/djgif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really great screencast. If you have the good fortune to be a JS developer in 2015 (and beyond), there are some exciting times ahead!

<comment><USER26> I'm _really_ late to the JS party, having just picked it up a month or so ago. node.js and Meteor are my current tools of choice; it's a rather super environment to get stuff done in.

It's nice to see JS get some positive press.

<comment><USER27> In fact, JavaScript is the one late to the party, having developed some rudimentary tools only recently. There's nothing exciting about redoing old mistakes in a new ecosystem.

<comment><USER28> Don't say things like that on HN. Say "Wow, amazing! I did not know this is possible in JS! JS is the future, other languages are not needed!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be curious to see how a medium to large project (500+ files) works with this approach? I'm guessing it would take a while to load the page since the browser has to request each script?

The tool looks pretty good. I think the most important feature is working with existing modules on npm. :) This means that most browserifiable modules can be jspm'd and vice versa.

<comment><USER29> In production you would bundle all into one file, while in development most/all of your files will be cached by the browser. But to be honest I've never worked with 500+ in the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nothing to do with this, but I remember a conf about javascript in 2040++ or something can't find the video..

<comment><USER31> [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, this looks great. Nice one Glen. I'm looking forward to trying this out. I'm going to, ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER33> I found this link that was linked by the article to be very interesting: [http://blog.npmjs.org/post/101775448305/npm-and-front-end- pa...](http://blog.npmjs.org/post/101775448305/npm-and-front-end-packaging)

</comment><comment><USER34> Slightly off topic, and sorry if it seems obvious, but his coding workflow looks really neat. He must be using a Chrome extension to live-reload the changes? Did anyone recognize the editor?

<comment><USER35> Editor is Webstorm: [https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/](https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if there is a way to split the build in more then just one big file but in several smaller files then can be loaded on runtime.

<comment><USER37> Use WebPack and set up code splitting

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Finally we have promises support built into JS.

</comment><comment><USER39> What is the difference between this and require.js for loading modules? I feel like I'm missing something

<comment><USER40> require.js loads modules that are written to the CommonJS and AMD standards. systemjs loads those too, but it also loads a few other things including modules that just dump things in to global scope and things written to the ES6 standard.

It's sort of like require.js on steroids.

<comment><USER39> gotcha, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Still has more WTF moments than any other language I have used so far.

<comment><USER42> Your comment might be useful or interesting if you explained which WTF moments affected you in particular, or even just which other languages you've used. As it is, it's not adding much to the conversation which is why you've been downvoted.

<comment><USER43> Some WTF moments in Javascript, courtesy of Gary Bernhardt:

        var foo = ["10", "10", "10"];
        foo.map(parseInt);
        // Returns [ 10, NaN, 2 ]

        [] + [] // ""
        [] + {} // {}
        {} + [] // 0
        {} + {} // NaN

        var a = {};
        a[[]] = 2;
        alert(a[""]); // alerts 2

        alert(Array(16).join("wat" - 1) + " Batman!");

Press F12 and use the Console to verify these if you're skeptical.

<comment><USER44> I know what the batman example gives but I don't get how it's a WTF?

I assume the expected output is "wa" but why should a string less an integer produce that?

<comment> squeaky-clean There is no expected output. It doesn't make sense to subtract the value 1 from the string "wat". But Javascript will cast both of them to numbers, then try to subtract 1 from NaN. However, if you do "wat" \+ 1, Javascript will cast both of them to strings, and append "1" to "wat".

It's not just the odd behavior, but the inconsistency.

<comment><USER44> Ok that makes a bit more sense. I didn't even think about how it would be if you tried to add them.

I like javascript but I don't do anything so complicated (or maybe not the right types of things) that I run into many of these situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Instead of creating yet-another-library, yet-another-framework or superset (TypeSscript, etc.) of it we should try to fix JavaScript itself. Why companies don't push for this even if it's in all their best interests is beyond me.

<comment><USER46> They _are_. That's what ES6, a major focus of TFA, _is_.

<comment><USER28> They are not fixing JS, they are extending it. That's a different thing. Because backwards-compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Node.js is the only real dev language.

<comment><USER27> Node.js is not even a language. Talk about factual correctness.

<comment><USER28> Node.js is just a Reactor Pattern implementation with some package management on top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> JavaScript is broken by design (eg. adding obj properties on the fly is killing perf and toolability) we need replacement.

Why web can't get such a nice lang like C#, Swift?

In the mean time I will stick with Dart</comment>


New: Check Out CeliTech's US Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.celitech.us <comment><AUTHOR> Celitech is the world's 1st digital-only connectivity platform offering affordable cellular data for US subscribers!!</comment>


Hadoop ported to R (and it's trivial) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/11/hadoop-ported-to-r.html <comment><USER2> Misleading title at best as Hadoop is a framework for the management and execution of map/reduce while the article demonstrates a map/reduce operation in R. I guess Hadoop has been ported to Clojure as well since I can just say:

(apply + (range 10))

And get an answer of 45. Hadoop must have been ported to MySQL as well:

SELECT type, SUM(price) FROM products GROUP BY type

It's not that I mind people pointing out the obvious (map/reduce style constructs have been around forever), but I'm accustomed to a port meaning something being migrated from one platform to another with a comparable feature set.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a stupid article. "It's not quite that simple, of course".

So the distributed petabyte-scale filesystem that scales to thousands of nodes, the recent work on append which guarantees fresh writes will be visible to all hosts, the efforts at map-locality which will run your map function on the host where the data split is located, compression layers to improve I/O throughput..

Trivial?

<comment><USER4> I'm sure they could bang that out in an afternoon. A weekend, at most.

</sarcasm>

I really wish people would actually read the MapReduce paper before trying to talk about what it is.

<comment><USER5> amen, the MapReduce paper is all about the distributed system they built around the core algorithm.

this article would be akin to somebody 5 years ago saying "hey guys, it's easy to implement Google's search engine in 5 lines of R ... here's the calculation for PageRank, the rest is just detailz!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In addition to the points below about Hadoop's implementation of MapReduce, Hadoop consists of many subprojects which perform complex tasks: HDFS, a reliable, petabyte-scale distributed file system; HBase, a clone of Google's BigTable; Pig and Hive, which provide higher-level syntax, columnar storage in HDFS, and a persistent metadata repository; and Zookeeper, a coordination service for distributed systems.

I'm not impressed by how REvolution's new management is approaching marketing.

<comment><USER5> sorry to sound trollish, but the sad part is that this sort of marketing-speak masquerading as technical blogging might actually be able to earn companies 'streed cred' with customers. their potential clients might be like "oh wow you guys really CAN implement Google's famous MapReduce or Yahoo's Hadoop in a few lines of R, and you even wrote about it on a techie blog, we'll buy it!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "It's not quite that simple, of course"

No, it isn't, or else every language with map and reduce functions would have a trivial, one-liner version of Hadoop.

