Too Much SEO? Google's Working On An "Over-Optimization" Penalty For That - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627 <comment><USER3> This can't come soon enough.

Too many sites are ranking by stuffing keywords and buying links.

Next, Google need to find a way to rank a page based on it's role in a broader user experience - rather than being measured in isolation.

Sites (especially in retail) are forced to optimise a page in a specific way to get indexed successfully. The result is everyone putting too much content on a single page - detracting from usability and creating homogeneity for users - like cars all optimised in wind tunnels.

<comment><USER4> "buying links"? I'm completely new to this; would you mind explaining what the benefit is of buying links?

<comment><USER5> >buying links

People who have a high PR website may sell a link (usually in the footer, on all pages) to websites in a similar niche to help them rank better. However, for some people its not blackhat enough. Spammers nowadays tend to use automated software like the following:

-xrumer - Developed by a few russian people and primarily used by russian pharmacies for fraud, this is the most powerful "spammer" too out there. You can literally spend $1k and get 1million backlinks within a matter of days and have your site in the #1 position for whatever keyword you're aiming for.

-scrapebox - Similar to xrumer, but while xrumer targets forums (vbulletin etc), scrapebox specializes in harvesting large lists of wordpress blogs (throught google + proxies/botnets) and then posts comments on them (usually all those generic comments you see on wordpress blogs such as "nice post" "good advice, bookmarked" etc).

I could literally go on for hours and hours on how people are exploiting search engines, I think that its prime time for Google to develop an AI for this rather then just relying on algorithms. There needs to be a better PageRank alternative that needs to be implemented.

>benefits

In the most basic terms, for spammers, more links = better search rankings = more traffic = more $$$

<comment><USER6> The most obvious means to counter this strategy is to watch the rank delta of any given site and dampen it. If a site goes from 12 incoming links to 12,000,000 in a few weeks, penalize proportionally pending human review.

<comment><USER7> What if the site just went viral?

Should the human reviewer check every link by hand?

Think codecademy.com now first for "learn to code". I mean, is it best place to learn how to code? At the moment, I'd say it's not. Is it the third result "codeyear.com" (run by codecademy as well)? I'm sure there are better sites that could take that spot and provide more value to the user than that landing page pointing to codecademy (Nothing personal against the codecademy guys of course, big kudos for their venture so far and best wishes for the future).

The problem with today's algorithm is that it can't really tell which site is really good and which one is just popular, mainstream, consolidated, with a high PR. Think lifehacker.com second for "learn to code" (on my side of the world, on google.com and chrome incognito mode on).

Right now if every single newspaper of the world cover your site about how to build a homemade nuclear device and actually write something about the matter in the article (how it would be natural to be), use as anchor text "how to build an atomic bomb" and link to your site, your site will skyrocket to the top for that kw (and many others similar). Even if it's just a school project or a joke that made it to the news.

Where's the quality check?

Anyway I'm sure that smart people are currently working on these details and that a comment reply can't really do justice to the complexity of the issue.

<comment><USER6> Im sure humans can quickly ascertain whether a site suddenly went viral or is being gamed, as the number of such sites is fairly small. I never said a comment reply is the panacea or do can possibly do justice to the totality of search quality, just that an explosive delta in page rank should not be a major issue to a company with the resources of a google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on search. These opinions are my own and based only on the linked article.

I took a beating on the SEO blogs for calling SEO a bug a few months ago, but I'm glad the rest of the world is finally realizing that I'm right :)

Ultimately, Google is trying to rank you highly for providing the best _content_ ; you shouldn't be spending your time trying to figure out how to game Google by making superficial changes to the presentation of your content. Want to rank better? Write better!

The whole problem is rooted in the fact that Google is a leaky abstraction. It tries to be an omniscient Sherpa, guiding the wary Web traveler with its infinite understanding of the Web and the individual user's needs. The reality, though, is that Google is actually just a computer program. So there is a gap between the user's mental model of Google and what Google actually does, and it's this gap that SEO exploits for its own profit.

An infinite amount of exploitation would mean that Google would just return results randomly, and so it makes a lot of sense to detect signs of SEO and penalize the behavior before it further broadens the perfection/reality gap. Gaming the system is currently profitable, since the worst thing that can happen to you is nothing, but the best thing is that you get more traffic. A penalty aligns the risk/reward spectrum to favor "write better content" rather than with "spam a bunch of wikis".

<comment><USER9> >Google is trying to rank you highly for providing the best content...Want to rank better? Write better!