Does anyone have any familiarity with the MapReduce package?</comment>


Kodi-wayland is coming (GSoC) - <AUTHOR> Philipp Kerling is working on reimplementing Wayland for Kodi as a part of Google Summer of Code 2017 project: The work is in progress, but it seems that most stuff is already implemented (form Dashboard and Kodi forum).
Please take a look at those links:
GSoC 2017: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#4913542374359040
Original proposal: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=309254&pid=2552143#pid2552143
Repository: https://github.com/pkerling/xbmc
Dashboard: https://github.com/pkerling/xbmc/projects/1
Topic in Kodi forum: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=309254 <comment><AUTHOR> GSoC 2017: [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#49135423743590...](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#4913542374359040)

Original proposal: [https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=309254&pid=2552143#...](https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=309254&pid=2552143#pid2552143)

Repository: [https://github.com/pkerling/xbmc](https://github.com/pkerling/xbmc)

Dashboard: [https://github.com/pkerling/xbmc/projects/1](https://github.com/pkerling/xbmc/projects/1)

Topic in Kodi forum: [https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=309254](https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=309254)</comment>


Show HN: Node/React/Redux blog that I've made. Dockerized, Isomorphic, has Auth - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/raymestalez/vertex?source=hn <comment><USER2> Do you really need to load a ~60kb React/Redux runtime just to display a content site?

I get that you're doing server-side rendering to mitigate the performance costs. I just don't get why any of these technologies were necessary to begin with. I mean, 120 dependencies just to display a blog!

I am reminded of the old joke about Java developers:

> lately the language has been sort of growing some of the features it > previously rejected, although they pretty are much bolted on. Many people > have even forgotten that there is a whole world full of people who don't get > around in powered wheelchairs and don't need machines to help them chew, and > argue passionately about how much they love their Chewing Completion and > Integrated Mobility Environments and how easy it is to sort of slowly > shamble up stairs on these prosthetic legs (which sounds impressive after > you've spent five years in a wheelchair), endlessly haranguing those who > choose to run on their own two feet about what they are missing by not > getting their legs chopped off.

Investing in an abstraction as heavy as React-Redux and then spending hours configuring server-side rendering, webpack dev middleware, code splitting and who knows what all to emulate the behaviour of vanilla web technologies - you're basically swapping healthy feet for sophisticated prostheses.

Why not just template HTML out of an SQL query?

<comment><USER3> The technical critique is not unreasonable. The tone of the comment is not consistent with the published guidelines for "Show HN."

Authors and makers take a risk publishing their work. The 'Show HN' guidelines make the outcome of the risk constructive.

<comment><USER2> You're right. It wasn't a helpful tone. I wouldn't heckle a stage performer and so I shouldn't attack the author.</comment></comment></comment>


RocketSkates let you zip along the sidewalk at a top speed of 12 MPH - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/09/rocketskates/?ncid=rss_truncated <comment><USER2> Not trying to be rude, but why is engadget linked here instead of the actual KickStarter? I can't be the only one who hates struggling to find a source link on most news sites? Wouldn't it be more useful to just link to the KickStarter?

Edit: Ok so engadgets source links are easy to find but still why not just link to the KickStarter?

<comment><USER3> So let's also link to the Kickstarter.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petertreadway/acton- r-r...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petertreadway/acton-r- rocketskates-worlds-first-smart-wearable-m)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a person that's bought an electric skateboard in the past and a lot of other dumb stuff, I feel like I have a decent grasp on the target market here... but I couldn't buy one of these, they just look so dorky. It's like wearing cement shoes or something. Way too bulky and garish. And the marketing video.. ugh. Like the shirtless dude and the weird slow-mo cuts and the obvious pandering to a male audience? It just gives off a very desperate vibe. If they have to go to such great lengths to make it seem "cool" you can be almost assured they realize exactly how uncool it looks.

The other thing is, your target market is basically college students to start with (probably), or kids. 400+ is out of their range. I think you can get away with cheap/functional+dorky (regular skates), or expensive+cool, but you can't do expensive+dorky (segway territory).

<comment> peter-row I think their marketing is off.

It's 10-20% of the price of a segway, and you can climb stairs, and carry them much more easily. They also look easy to put on (unlike rollerblades).

If they can sell 500 units, they'll easily hit their stretch goals. I think they'll do OK.

They just shouldn't be afraid of being the next segway - segway didn't fail because it was "dorky". pg was using that as an example of the problems companies get when they run fat and are too cloistered. Segway had a lot of other problems (with the same root cause) - it was way too expensive, and it was too awkward outside a controlled environment (both of which these skates seem to solve). It also tried to sell 50,000 units on the first iteration, while these guys are selling maybe 1000 (for the kickstarter), and can then tweak things based on customer feedback.

<comment><USER5> Not all rollerblades are difficult to put on -- check out Doop skates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These look neat and they made a great kickstarter video. They know who's going to want those (25 - 30 something guys) and they made sure to have lots of shots of cute girls using the skates. I watched the whole thing ;) It was also fun to see my home town of Pasadena all over that video. Now I'm homesick. Good luck to you guys - they do look genuinely fun!

<comment><USER7> I was actually put off by the great pains they took to make them look cool in their video. It reminds me of the early promos for the Segway.

<comment><USER8> The shirtless guy, the slow-motion, the tricks and then the guy reading notes below the camera - found it off-putting as well. I think that most people who could afford this sort of thing just want a good way to get around rather than show off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like I'll see these in SkyMall some day.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is kind of neat, but it negates one of the great benefits of skating (or walking, or running, or bicycling) which is exercise.

<comment><USER11> I agree. They are quite cool but they are solving a problem I never had. If I had a bunch of money laying around and was bored I would buy these but not otherwise.

<comment><USER12> Isn't it sort of similar to segways?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Speaking of the actual _skates_. The most real are probably [http://boostedboards.com](http://boostedboards.com). There are almost here it seems.

<comment><USER14> I've seen a few Boosted boards in the wild, they're definitely real.

<comment><USER15> I rode one at SXSW in March 2013 -- they're yet to be made available commercially?

<comment><USER14> I think they've already shipped a fair number of the Kickstarter backer reward boards.

<comment><USER16> Romain Guy, a Google engineer (formerly Android, now works on their robotics stuff I think) has tweeted about riding his, so that sounds right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this is a very interesting concept, but stylistically speaking, they are so ugly.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not too fond of the design of these things. They look like some kids toy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems like a neat idea if you live in a place with well-built roads. As a resident of Michigan, where the roads typically consist of more pothole than road, this would be useless at best and dangerous at worst.

Still waiting for the Kickstarter that brings us the 'spokewheels' from Snowcrash (not sure if that's the actual name, it's been a few years since I've read it). Something that can deal with potholes and road debris alike would be a godsend.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I wore these, I'd have to kick my own ass.

<comment><USER21> You'll have to catch your ass, first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I totally want a pair of these for "commuting" to work! Sure they're a little chunky, but I think they've achieved something remarkable anyway. Besides which it simply takes space for batteries and motors and all the gizmos and what have you. I'm sold. I think these will be a big hit if they work as advertised.

</comment><comment><USER23> That video pitch may be the beginning of the end of Kickstarter...these wheelie things are not a safe, practical product and anyone who buys this wheeliebarrow of overpromises will be disappointed. Is it possible to short a Kickstarter project...maybe that's a Kickestarter project I should launch!

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of the hover boots from the Zelda: Ocarina of Time game for Nintendo 64. Fun memories! I see a lot of comments concerning the product's ugliness. But, hey, not every product has to be subtle and elegant. Some consumers may embrace the over-the-top, video game-like appearance.

</comment><comment><USER25> This guy beat them to it: [http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker- media/image/upload/18n331wztgz...](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker- media/image/upload/18n331wztgzcyjpg.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER25> Why does everything these days need an "app" with "games" or other gimmicks?

Boosted Boards focus on building an amazing electric longboard is much more appealing to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> The angry masculine look of these isn't my style but I really like the idea. A 10 mile range is much better than I expected. I could see these becoming quite popular on college campuses.

I don't know about "zipping along the sidewalk" at 12mph -- that seems kind of rude anywhere there are pedestrians traveling at more pedestrian speeds. There is also an interesting gray area as far as traffic laws.

</comment><comment><USER27> These look like foot-sized Segways.

</comment><comment><USER28> Based on the name, I was expecting something much more Wile E. Coyote than this. Disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER29> the founder was a teenager in 198x - that explains "Back to the Future 2" design, etc. As another 40+ years old a&& i'd personally feel strange trying to push a "cool and fun" thing to the 20+ years olds. (Even such an unquestionably cool, in my mind, thing as a million bucks is far from being cool for these youngsters :).

Wrt. all these new devices, mostly electrical - they are victims of "uncanny valley" effect - unmoving/freezed human body at speeds less than 20mph looks spooky. Even electric bicycles look this way.

</comment><comment><USER30> I hope they come with a helmet.

</comment><comment><USER31> More kickstarter Vaporware.

<comment><USER32> Vaporware? Have you watched the video?

<comment><USER31> I have. It's a kids toy with a slow mo video. But I am sure the founders of this seeded this thread with enough fake accounts to make sure it gets its much deserved publicity.

<comment><USER33> You realize that all new accounts on HN show up with green usernames. Currently, there are only two 'new' users who have posted in this thread, both expressing negative views about the product. If they've 'seeded' this thread with fake accounts, there's no evidence of it.

<comment><USER8> I think they mean upvoting the story submission rather than the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can't wait for sidewalk/bikelane wars over this. Too fast for the sidewalk with people walking. Will cyclists give up there precious bike lane space?

<comment><USER35> I don't think they have to, since this is not a bicycle.

<comment><USER7> These are probably too fast (and powered) to be considered pedestrians. They'll like suffer the same limbo the Segway did, and end up with nowhere to go.

<comment><USER22> Naw, I'd be able to use them on the sidewalks here in San Diego without any issues. And with the range and ride time they have I could get most places I want to go. There are plenty of places which allow electric propelled scooters (for example) or bikes on sidewalks...just so long as they don't go faster than 15 mph.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Postcrypt Coffeehouse: One of Columbia University's Best Kept Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.pix11.com/news/morning/hidden-new-york/postcrypt-coffeehouse-one-of-columbia-universitys-best-kept-secrets <comment><USER2> When I was in school long ago I was involved in running the campus coffeehouse. It was a great place for music, but it was hard getting students in. Most nights, most of the audience was locals.</comment>


Baidu: Supporting 50M Inserts a Day with CockroachDB in Production - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/baidu/ <comment><USER2> 50M inserts/day isn't that high...

= 2m/hour = 34.7k/minute = 578/second

That isn't too much to shout about... or am I missing something?</comment>


Mechanical Computing Systems Using Only Links and Rotary Joints - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03534 <comment><USER2> > A key performance metric of computers is their energy dissipation. One > contribution to dissipation is friction at the rotary joints in each logic > gate. Due to the joint's small frictional drag, mechanical computers > constructed from them can, in principle, dissipate orders of magnitude less > power than conventional semiconductor computers, while still operating at > relatively high speeds.

This claim seems dubious, perhaps someone has more expertise to comment. The justification

> Operating this lock involves rotation at the joints by up to ∆θ≈1 rad. The > model system analyzed in [11] is an excerpt of the links and joints shown in > the closeup on the right of Figure 24. From [11, Eq. 2], this rotation > dissipates bout 2.4×10−27J per rotary joint when operating at f = 100 MHz.

Seems akin to saying "We operate our microchip at 1 microvolt / 1 pico ampere at f=100MHz, giving 10-26J per operation." \-- which seems like a silly aspiration without carefully analyzing noise and quantum mechanical constraints. (without which it would seem almost any computing device could operate at arbitrarily low power).

<comment><USER3> However it would have a nice property: not operating would consume zero power. Useful for low-leakage cases or energy harvesting.

<comment><USER4> it is possible to design microprocessors which can just utterly stop. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_core) power consumption doesn't drop to exactly zero, but it can come into competition with the quiescent current of the power supply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did no one else notice the name of the lead author? Ralph C. Merkle [1] is a rather well known computer scientist, involved in public-key cryptography, hashing algorithms, and inventor of the Merkle Tree [2] that is at the core of the blockchain.

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

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

<comment><USER6> I did. Iirc Merkle is big into nanotech too.

<comment><USER7> Yes, he's collaborated with Eric Drexler, the author of Engines of Creation at the Forsight Institute.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It somewhat reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_\(computer\)) although this mechanism is definitely superior in terms of friction. I guess the majority of research into mechanical computers stopped shortly after electrical/relay ones started becoming more interesting, which is why there's definitely better mechanical designs possible.

In fact, people probably use a lot of mechanical devices which can serve as logic gates without knowing it --- although everyone focuses on electronic digital computers, the mechanisms on which computers can be built are surprisingly vast and simple.

Also, the PDF is rather bloaty for the content, because all the figures are extremely high-resolution bitmap images instead of vector graphics, despite looking like they were created with a vector graphics program.

</comment><comment><USER9> this is intriguing. since the links and rotary joints will be susceptible to friction I wonder if you could pump oil through the machine to remove any shavings that might be created.

I wonder if the fact that the gates etc. are in a single plane could be used to make it function more effectively as well.

It certainly is using a different mechanical approach than the Differential Machine.

<comment><USER10> I was going to submit the same paper, and had the same question, along with another one. The abstract says that the system can be scaled down to molecular level, much like electronics has been scaled to sub mm or nm level. But at the sub nanometer level, we face quantum effects which are hard to overcome. Would mechanical based computing systems give us the same headache as we try to scale them further down?

<comment><USER11> _quantum effects which are hard to overcome_

This is discussed thoroughly in Nanosystems (Table of Contents - [http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html](http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Heh, one step closer to a real self-replicating rep-rap :) Now to implement a PID controller..

<comment><USER13> This is a very scary idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If people like reading outlandish papers like this, see the full queue.

2018 [https://arxiv.org/list/cs.ET/18](https://arxiv.org/list/cs.ET/18)

2017 [https://arxiv.org/list/cs.ET/17](https://arxiv.org/list/cs.ET/17)

</comment><comment><USER15> Billiard Ball Computer is just made out of billiard balls :).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard- ball_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer)

It's turing complete. I'm wondering if the mechanism described in paper does something above and beyond...

<comment><USER16> Plus, you can implement it with crabs!