The real world doesn't always work like that. I do a lot of work for an eCommerce site that sells wholesale. Their customers have little to no interest in reading text, all they want are pictures. Which means, the catalogue pages, which are optimised for actual human visitors and not Google robots, contain little to no text, only pictures. As a result, the catalogue pages (most important part of the site) do not rank anywhere with Google, and never will. Google is unable to handle websites that are - quite correctly - all about the pictures. Competitor sites that outrank this particular site design their catalogue pages for Google, not for humans, and rank well because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I gave up trying to optimize for SEO a long time ago. The future is good content, period. Technology will eventually figure out a way to get the good content in front of users, whether it's through a Google-like search engine or something totally different.

I'd rather focus my energy on driving traffic in other ways, such as traditional media, list building, PR - and focusing on creating great content.

I just do the bare minimum stuff when it comes to SEO (title, h1 tags, some anchor text here and there). Other than that, I don't pay attention to SEO in the actual content of the pages.

<comment><USER11> I'm with you.

Create content & do minimum SEO.

Eventually, other sites will link to your content & Google will figure it out.

<comment><USER12> I think this is wishful thinking. Google have been trying to make search smarter for many many years. The truth is that links are still a good signal, and you should try to consciously build links. There are many many many articles out in the internet that are well-written and informative but noone can find them because they're not in the top 10 in Google.

<comment><USER10> Creating good content and promoting it through PR should result in natural links - the exact type that Google looks for.

If you try to stay on top of the latest SEO tactics, you end up hurting yourself in the long-term. For example, awhile back it was recommended to create huge directories of conten t (something like: Travel deals in Ohio, Travel deals in NY, etc, etc). With Panda update, you are now penalized if you have too much similar content. Why deal with all that headache, just create good content.

<comment><USER12> Yep, that's what I said. Creating good content ALONE is not enough and never will be. The internet, like life is not a meritocracy. Just because you write great content doesn't mean Google will do you a favor and feature it. You need to promote it, which is what linkbuilding post-Panda is all about. Not blog commenting, forum spamming, or submitting to directories.

But telling someone to "just write good content" is like telling a programmer "just create a good product". The world doesn't work like that. You need to hustle, shout and say Look at how awesome this site/app/article is! Link to me! I don't like it that much, but that's how the game is, and if you don't play it accordingly, you'll end up with awesome content and no visitors.

<comment><USER10> True, I take it for granted that everyone knows marketing is the most important thing you need to know, no matter what product or service you provide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem is that Google actually aren't good enough at search yet.

They still rely on this dumb word-based approach to document retrieval. Example, if my page is about how to manage your time, and it's a really fantastic resource about that, but I don't actually mention the phrase "how to manage your time" anywhere, I won't rank for people searching for that phrase. I should, but I won't.

So I _have_ to write my content for two audiences - humans and Google.

I don't want to do this. I'd be much happier just building great content for my human readers, and if I happen not to mention the exact keyword phrase a searcher might use, it doesn't matter, Google still knows it should put my site at the top for that phrase, because it understands that my site is about that phrase, even though I don't mention it exactly.

But Google just isn't good enough yet. Someone can set up a page which has a bunch of headers and URLs and variations of the keywords and beat me to #1, even if their content is utter rubbish for human consumption.

That's _why_ SEO still exists. It's symptomatic of a bug in Google.

This penalty will help, hopefully, but we're still going to be in a state where we have to compromise our content to serve two masters.

<comment><USER14> Google is actually pretty good at getting the semantic meaning, but the SERPs show snippets of the content, and users only click on results that match the query.

Google could stop bolding the keyword matches in the SERPs, but that would be a disaster because they are useful for picking the best result.

My point is that this is not purely a Google bug, but also a bug in human nature. People like exact keyword matches to their queries.

<comment><USER13> > the SERPs show snippets of the content, and users only click on results that > match the query

I'd love to see a source to back that up. The only data I've seen on this is various eyetracking and/or click tracking studies which suggest higher up on SERP=more clicks.

<comment><USER15> just run a ppc test with dynamic keyword insertion and look at your click through rates.

This is absolutely correct!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if Google is getting trapped near a local peak.

I watched the video they released on improving search quality yesterday ([http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search- qualit...](http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality- meeting-uncut.html)) and was initially impressed that they gave so much thought to slightly improving a small subset of 0.1% of queries. That meeting must have had 40 people attending!

But afterwards it left me with the feeling that Google is becoming so big and entrenched in old ways of doing things, that they may not be focusing enough on the next big improvement in search. Penalties and heuristics can only go so far -- eventually they'll need something approaching AI -- and if any company can do it it's Google.

<comment><USER17> I don't know if you have any concrete idea in mind, with what AI Google should to approach AI, but Google does fund a lot of research in Information Retrieval and other subfields of AI (machine translation, machine learning, ...).

If you were thinking more along the lines of: "you ask a question and it understands your question and answers it like a human would", then I can tell you that this would require a scientific breakthrough first. That is not really something that you can plan for. Also Google mainly excels in engineering, less so in research. I actually think that Yahoo and Microsoft have stronger research divisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am all for continuing to clean up search.

I'd also like to note that for people creating content on the web, especially programming-type people who deal in logic and certainty, the SEO system resembles something like black magic. It's pretty clear that unless you understand SEO and apply it, you're never going to be seen no matter how good your content is. Now it appears that if you understand it too well that's also a bad thing.

The goal here is to let the users themselves inform the search engine as to what content is good -- hence the plus-ones, social search and all of that stuff. But all of this is still indirect evidence. Unless you could plug a computer inside the head of a person and watch their every thought, the only real data you have for input is server logs, click-throughs, and all kinds of other things that computers do, not people.

I just don't see this being solved any time soon. But I do see it getting so complex and unwieldy that it continues to frustrate searchers and content producers alike. Meanwhile the bad actors will continue to have a heyday.

Wish I could be more optimistic about it.

<comment><USER19> Don't you think the obvious solution is to build an algorythm that thinks like the human brain? I suspect Google isn't that far away from that riht now.

<comment><USER20> Fortunately this is somewhat more than just a wicked problem, something that is going to keep life interesting for a few more years to come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While they can certainly penalize sites that optimize today with respect to the criteria of yesterday, that effectively just means changing the criteria of ranking. Nothing stops site owners to optimize with respect to the new criteria tomorrow. The full implications of the proposition are reminiscent of Russel's paradox, or worthy to be included in a next edition of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach book.

EDIT: small clarification

<comment><USER22> Well no, it's clearly stated that the goal is to even the playing field, not change the rules. If SEOs build too many backlinks (and for big keywords you need them in the range of hundreds of thousands) they will get punished. What are they gonna do, build less backlinks? This is of course over-simplified but it does come across as a sound solution.

<comment><USER23> The solution would be to keep building more backlinks but vary the anchor text significantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A little off topic but: the idea of SEO has always bugged me: like a store owner investing in having really clean windows, but crappy products inside the store.

Admittedly, that is easy for me to say because I don't need high traffic at my site. I need my web site to have a few high value visitors: people who want to work with me or communicate because we are into the same technology. The way I "optimize" my site is writing about what most interests me, and that attracts people with my interests. Seems pretty straight forward to me.

<comment><USER15> actually, the most successful retailers invest more money in their window displays than any other marketing strategy.

Regardless, you are taking an overly simplistic view of SEO...

SEO works best with quality content backing it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I hope they'll be able to do it right. But, as soon as they change their algorithms, SEOs will reverse engineer them again and change the optimizations. There can be no definitive solutions, at least not with current technologies, because SEOs are very smart and very fast at adapting.

As an aside, the first over-optimization that I would target if I were google are keyword-based domain names. Keywords in the domain name are given WAY too much weight; how often do you find that the top three results for the search "XXXX YYY ZZZZZ" to be very shallow but keywords-rich websites with the domain names www.XXXXYYYZZZZZ.com, www.XXXXYYYZZZZZ.org, www.XXXXYYYZZZZZ.net?

</comment><comment><USER20> I have relatively little hope that it takes longer than a few days/weeks until a wave of seo-deoptimization services hit the SEO market. The incentives for beating "the system" are just too high.

<comment><USER26> I would guess Google already keeps a record of a website's history and could easily detect if it suddenly became "seo-deoptimized"

EDIT: But I completely agree. There are far too many SEO's out there for this to beat everything

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google has gotten so bad. I'm now finding worthwhile results until the second or third page.

Here is my search process

If it is from ehow ignore

If it has my search term in the URL ignore

If it is from about.com ignore

<comment><USER28> ehow should have been hit with the Panda update? Do you have a "block all example.com results" link on your Google results page? (You might have to visit the link and then hit back in your browser to get it to appear.)

Do you have any examples of search terms that don't return useful results until page two or three?

<comment><USER19> Let me tell you, searching for typical tech support issues, ehow is always on the first page and the content is clearly spam- usually only tangentially related to the query. try Googling exchange server specify IP adress- and try to find something useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unless the penalties from Google are long term I can't see this as being very effective, as you would assume competent SEOs will just tweak their processes in response.