[http://www.complex- systems.com/abstracts/v20_i02_a02.html](http://www.complex- systems.com/abstracts/v20_i02_a02.html)

[https://www.wired.com/2012/04/soldier- crabs/](https://www.wired.com/2012/04/soldier-crabs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Technical question: Could someone explain why, in the shift register, the output lock is needed at all?

Couldn't you simply connect the output of each holding lock to the respective input of the next cell and get the same results?

</comment><comment><USER18> It looks like you could really easily prototype and make toy projects with this system using a peg board, and maybe a half dozen parts: pins, bell cranks, the locks, spacers/washers, joints and links a variety of lengths.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this how the technology was described in Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age" in which computing was done with nanoscale Babbage like machines?

<comment><USER20> Pretty much. See Nanosystems, linked in another comment, for a technical treatment. Its logic design used sliding rods, so friction could be more of an issue, especially if you _can 't_ make it atomically precise. (With atomic precision you could design the surfaces for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superlubricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superlubricity)) Quick intro here: [http://www.halfbakedmaker.org/blog/58](http://www.halfbakedmaker.org/blog/58)

Merkle wrote a later paper on a different approach, buckling-spring logic: [http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/mechano.html](http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/mechano.html) I'm not sure how this latest design is supposed to be better still. I haven't really dug into either of them.

BTW this is the same Merkle who's always getting mentioned in blockchain articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At large scale, I wonder what kind of horsepower would be required to run a "useful" implementation made at a scale that an normal workshop could produce?

</comment><comment><USER22> i want to build a few these at 3d print level, but would love to see someone prototype some of these at micro level, anyone have access to lithograph? Another basic question is potential clock speed based on size and material used. curious if anyone has done some basic ballpark theoreticals</comment>


Twitter as a replacement for Google Reader - <AUTHOR> http://abhishekbiswal.com/blog/twitter-replacement-google-reader.html

<comment><USER2> Or you simple use [http://newschalk.com](http://newschalk.com) ;)</comment>


Fund your company from the command line - <AUTHOR> https://asciinema.org/a/16243

<comment><AUTHOR> A software system for composing, validating, and sharing form contracts. All four flavors of SAFEs are currently on the API server, including SAFE-MFN, SAFE-cap, SAFE-discount, and SAFE-cap-discount.

I've also blogged about the system here: [http://writing.kemitchell.com/2015/02/09/Common- Form.html](http://writing.kemitchell.com/2015/02/09/Common-Form.html)

Much appreciate any thoughts or feedback!

Oh, and you guessed it: I am not your lawyer. Please get a lawyer. Especially if you don't know you need one.</comment>


BlueMail Creators to Apple: Let us back in to the Mac app store - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/bluemail-developers-write-open-letter-to-apple-mac-app-store/ <comment><USER2> > He said the company doesn't want to distribute BlueMail over the internet > and bypass the Mac App Store because Apple's MacOS software prevents > downloads from "unidentified developers" unless a user tweaks their MacBook > settings.

But all they need to do is notarize their software to get around that? Considering that they're already distributing their app on the App Store, this would be _less_ onerous.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like an almost unreasonably charitable story. Their app was apparently kicked out of several app stores for sending mail service user credentials to their servers. It's entirely unsurprising the app was launched towards the raging thermonuclear heart of the sun. Now they hope to make up for this catastrophic mistake by... patent trolling? Perhaps I'm missing something here but it's very hard to sympathize with this lot.

<comment><USER4> Yup. Keep it out of the app store. I ran into BlueMail awhile back when assisting a non-profit. A number of the staff members were using it so I figured I'd take a look. It wasn't long before I found it was exposing email service authentication credentials in clear-text network communication and was sending those credentials to their own servers. I advised everyone to stop running it and banned the BlueMail agent from connecting to our mail service. I reported the vulnerabilities and never heard back. I never followed up because the app was subsequently removed, which I hope I played some small part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be really curious for anyone who's experienced at reading patents to take a look at their patent and figure out just how broad it is, because the idea of patenting "creating different fake emails for different services that all proxy to your real address" seems quite ridiculous. The reason other third- party signin providers don't do that isn't because it's a novel idea but because they have no incentive to do so (and typically do the opposite, sharing even more data about you with the service you're signing in to).

</comment><comment><USER6> > Without a presence on the Mac App Store, we cannot continue forever,"

I'm interested in how prevalent the MAS actually is to most people. Everyone I know with a Mac barely opens it and downloads most of their software (generally enterprise file sync software and game stores eg. Steam) via the internet anyways, or just uses almost exclusively websites since a lot of software isn't made for Mac.

<comment><USER7> I basically installed my new macbook pro, yesterday. besdes two apps I downloaded pkg/dmg files from websites. well most of these apps have their own update infrastructure and would not work when published through mas. like vmware fusion. also Chrome/Firefox have their own auto update. funny enough the only two apps that came from MAS where from microsoft (RDP and OneDrive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How was a patent granted for throwaway email address creation? We wrote scripts to generate them back in 90s to get signup bonuses at e-commerce sites.

<comment> crooked-v The patent office grants obviously invalid patents constantly, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish these guys' app gets back into the Store (although given it's the Mac App Store why not just distribute it directly?) but I don't like how they want to patent & litigate over the simple concept of a proxy server for e-mails that substitutes real addresses for aliases.

</comment><comment><USER10> > The pair are suing Apple for patent infringement, but they've also just > published an open letter to Tim Cook, asking the Apple CEO to restore > BlueMail to the Mac App Store—despite the ongoing litigation—so they don't > lose their business.

Well this takes the meaning of despicable into new heights, given how any allegation towards this tech giant can lead you to being financially suffocated if you exclusively depend on their platform.

It is beyond pointless to sue Apple for copying you and they know that BlueMail depends on them on the App Store and also know that they will be embarrassingly reduced to begging them (Apple) to go back on the App Store to survive.

> Without a presence on the Mac App Store, we cannot continue forever,"

As far as Mac Developers are concerned, they can distribute without the Mac App Store, if they don't use in-app purchases. But for Mac/iOS-only app companies who use In-App Purchases however have to ultimately sign an unavoidable deal with the devil and your better hope that he doesn't take your idea soon!

</comment><comment><USER11> "Dan and Ben Volach told WIRED their company doesn't have the resources to pursue the lawsuit if their MacOS app isn't back on the App Store, considering the litigation can take time. It doesn't help that Apple's legal team has allegedly asked for an extension to prepare its defense."

Hmmmm....sounds like this was the intended result....so not sure how writing a nice letter to Apple would help.

<comment><USER12> > not sure how writing a nice letter to Apple would help.

Tim might say yes. It certainly can't hurt to ask.

<comment><USER13> He says yes to China and Russia, so why not?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there arrows beside usernames in comments? - <AUTHOR>

I click on them and they disappear, do they have a purpose? <comment><USER2> They are to rank the comments and give the users karma points. So yes they have a purpose.

<comment><USER3> OP points out a real issue, though. If you didn't already know that, how would you? Perhaps some alt text could be added to the arrows.

<comment><USER4> You make a great point. It probably took me a day to figure out what "karma" was, upvotes, etc. I don't think I sent a single upvote for weeks since I didn't know how important they were/weren't.