From what I've read over the years, basic SEO mainly boils down to :

\- Have good, relevant content

\- Choose your page titles and URLs carefully

\- Get lots of links to your pages , from as many different domains as possible, and try to get them from high Pagerank domains

\- Where possible try to get anchor text relevant to the terms you want to rank for - but don't go overboard with a large percentage being the same phrase, as it appears artificial

\- An older site can benefit you, as will exact match domains for the main TLDs

Except for site age, they are all easily changeable by the SEO.

Maybe Pagerank is too easily gameable, and what is old will become new again, and some of the approaches tried in the 90s and replaced by Pagerank will return with a new twist.

<comment><USER30> Pagerank is a very small part of Google's ranking algorithm nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like the equivalent of the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax, designed to increase the US income tax of those deemed to have too many deductions).

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Google needs to be really careful with this. It would make sense that the first place they should look for over optimization is anchor text manipulation. The problem is that this could open up the door for "Negative SEO" services where you can blast a competitor with high traffic keyword anchor texts. The safest place to look will be on page factors and if they decide to go after anchor text manipulation there should be some type of authority metric that protects established sites.

<comment><USER32> Google is probably already do that, which is why the current traffic- generation methods advice is along the lines of varying anchor text.

This is done mostly by identifying related / tangential / complementary / supplementary keyword terms to the resource linked to. Non whitehat SEOers are wising up to the idea of a site targetting niches, and that considerably widens the list of appropriate keywords.

By tackling the long tail keywords en masse - these are less competitive, easier to rank for, and correlated better to buying intent; gradually they make significant inroads to ranking strongly for the big-head keyword in a manner that looks more natural.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google and Matt Cutts, in general, have a larger problem. Cutts never acknowledges that Google works primarily on the language, which is one of the most complex things the human race has ever come up to. And though language is always at stake in Google search, I don't see any serious semiotic study in whatever they make.

And, apart from that, Google totally sucks on languages that are different than English. They think of a new thing for the English based search and then they'll just propagate it everywhere with no substantial modifications whatsoever.

I've got many sites under me, all writing original content. They're not gonna win the Pulitzer, of course, but at least they're edited, accurately followed by teams of human authors that won't even copy PR as a measure to prevent non original contents to appear on the sites. Although all of these things, we got seriously pandalized.

The results where we once used to stay atop are filled in many occasions by scraper-sites who steal our contents and rank 2 or 3, sometimes up to 5, positions above us on the SERP. I can't even count the times I filled the anti-scraping form anymore. That's not enough, because many times popular sites rank higher than us just because they're pretty popular, although their contents are horribly written, short, totally uninformative.

That happens all the time. You know where we still go pretty strong? On Google News, where the human intervention sometimes really applies.

Google should see what's going on everywhere and their insistence on having matt cutts as its only public voice on this huge issue is becoming really frustrating.

He ends up looking like a fake good guy, perpetrating the hypocrisy of a corporation too big and too convinced they have the ability to solve all the hyper-complex search problems, laden with human generated unpredictability and the natural human tension towards deception, just with pretty algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER34> For years those penalties have often been mentioned on SEO forums. This is nothing new but just another filter they will add. Or maybe its just a little FUD to keep people nervous?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is completely the _wrong_ thing to do and in my opinion this means that, Google have essentially just admitted they're _bad_ at search.

Firstly, for ecommerce sites etc due to the lack of content - <USER2> unique content (because there are only so many ways you can say something is X length) these sites are _forced_ to SEO themselves. This is even more apparent as Google are placing their "Google Product Search" within the results as well. Sure, you could add yourself to Google Product Search but that's not the point - Google _should_ be adding ecommerce sites etc in their automatically to make it _a level playing field_. Sure, you can argue that it is hard to do and that might be the case but, there is proof out there in the marketplace to highlight that this is possible - look at what TheFind etc are doing in this space. Additionally, I think there is a lot more that can be done in the Shopping Search space as well as other areas of search which I will cover below.

Having covered those, I will also highlight another problem which is _hindering_ Google = their search engine is based around the Pagerank algorithm which despite evolving is actually _hurting_ Google in trying to solve the problem of SEO.

I believe this is the case because of PageRank and the general Google Search algorithms which are in place – their search at its core is based on 'citations' like those in academic papers etc (yes it has evolved over time) but it is still even loosely based and developed upon on this ranking system. Hence there is the problem of paid links - although you can report them [1] this reporting method actually isn't effective and doesn't work. Additionally, there are tons of ways to get links really easily which appear natural, won't appear overly seo'd and are _extremely_ easy to get and game as well.