HN isn't really set up for the new user, IMHO.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty new here (about a week I think). While the voting/karma system isn't readily apparent, like you, I figured it out about a day after registering. I think the FAQ could possibly benefit from a more thorough explanation, but I do think people figure it out eventually once they start participating.

<comment><USER6> I registered yesterday and came to know about it immediately about what he up arrows are. Anyone who's familiar with discussion forums can get it in a while I guess. But, sure, I think HN should have given a note of this. Using Alt text is a good idea to keep the space clean and unintuitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> getting rid of karma points on comments has certainly hurt here... it's harder to ascertain what they are for when they don't increase.</comment>


The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ <comment><USER3> This is just one of the worst things I've ever read on Cutt's blog. Because they can't really distinguish good guest posting from 'passable' guest posting, it's all done?

Got news for you: guest blogging is relevant for many more reasons than Google. In fact, that's probably one of the least important reasons to guest post or guest blog these days. Referral traffic that is more qualified than organic search, audience building, reaching new channels that organic search cannot quite tap, and many more non-SEO oriented reasons are why guest blogging will never really die out in the way that other types of linkbuilding have died out.

You have to love the world's biggest scraper and source of 'duplicate content' (all the scraped info from weather, wikipedia, etc in their sidebar these days) making up the rules of what is and isn't allowed. Extremely hypocritical, but the good news is that relying on Google never was necessary, and is becoming less and less so as time goes on.

<comment><USER4> Google have reached the point where they know that every website is fundamentally dependent on them, and now they're taking advantage of it that to make their lives easier by forcing the entire internet to change every time some commonplace practice makes their algorithm's life harder. They've been doing it on a technical level for a while, in terms of stuff like how ads may link to the destination. Now they've simply moved onto dictating the culture and social norms of the Internet. If your way of sharing good writing with your actual readers makes life harder for Google, well you'd better change your practices or they'll punish you, even if you're not doing it for them.

<comment><USER5> _Google have reached the point where they know that every website is fundamentally dependent on them_

Isn't that exactly the kind of institutional arrogance that the GP post was highlighting?

OK, _some_ web sites might still be fundamentally dependent on Google. Personally, I'd advise against relying on a business model based primarily on search traffic for a number of reasons, but of course everyone is free to try it if they like.

However, I somehow doubt big name brands like Microsoft or Audi or McDonalds would suffer irrevocable harm if Google disappeared tomorrow. Nor would major sites like Wikipedia or Facebook. Nor would all the popular forum/news aggregator sites, or the popular source sites that repeatedly get linked from them.

Perhaps more telling, I doubt any of the much smaller niche/hobby or family business type sites I know about would suffer greatly if Google vanished tomorrow either. The big G represents only a modest share of the incoming traffic in each case, and moreover the quality of that traffic in terms of engagement and conversions is relatively low compared to most other major sources. They are often beaten on volume by at least one order of magnitude by a single link from an influential blogger in a relevant field who is genuinely suggesting that their readers visit that site, or the equivalent via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. And that's before you count the viral effect, which can bump the difference to multiple orders of magnitude. Content is king, as Cutts has often said, but in 2014 good content can be found many ways without any help from Google.

I suspect this issue is symptomatic of a serious and long-term difficulty for Google search: their foundation is still basically the idea that you can judge the worth of a page by how many incoming links it sees. I'm reasonably sure that unless they have some shady deals going on with various popular social media sites, they don't even know about probably 90% of the incoming links to most of those little sites I mentioned, nor about 99% of the links my friends and family share to other people's sites. All they've got left is the public blogs and the assorted SEO tricksters, and that's not where a lot of people share genuine recommendations any more.

<comment><USER6> "I doubt any of the much smaller niche/hobby or family business type sites I know about would suffer greatly if Google vanished tomorrow either."

Many existing businesses already have awareness built through a variety of channels over a number of years, but if search were to die off some newer sites struggling to build exposure from scratch would struggle harder. That said, as Google keeps lifting the cost barrier to entry & radiates greater risk out to the smaller players perhaps building initially from the perception that Google is perpetually late / behind the curve on new sites, & that one needs exposure elsewhere isn't a bad thing.

"They are often beaten on volume by at least one order of magnitude by a single link from an influential blogger in a relevant field who is genuinely suggesting that their readers visit that site, or the equivalent via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. And that's before you count the viral effect"

If they don't have an SEO strategy (or are selling a unique product that people don't know exists until they see it) & just let whatever search traffic happen on its own then sure it is easy for other sources to drive vastly more traffic than search. But if they are focused on commercial keywords, build content around the consumer demands their solutions help solve, and have an SEO strategy then search is typically in the top few referrers in terms of revenue driven.

A lot of the top affiliate links on Twitter or such are for iTunes song sales: low cost, low friction & low commitment purchases. I think I have had maybe a couple Twitter conversions in years, while search has driven orders of magnitude more. But both are channels that are part of the awareness process & when you add them together its more like 2+2=5.

"their foundation is still basically the idea that you can judge the worth of a page by how many incoming links it sees"

I think they fold in more usage data than they let on, but feel little need/incentive to mention that aspect of the algorithm.

"I'm reasonably sure that unless they have some shady deals going on with various popular social media sites, they don't even know about probably 90% of the incoming links to most of those little sites I mentioned"

Did you see the bit about using Google Chrome's data saving caching feature on Android? Chrome desktop also has security features baked into it. And there are boatloads of signed in user accounts tied to both of these. And large chunks of many social sites are crawlable.

"All they've got left is the public blogs and the assorted SEO tricksters, and that's not where a lot of people share genuine recommendations any more."

The fact that those votes are harder to give means they (often) have greater discrimination value. It is easy to say that social signals should replace links, but that would effectively be Google subsidizing competing ad networks. And even if we ignored that the "relevancy" signals in social are also the ad units, outside of those official ads there are third party strategies to ensure social is every bit as gamed as the link graph is.

Just today I saw this [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/stealth- marketing-micr...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/stealth-marketing- microsoft-paying-youtubers-for-xbox-one-mentions/) and that reminded me of this from the past [http://www.seobook.com/images/tweet-and- get.png](http://www.seobook.com/images/tweet-and-get.png)

<comment><USER5> _If they don 't have an SEO strategy (or are selling a unique product that people don't know exists until they see it)_

The second part is what I really had in mind there. One of the sites I was thinking of is a textbook example, a start-up for people who have a certain hobby.

The SEO strategy is reasonably effective: the site consistently ranks on the first page of Google for almost all targeted search terms, which is not a bad achievement starting from a page rank of nothing a few months earlier. But it's partly able to do that because no-one in the field has really done anything similar before, so almost no-one actually searches for anything like it either.

In contrast, more specialised and proactive channels, such as advertising in traditional off-line media or targeting ads at people with that particular interest on social networks, attract very favourable comments and numerically they tend to get far better click-through rates, similar levels of engagement, and in some cases a much higher overall conversion rate/lower CAC.

If you only looked at the hits from Google, your first reaction might quite reasonably be that there was no market for this product, but the feedback once people in the target market actually see it paints a different picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> so because google's algos can not distinguish between spam and ham, we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater (sorry for mixing metaphors!)

we've already seen how google missed a massive and long running link scheme (rapgenius) and had to do a clumsy temporary manual change to save face... now we're seeing them try to stop guest blogging from being used for spam

well guess what, every tactic that can be used to create good SEO can be used in the wrong hands for 'bad' SEO. you can leave a great insightful comment or you can leave a spammy comment. you can do a great guest blog article which adds tremendous value or you can do a spammy terrible article

google is confessing that they are incapable of telling them apart so they want to destroy the whole thing just so they can go on saying that they still know what they are doing

well, let me reiterate what many already know: the emperor has no clothes!

<comment><USER8>
      well guess what, every tactic that can be used to create
      good SEO can be used in the wrong hands for 'bad' SEO

I would suggest that if you're coming up with 'tactics' for SEO you're already on the road to bad SEO.

optimise your search engine placement by, huh, here's a novel idea - <USER2> original, good quality content. everything else is secondary. gaming the system is an arms race and not a long-term win.

<comment><USER9> You need links as well. "Sure, but good content will naturally be linked to", but then ask yourself, when was the last time you gave something you liked a dofollow link on your blog? And even if you did, you maybe gave one link for every 100 you enjoyed but didn't.

People very rarely link to things these days, and the big guys will pay people to provide links. Guest blogging was previously the ethical way to get those links until people started abusing it.

<comment><USER10> The model is outdated, most links are now shared in closed networks which will happily nofollow everything.

Also depending on your niche many of your users may have never actually placed a link anywhere before (outside of a closed network sharing a link)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the difficulty in fighting spam. Google's goal is to determine which sites are the "best," and use, as their measure for doing so, the number of natural (organic) links as a scorecard. And as soon as people realized that's what Google was looking at, they started to mimic the organic links to boost their own ranking.

In a sense, Google is the largest crowdsourced project of all-time. It's a lot like Reddit or HackerNews in that every link is an upvote, but the genius of Google is that each link carries a different weight, and that links are a natural byproduct of using the Internet. In short, the people contributing to the crowdsourced ranking system don't even realize they're doing so most of the time. They're just doing what they like and leaving a byproduct of doing so (links, social signals) that Google can use to tell you which sites people consider valuable.

But that means that once people realize what Google is using to rank, they can mimic those signals, and sway the algorithm in their favor. The problem Google is going to run into is that once spammers can closely (and at times programmatically) mimic what is happening "organically," Google's algorithms cannot tell the difference.

Right now Google's approach seems to be ignoring or highly devaluing portions of the Internet that have been overrun with spam. Article submissions, blog comments, and now apparently guest posting, which sucks for people that do really high quality, organic guest posting; for Google that has to be collateral damage. Spammers will simply move on to the next portion of the Internet, mimicking what Google still uses as a ranking signal. It's an endless battle.

One of the big things I see happening now is entire website hijackings (I've been meaning to email you about that, Matt). I did a quick little report on the search engine results for "Viagra," and 81 of the top 100 are hijacked websites, including a client I have to upgrade to a newer version of Drupal, as the older one has been compromised. I don't know if or how Google will win this battle, but it's far from over. I honestly feel like the new way we gather data to rank websites, and what will be successful in 25 years, will have to be completely unrelated from what Google is doing now, and much harder to manipulate than spreading links all over the Internet.

<comment><USER12> "One of the big things I see happening now is entire website hijackings"

It's true that website hacking remains a big issue in the spammiest areas of the web even though it's completely illegal. Unfortunately, there's a lot of unmaintained, unpatched web servers out there that blackhats exploit. It's fundamentally a hard problem, but we've been working on the next generation of our hacking detection algorithms.

I've always wondered why we don't see more startups offering hacker protection, detection, clean-up, etc. Companies like McAfee made a lot of money protecting personal computers, and there's a similar opportunity on the web server side.

<comment><USER13> I think a lot of companies are scared of how good hackers are these days. No one wants to guarantee protection because a hacker of a more elite variety will come along and take that as a challenge, by hacking into the sites that X company has created.

I definitely agree with you that it is somewhat of an under tapped market, but definitely think it needs to be head up by the _right_ individual(s).

<comment><USER12> It could be scary to try to outwit hackers, but even if you don't tackle the problem head on, a website backup and recovery service could be a big help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Given the fact that a very large part of the web in 2014 consists of user- generated content, it seems like pretty much every hyperlink should be nofollow.

It's pretty much impossible to get good rel=follow links nowadays. My startup has gotten some pretty good and genuine attention on blogs and forums, but almost every link appearing on the internet to my site is nofollow.

This is not how Pagerank was meant to work. Google has learned that it's core algorithm is failing to be able to fight spam. Nofollow was invented in 2005 and it will be useless in 2015, since the entire internet will consist of nofollow links.

<comment><USER15> I couldn't agree more. Almost every site is defaulted to nofollow. My opinion is that nofollow has actually come full circle and now makes it easier for the spammers. Since almost all legitimate links are nofollow, the only way to get "follow" links is to pay people to explicitly put them up for you, have friends give them to you, or create spam websites to link to yourself. The people who happily find my website and are excited about it tend to post to social media, and occasionally some blog posts, but very, very rarely a follow link.

<comment><USER16> And of course social media links are generally going to be nofollowed. Doesn't leave much use for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> His title should really be "The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO" because guest blogging is still relevant for traffic, awareness, thought leadership, reaching new audiences, etc.

So while it may no longer a worthwhile SEO strategy, guest blogging still has some other PR-related upsides to consider.

<comment><USER12> Point taken. I just changed the title of the post; thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Spot-on, Matt. I've been getting these requests with increasing frequency for my old robotics blog. My typical response:

 _I 'm exceedingly picky about the topics and quality of articles on Hizook. In fact, of the few guest posts I've done in the past.... I have (1) known the author in person for quite some time, and (2) usually end up spending multiple hours to help edit / mold the final result. I have so little time to curate (even guest posts), that I'd prefer to just pass._

Of course, the difficulty arises if Google's policy is "all guest blogging is bad." There is a lot of perfectly sound justifications for it besides PR: credibility, new audiences, expert opinions, etc. For example, I shouldn't incur PR penalties if I write a (sadly, too rare) robotics piece for IEEE Spectrum.

A few are ruining it for everyone, and balance is hard.

<comment><USER19> Well, that's deeply sucky.

I'm spending three weeks on the road in the next month, so I've got three hand-picked guest bloggers taking over the mike on my site, for the duration. Emphasis on hand-picked, i.e. _invited because they 're interesting_ and I'm hoping my readers will enjoy what they've got to say. I get to take some time off, they get access to a new audience, and the audience get some new and thought-provoking material -- because from my PoV it's not about SEO, it's _all_ about the quality of the content. (Hint: I'm a novelist, one of the guests is a film-maker, the other two are other novelists. We all pretty much live or die by the quality of our writing.)

The question I'm asking is, how do google's algorithmic processes figure out whether a post is a guest post? Are they doing style analysis on prose now? Or counting outbound links, or looking for anomalous keywords? Or is it just a matter of looking for spam-flavoured advertorial?