Google seems to be taking their search into the, Semantic & Social Search approaches which they will probably solve some of these aspects but, everyone is working out (and many have already worked out) how to game social search although, it is a step in at least a decent direction.

Currently, Google just provides links and documents etc to the ones which it believes is the most useful based on their Pagerank/keyword approach and even if it can improve search to a much greater degree the issue is also related to Adsense/Adwords.

This is because; these two print money for Google. For instance, Adwords really is used for Google Search (yes it does feed into Adsense as well but Advertisers really want their ads on Google Search Results). The last statistic I heard about Google Search, is around 2007 when Google was making $0.12 on average per search – you could probably calculate easily how much Google is making now by looking at their income and dividing it by publicly available search numbers but, I'm going to say it's more than that because in 2004, they were making $0.09 per search. This is actually an issue for the user because, I believe Google really just want their ad results to be perfect – they don't really want you to have to click on the result because then Google isn't making any money – as long as their results are good enough so then they're Ok with that If you don't believe me, take a look at [2] that's a whole lot of ads above the fold. Oh, and if you try and do that be prepared to be punished [3].

Now Adsense, sure it doesn't make that much of Google's income but it still is highly profitable – if it wasn't they wouldn't be doing it. If Google, really wants to fix search then they need to review every single Adsense site and I mean every single Adsense site since Google only reviews the site which you apply with. This leads of a huge problem as MFA's aka. Made For Adsense slip through the net afterwards and if you look at their sites, they're generally have poor content etc and are optimised for the search engine and the user to leave either by clicking the back button. Sure, Google will lose some Adsense income on their balance sheet but if they want to fix search this is also a good place to start.

Sure they're trying to solve this issue and get to grips with it but I don't think they will anywhere in the near future. You can argue this fix they have announced will solve some SEO problems but, as I said in my opening sentence I believe this is the _wrong_ approach and some of the above reasons highlight several issues already but there are tons more. In fact, I actually hope you disagree with me because, not only do I value your opinion but am interested in the other aspects you may add to it.

[1] <https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1>

[2] [http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp- content/seloads/2012/01/...](http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp- content/seloads/2012/01/6728099139_d5444820cf_z.jpg)

[3] [http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold- now-...](http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now- penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613)

<comment><USER36> I don't need to see any ecommerce site in the search results anyway. So good luck making them visible via SEO. It's annoying when searching for information about a product. If I want to buy it, I go directly to amazon, not to the google serach

<comment><USER35> You've actually just highlighted another problem with Google there as well ;)

Google doesn't really know what you're searching for, it doesn't understand the _context_ which is why you see shopping results when you're just looking for information. Yahoo actually tried to solve this with a slider with an option for more shopping/info results but it didn't catch on as users don't want to click anything, they just want to type words in to the box and get the perfect answer - be it an ad or an actual result. If you make a user do anything else then you've already lost the game.

This is another reason why I don't think Google will fix this SEO problem it has any time soon, and I definitely don't think this current 'fix' will solve it either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think this is going to be very interesting. I can understand the benefit of it, but as an SEO, I also feel that because we are working in the dark it is as much a science as an art. To me, this just means I have to work on fine tuning what it takes. Also, I think it will be harder for those who play on the wrong side of the tracks to rank well, which in turn may make it easier for those who do to rank well.

</comment><comment><USER38> I am probably misconstruing things, as I often do and being simple-minded on top of that, but this seems like a circle-jerk and makes me wonder what happened to Tim Berners-Lee's musings about the Semantic Web, and why search hasn't progressed in that direction in some exponentially powerful and revolutionary way.

<comment><USER39> I believe the reason that we see so little of the semantic web is that advertisement is such a dominant business model on the internet. Since it is hard to embed ads in semantic web content, and the will to pay for it isn't there, the sad result is that it is not worth producing.

<comment><USER32> Various bits of the lowercase semantic web (and its related uppercase Semantic Web cousin) factors show through on Google results - mostly Google Rich Snippets, so reviews metadata. These mostly require human intervention to enable on a site-by-site basis (sometimes by the site owner, sometimes by humans in Google itself).

The deeper problem of the semantic web is that it's meta data, which tends not to be visible to visitors. And because of that, it's easy to forget / overlook / incomplete, and nefariously allows SEO over-optimisation invisibly that non- whitehat SEOers do in full view of the human audience.

I wish it wasn't true, but Cory Doctorow's portmanteau of metacrap is unfortunately still accurate ( <http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm> ). We have made several small metadata improvements over the years, but not much progress in substantially overturning Doctorow's original concerns.

Human beings are not great sources of accurate and up-to-date metadata. So we rely on scripts and services to fill in the blanks that we don't. (publish times being recorded in WordPress, for example.)

Converting human content into metadata ends up being an automated human-hands- off affair which means that those automative tools need to be able to parse and extract information / meaning from human prose. Very much what Google has been doing since inception.

It's flawed because it relies on automated interpretation of prose. But there isn't a viable non-flawed method of getting the same information without imposing academic-like constraints to the Web.

<comment><USER38> Thanks for the Doctorow metacrap link, excellent reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone else find that announcement weird? "over -SEO", is just a kind of low quality content, so been a Google target for years. This announcement seems like it's just trying to scare off SEO fanatics, or an admission that Google has been using ridiculously naive linear scoring models for keywords.

</comment><comment><USER41> Well, that's pretty good news... if it works. There's a lot of garbage on the first page just because the page/site has a lot of backlinks and has the whole site SEO'd by the book (titles, keyword density, headers, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER42> As an SEO I am interested to see how this update goes. Google updates usually have a 'shotgun' result. They might kill the intended targets but there is a lot of damage from the spray to sites that might be unwarranted.

<comment><USER43> Define 'unwarranted'. For every site with a good ranking there's probably a dozen who rank worse but provide equally good content. Maybe just shaking things up a bit regularly isn't a bad idea in itself.

<comment><USER42> By 'unwarranted' I am referring to websites who might get dinged in this update but are not overdoing the SEO, or possibly not doing any SEO at all. It happened with the Panda update so I can't help but think that it will happen again.

<comment><USER44> If you're doing SEO at all you should be punished imo. Let Google do its job without interfering and trying to manipulate please. And no, I don't believe there is such a thing as "whitehat SEO". Whitehat SEO is just common sense (write good content and don't screw up your markup).

<comment><USER12> That's like saying trying to sell your product is a sin.

Mind telling me how a consumer web startup is supposed to get others who are interested in X to visit his site about X? This is the basis of SEO: matching searchers to pages. It doesn't happen magically just by wishful thinking, and writing good content unfortunately.

<comment><USER44> No, it's like saying trying to lure people into buying something worse instead of the better is a sin. Like the product manufacturer secretly sneaking around in stores hiding competing products and putting their own in the front.

<comment><USER12> In this world, there will always be people who will attempt to sell you a shoddy product, and snake oil salesman.

But because that's the case, and you got a quality product, you're saying to sit tight, don't get out of the building, don't try to sell... and hope people will eventually choose you?

So how exactly is a consumer startup going to get people who want to know X to visit your site about X?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The huge elephant in the room is that Google can kill so many startups and small businesses practically overnight with an algorithm change.

People can say "create quality content, don't worry, you can always file reconsideration request if it's an accident" don't realize how Kafka-like Google really is. If an algorithm penalizes your site by accident, and your traffic drops by 99%.. good luck trying to talk to an actual human being working in Google to get your problem fixed!

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder how Wikipedia will be ranked with this change since there are litte to no outbound links.

<comment><USER40> ?? All the references are outbound links. A wikipedia page with no outbound links should likely be deleted for non-encyclopedia content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there a SEO industry around Bing? What does Bing SEO look like?

<comment><USER47> Many factors make Bing SEO different. Since Bing doesn't crawl as many pages as Google, they are more harsh on low quality sites and links coming from "content farms". Specifically, Bing is:

\- Less likely to find results in forums

\- Harsher on results from "content mills" (even after Panda)

\- Less likely to give you ranking for a keyword if is not found verbatim in the page

\- Also provides way fewer results for phone number queries

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I hope this destroys all the scabby blogs that link everything to more of their own garbage - Mashable, Engadget, The Verge etc. Be nice to see them focus on not being shit instead of being rewarded for it.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is great news. I've always been surprised how the SEO industry can have such legitimacy when it's basically as legit as false advertisement.

<comment><USER49> Do not confuse black hat SEO with white hat SEO. One is not the other.

Creating good, worthwhile content is a key part of SEO. If you write, or create, good, worthwhile content, you are taking part in SEO. If you take your time to write a headline that best reflects your article, and mark it up correctly, that's a part SEO. If your site is using easy to read names, that's SEO. If people link to your content and write about it, that's a part SEO. If you make the description below your page title on Google's search results actually worthwhile then some random piece, that's a part SEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is the Laffer Curve for search.