<comment><USER12> Hey cstross, I almost added a link to your blog post at [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2014/01/introduc...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2014/01/introducing-hugh-hancock.html) as an example of someone doing it right--you've clearly put a lot of thought into people who can add value for your blog's audience. You're at the very tip of the head in terms of quality--most of the scuzzy people take advantage of massive numbers of small, not-very-savvy bloggers who will throw up any submission they receive. So I wouldn't worry at all, and I apologize if my post came across too broadly.

beambot, I agree with your comments and adjusted the title of my post and added on to the end of my post to give more context. Certainly not all guest blogging is bad (e.g. valid reasons for guest blogging include exposure, branding, audience, community, expert opinions, etc.). We just see a lot of spammers exploiting guest blogging and innocent site owners as an SEO tactic, so I wanted to make it clear that we reserve the right to take action where we see abuse.

<comment><USER20> "we reserve the right to take action where we see abuse." With that option on the table, and Googles broad and subjective discretion, I don't see any reason to ever Do Follow a link again.

It seems like all the legit reasons to link out have nothing to do with search rankings, so why risk Google's Ire?

More importantly, if No Follow becomes the default, wont that be a net negative for Google's index?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here comes Google, the Internet police! Do as they want or say goodbye to 80% of search traffic.

<comment><USER22> Do as the people who use Google want (I'll give you that they have a big influence on that). But come on, spammy guest post SEO hacks are not something in any Google user's interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ironically, with their guidelines, Google is probably responsible for shaping web content more than any other entity or spammy SEO tactic.

<comment><USER16> PageRank and AdSense likely go a long way towards encouraging all the MFA sites and low-quality guest-written content people would dislike on the net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Matt Cutts: (I know you lurk here, so hopefully you answer this)

Will guest posts on high quality sites still count toward link building? I'm talking about well known sites that accept only a fraction of high quality contributors. Thanks

<comment><USER25> I.e guest blogging on SmashingMagazine etc.

<comment><USER26> Right. Same goes for VentureBeat, TechCrunch and every other major web publication out there that solicits guest posts. And not all of them are of great quality, either. Many come across as nothing more than thinly veiled advertisements that wouldn't look out of place on Ezinearticles or somewhere similar.

I understand what Matt's getting it with this decree but it's very hard to selectively enforce this in a way that doesn't come off as favoritism towards big brands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is too bad. Most of the other SEO-spam tactics (paid links, affiliate networks, etc) were pretty clearly destined to be spam traps and invite Google's wrath. Unfortunately, one of the things I thought was best about content marketing and guest blogging was that it encouraged founders and experts to find where the audience was that would appreciate their product, and create high quality content explaining why it mattered. Many have written about how founders can be tempted to stay in and wait for customers to come to them, but a guest blog could help bridge that gap, as they can stay in while still finding customers, and honing their message (plus the comments to these are often really valuable wells of feedback from people you may not have been able to reach before).

Here's hoping for a happy medium here.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this a response to this? [http://nenadseo.com/new- seo/](http://nenadseo.com/new-seo/)

Now that the cat's out of the bag (and getting some attention), I guess it's sensible for Google to jump out of the "big brand's" pocket. Sounds like they're trying to avoid the interpretation that big brands and Google are scratching each other's back by blaming it all on the practice of guest blogging.

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant: "Expedia Lost 25% Of Their Search Visibility In Google Possibly Over Unnatural Links" \- [http://searchengineland.com/expedia-loses-25-of-their- search...](http://searchengineland.com/expedia-loses-25-of-their-search- visibility-in-google-possibly-over-unnatural-links-182113)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Along similar lines, if someone offers to translate your website for free, it's not free.

Someone might e-mail you out of the blue with a translation of a website you control. They'll ask you to leave in the links to them as a way of giving them credit. The links are there to give PageRank to a shady SEO organization.

I admit, I came close to falling for this once, when someone offered to translate a documentation page I maintain into Romanian. But I have a friend who speaks Romanian, who read it and pointed out that it was the worst Romanian he had ever seen, and that was enough for me to look into what was really going on.

<comment><USER29> Somebody does you a service, and you give them a link? That seems perfectly reasonable to me. If SEO means trading a good value service for a better reputation, then SEO sounds like it's working pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google doesn't own the internet so it's unfair that they get to decide whether or not a concept like guest blogging should or shouldn't be allowed.

<comment><USER24> You can still guest post. Google just won't be ranking it for SEO. True guest posting is valuable regardless of SEO. You should be targeting the web site's users, not Google.

<comment><USER25> > Google just won't be ranking it for SEO.

Ah I mistakenly remember a similar post by Matt saying there would be penalization for that.

<comment><USER30> If you nofollow the links you won't be penalized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How can this be enforced? Will Google determine when the author meta data is different for a blog and not pass page rank for those posts? Blog owners would just react by making the post under their default account. Isn't the real issue the quality of content, not who's writing it? It just seems odd to hear that Google is going to go after guest posts instead of focusing on the content.

<comment><USER22> It's easier to go after authors. My (possibly naive) hope is that they are working really hard on evaluating content (Arguably G+'s social signals are the most important input for this), and they'll move towards that as they improve. High quality guest blogging is fantastic, and it would be sad to see it vanish because of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Next up made-for-social-media articles, or why we're fed several helpings a day of "Random Startup Anecdote" by companies just looking for backlinks and traffic.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can anybody give an advice on how one can gain quality backlinks?

Because competition is so high that to rank on any damn keyword it may take years without link building.

<comment><USER28> Did you just ask Hacker News for SEO advice? Who _cares_ whether it's you or someone else who "ranks" for a "keyword"?

Build something of value. Then people will go there.

<comment><USER15> It's a legitimate question, although maybe not worded perfectly. I care whether it's me or someone else who ranks for a keyword, maybe my site is better, and I (like anyone else rational) would prefer to make the revenue. I think understanding what ways you can gain links that is still acceptable under Google's guidelines is a very important thing to know, and truthfully pretty difficult to figure out. If you try to build a really great product and never tell anyone about it, I don't think you will last long enough for Google to give you the proper recognition.

<comment><USER33> Said it true sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There are black hat groups owning high PR 6, 7, 8 websites and they're using the sites for SERP manipulation. The high PR websites are legit too.

What would be a solution to this? I just hope it can be stopped.

<comment><USER12> Hey Alex, I'm always happy to hear about specific link schemes or websites that spammers are using.

<comment><USER35> The implied solution appears to be manual discovery/detection? Google has this [https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1)

Not sure there is an automated system that could detect "legit" sites selling links unless you have a larger body of evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Boing Boing reference irked me more than I though it would. Guest posting is bad unless you're a brand we've heard of? Sorry but the line between spammy guest post on some anonymous blog isn't far from the trash that gets posted on _legitimate blogs_.

The rules should apply evenly to all, no matter how well we know the brand. Google seems to violate this when it comes to respected business models. If you toe the line and Google hasn't heard of you? You're done.