</comment><comment><USER51> Thought 1: This may be overly cynical, but it is hard to believe that this isn't just another way to dump more people into their adwords system.

People who "over optimize" on a large scale are probably the same people making money off of well ranked SERP's, penalizing those people pushes them to buy adwords.

They are in essence pre-qualified customers for adwords since they have already demonstrated a willingness to invest real time/money in ranking. Sure this will just trigger yet another race to optimize optimization, but until things are refigured out more money will be dumped into adwords.

Thought 2: This SERP "Market Volatility" is a great way for Google and SEO's to make a little more money.

This is also a good way of reminding some people how much their revenue is dependent on Google, when you see an overnight dive in revenue it captures the attention/mind share of higher ups who have maybe been taking their well oiled SERP machine for granted.

It's like a one night only "Google Dance" reunion tour, and gets people obsessing over them again.

<comment><USER43> That sounds like a marvelous future. Everyone who can justify throwing money at the problem can use paid search and everyone left in organic search can wish them all good riddance and get on with producing content.

<comment><USER12> except this makes sites like StackOverFlow, Huffington Post, Mashable, Yelp, and most sites that depend on advertising economically unsustainable. Before you say "No..", remember even Yelp, a great word-of-mouth resource gets over 70% of their visits through search engines. As does Stack Overflow.

What will be left will be personal bloggers, charities, and hobbyist sites. Be careful what you wish for.

<comment><USER40> HuffPo is a spam site that Panda should have killed. Stackoverflow is a unique content sites with practically no human-unfriendly SEO (Except maybe the huge list of related questions that tends to fool Google, where the search term is split over two questions and neither is actually relevant. )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The Google guys are so smart, with enough time they'll get all their algorithms so optimized they'll eventually exclude every site from ranking on the first page of results. It'll just be a blank white page, the ultimate in minimalism and speed. It'll be an engineering feat not rivaled in the 21st century.

<comment><USER53> You are probably the same guy who complains that Google get's to spammy.

<comment><USER52> Nope, not that guy at all.

To clarify for your benefit, I wasn't complaining about Google's optimization or lack-thereof (spammy vs not spammy). I think it's hilarious, watching the endless dance that Google is going through because their fundamental approach to search is broken and they're trying to drag that broken approach into the future. It's like watching Microsoft with each iteration of Windows & Office, trying to figure out how they can cheat death and drag 1980s software into the future.

On a business level, I don't care about Google's survival or their optimizations. My product doesn't benefit from SEO, nor from their search engine. I'm indifferent to them. If they make a good product, great; if they don't, someone else will eat their lunch eventually.

<comment><USER53> There is some truth to it, the approach was never really good. There is just an extreme need for it and they are still the best one around.

I wonder what happens 20 years from now on, Google can't win over SEO in the long term. There are just too many people on the other side. As long as they don't develop some AI the results will get worse. I use more often "site:" to get what i want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The trouble with SEO as a business is that you are always second-guessing the whims of people who's plans and actions are unknown to you other than the fact that they are almost definitely working against you, and furthermore they will usually have much better resources available.

</comment><comment><USER55> Hard to believe that they don't already do this...?</comment>


Steve Jobs Realtime Posts on Google+ (1-5 mins to load) BETA - <AUTHOR> http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/livestream?keywords=steve

<comment><AUTHOR> First (Unofficial) Google+ Live Post Stream based on Google+ users that have greater than 500 followers and frequently share - Keywords filter is BETA - <USER2> you might have to wait up to 5 minutes before you see Steve Jobs related posts. Leave it running for a bit and enjoy what people have to share on Google+.</comment>


Why Web Designers Should Not Use Ad Blockers - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/14/why-web-designers-should-not-use-ad-blockers-opinion-column/

<comment><USER2> This is what I saw when I opened that link on my macbook without ad blocker: <http://i.imgur.com/hSiC3.jpg>

<comment><USER3> For as much good content as Smashing Magazine has, there is an equal share of brain-dead layout going on. I understand the need to monetize a website, but at some point, content providers are going to have to learn a little bit about economics. The solution to plummeting advertising rates isn't to _increase the supply of advertising space_. That's exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

As an advertiser, I wouldn't even begin to consider advertising on Smashing's blogs. There are ten items (if you include their book, twitter, and Facebook plugs) on that page competing for my attention before I get to any content. The task-focus for someone viewing that page is to find the content. It's a horrible game to foist upon your readership.

If anyone is clicking those ads, it's either by accident, or because they're thinking to themselves, "Ok, obviously Smashing is hard up here, otherwise there wouldn't be 7 ads and 3 plugs."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't agree.