</comment><comment><USER36> Will Google be doing something about spammy guest posts that cite a bunch of so called experts who are part of a link scheme network like Young Entrepreneurs Council? Or do they get a pass because they post on big name sites like these:

[http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/ask-the- entrep...](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/ask-the- entrepreneurs-15-affordable-resources-for-learning-new-business-skills.html)

[http://www.smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2013/05/10-ppc- mar...](http://www.smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2013/05/10-ppc-marketing- tips-for-newbies.html/)

[http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/8-tips- de...](http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/8-tips-designing- unique-call-action-0718658#!sMpQF)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/young-entrepreneur- council/9-s...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/young-entrepreneur- council/9-sites-to-check-out-when_b_3398357.html)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2013/09/25/six-tips-to- en...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2013/09/25/six-tips-to-enhance-your- online-brand/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I fail to see how Google could work around this kind of thing. I mean, you've got nothing flagging the "guest" post as illegitimate other than the fact that it links to an SEO-target, assuming the SEO emailer is telling the truth when he describes non-spammy unique content.

Likely, that's all they could go on - "Your blog has a dofollow link to this site that we know is super-sketchy and now you've been sullied by the link".

</comment><comment><USER38> > Okay, I'm calling it: if you're using guest blogging as a way to gain links > in 2014, you should probably stop.

Matt, are you saying guest posting is penalty-worthy or simply "not useful"? It sort of sounds like you're threatening to penalize anyone who is, plans on or has done guest posting. If so, it seems strange that google would retroactively penalize people for a practice that it previously endorsed.

Can you clarify that at all?

</comment><comment><USER39> If Google's street view car cannot take picture of house paints in black, you should not painted your house in black.

</comment><comment><USER40> This article kind of reminded me if this comic strip:

[http://xkcd.com/810/](http://xkcd.com/810/)

What we're saying here is that someone offered to let the blog owner post some well written and original content on their blog, that would be relevant to their readership and mutually benefiting to both parties. But that's bad because Google says so.

Now, if the content is bad, or not relevant to the readership, or overly spammy, then the blog's readership will presumably react. So it's up to the blog owner to protect their reputation and vet all content that they publish. But assuming the content is good, haven't we just got to a nice place? With marketers realising that the best way to promote their product is to persuade respected content publishers to endorse their products and by making content that people want to read?

</comment><comment><USER41> Human beings can't even always tell what is faked or paid shilling, should we really expect Google to do better than human beings?

Gaming the system seems to be a constant in nature. Species all over the animal kingdom develop mimicry, camouflage, and other techniques to fool predators, prey, and mates. Black hat SEOs are just the digital equivalent of the mimic octopus ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-LTWFnGmeg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-LTWFnGmeg))

The Web is an ecosystem. You can expect Google to evolve overtime to respond to cheaters, but you can also expect the cheaters to constantly involve new ways to game the system. There's no foolproof algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER42> I posted and predicted this today at the same time cutts was writing his post. [https://linkaudit.co.uk/blog/predicting-the- beast/](https://linkaudit.co.uk/blog/predicting-the-beast/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Something I learnt recently is that what Google makes sound like blackhat and the blackhat practices it actually enforces against are two very different things. I realized that when I noticed that a niche site ranking highest for a particular query was involved in link exchange as well as operating a network of sites that despite being unrelated, pointed toward that one site. Looking into it further, Google has made link exchange sound bad (just like this post makes guest blogging sound bad), but stopped short of ever claiming to penalize it or ruling it out.

<comment><USER35> The issue is that competing marketers can use "negative" signals as a weapon to hurt competitors. Google is handcuffed somewhat (less so as time goes on) when penalizing for bad SEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does this mean that if I do a high quality guest post, I should ask the other site to no follow the link? I have a few guests posts lined up and want to stay on the right side of things.

</comment><comment><USER45> If a blog owner wants to place a small ad (say via guest post) in their blog why should they be penalized when the same blog is not penalized when they place an ad via Google ad network? (Referring to near spam text ad placements in between content that you see in many sites).

<comment><USER16> Because Google can easily tell that one is paid for, but not easily tell with the other. The method of ranking by incoming links is very flawed and prone to abuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wow, just wow. SEO as if it were good for the people who are on the web. Google as if it were a shadowy govt agency run by a secret cabal to rule the world. Frankly, I am surprised at so many SEO spammers participating on HN in this thread and not getting called out for it.

For the regular folks who want to use the Internet, let me put it this way:

Okay, I'm calling it: if you've ever advocated, used, bought, or benefitted from guest blogging, you're part of the problem on the Internet. It has always been and will always be a scummy and spammy SEO technique that devalues and dilutes the value of information on the Internet. It is pure entropy.

And no, I'm not talking about Charlie Stross taking a vacation and having relevant people write on his blog for his fans. I'm talking about the brokers, the people who buy and sell content and links, the people who see their online content as a means (way to make money by selling ads), not an end (way to give value or entertainment to people).

</comment><comment><USER47> My 5-pence is how on Earth can you rehabilitate your position in SERP once you have been mistakenly penalised for "spammy guest blogging"? Punishment will be done automatically, right? Any guidelines for making things the right way?

</comment><comment><USER17> The question becomes: What about links from sites like HuffingtonPost, Forbes, and Medium?

</comment><comment><USER48> Once again, Google has no method for weeding things out, so everything gets tossed out.

It would be funny if everyone used nofollow for every link. Google would find itself in a pickle.

<comment><USER49> Could you explain what you're referring to ("once again")?

<comment><USER29> Google's ranking algorithm is getting less and less able to discriminate between "good" and "bad" content. Their response is just to whinge at people who won't play by their rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Google's definition of 'good' and 'bad' is the criterion...

</comment><comment><USER51> Great to see this confirmed. ~ an SEO

</comment><comment><USER52> Whats your Username On BHW ?

</comment><comment><USER53> From doing some SEO, truth is: Googles algorithm is stupid while they have the image of being genius.

This results in two things: Although Google tells you that you should optimize for your clients, if you do that, Google has no clue what the website is about. If you sell paper, a user knows what to do with these - package gifts, wrap books. Googel doesn't unless you put "paper to wrap books" on your site, it doesn't show in peoples search results. A list of mobile phones? Google doesn't know that you try to sell these, your website visitor immediatly does. If you only have brand names and don't use smartphone, if your button is called "add to basket", it does not show your page for "buy smartphone" unless you stick it to your site, a lot of it, but just below the Panda threshold. This is the reason ecommerce sites explain what a "jacket" is on their search result page. No user needs this, but the web is plastered with "hints" for the Google algorithm by legitimate websites, not spammers. Everytime I surf pages, I see this Google hints making websites ugly everywhere.

The other result of Google is so much different from humans in reality: The algo can't determine between legitimate content (e.g. good guest posts) and spam. So there is more and more collateral, websites and blogs that are hit, legitimate business that is lost due to some Penguin update, never to recover - without any bought links. (Go to seo/bigseo Reddit)

Googles algorithm is so much less intelligent as they want you to belief it is with their "just design with the user in mind" to rank on Google. If you do this, you're lost.

PS: The only people that love Google and do not care are spammers. They put up a website, spam it, make money and when hit move on to building the next cheap website.

<comment><USER54> This is 100% true and I can't help but agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> matt cutts should not be determening what is and what is not quality on the www period. the world needs to get rid of googles influence on the web.

<comment><USER56> So don't use Google. Use Bing or DucDuckGo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Hey Matt, just wondering what your Username on BHW is?</comment>