The only reason why web designers should not use ad blockers, that I can think of, is to see how others are placing ads and learn from them, so when you have to design a page that has ads, you know how or how not to do it.</comment>


Palm did it: better experience than Apple - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2009/01/08/palm-did-what-nokia-rim-and-microsoft-couldnt-build-a-better-experience-than-apple/ <comment><USER2> I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy, but you need more than a pretty phone to dethrone the iPhone. The App store is the best thing since sliced bread. The ever-growing developer enthusiasm for the iPhone is a huge factor too.

And if webOS is basically web-based, that means that all of Palm's apps will be available on the iPhone, but none of the iPhone's apps will be available on the Palm Pre. Not exactly a winning proposition.

Well done for getting the design close to Apple's standards (though they had to poach a team of Apple people to do that, all the way down to the packaging that looks just like Apple's), but being a second fiddle won't win this war...

This is not to say that it won't be successful. This Pre is clearly a slick piece of kit. But it won't be anywhere as successful as the iPhone, and certainly won't do "better" than the iPhone.

<comment><USER3> They don't need to "dethrone the iPhone" to succeed, in the same way Apple didn't need to "dethrone Windows" to succeed. There's no reason why multiple manufacturers can't all have viable businesses in the same market space.

<comment><USER4> If the call quality is good (read: way better than Apple/AT&T) and if the network access is good (read: way better than AT&T) and if they address some annoyances that Apple creates with its highly restrictive user experience control policies, then they will give Apple a real run for their money.

BUT, if they can unify Facebook apps with a mobile device, this could be the start of something really huge. If someone (or someones) manages to unify all of the social networks with a mobile device, this would clearly leapfrog Apple's iPhone. We can access Twitter, Facebook, our blog, and location-aware social networks on the iPhone, but this experience is currently somewhat fragmented, and that aspect definitely sucks. If something enabled by the Palm Pre manages to unify all of the above, then this would be a huge game-changing win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Palm's bet on social networking integration is a game changer ... That is huge and not many people will get it."

Umm, how can a social _anything_ be huge if not many people get it? The Zune wasn't just social, it was The Social -- and no one got it.

<comment><USER6> "not many people" are the writers/reviewers. Scoble has a good point. The Zune network assumed you were within proximity of another Zune user. That would be cool if everyone had a Zune, sort of. If you're under 35 most of your friends have Facebook accounts and the network doesn't partition when you move 30 feet ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Um, while a product is still vapor (hasn't shipped yet, genius) its a little hard to declare it a winner. How many concept cars has GM made that would own ALL other cars out there, only to have them produce a Pontiac Sun Fire with a different body kit? (Original re-make of the GTO, I'm looking at you.)

(Disclaimer: Some of my friends from college work at Palm now. If you're reading this this, Matt, good job, I think your product kicked ass.)

<comment><USER8> Read it as if he's evaluating the product on the merits, not as if he's predicting the market. The iPhone is going to crush this thing, but it's still a nice looking device.

<comment><USER7> I know, I'm just saying, sometimes features get pulled at the last minute on behest of the carrier or because they're not "stable" enough -- or cost. Until it ships, its hard to judge.

But competition is good, tho. I'm in favor of Palm kicking ass and taking names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope so. As a Sprint customer, I've been waiting for such a device. As a general consumer, I'm glad that others are challenging Apple. I love Apple, but I also like others to be able to challenge them. In my opinion, no one was able to match the iPod for ease of use and size. The Palm pre is at least dimensionally competitive at a mere 2grams heavier and only 15% greater volume (a real keyboard takes up some space).

It's nice to see someone who hasn't decided, "we can make it kinda appear to be an iPhone" in the way that the G1 disappointed with its lack of multi-touch capabilities.

Hopefully Palm will pull it off!

<comment><USER10> There are numerous Android devices planned for the near future. I own a G1 and I see it as a development platform. The hardware leaves something to be desired, but Android is actually quite nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love my iPhone. But giving developers the option to cook up apps in HTML/JS is a very slick move.

I don't know how it'll play out, but any average web developer will be able to immediately pump out an app without breaking open a iPhone SDK tome.

I don't know if it's possible to advance against the AppStore line of offense, but it's a seriously smart move.

I think their next coup should be to create an "open framework" so that other phone designers can latch on to whatever OS-specific hooks Palm plans on using.

I feel like this is critical. It can't be a closed framework.

<comment><USER12> While I don't disagree that there is something nifty about HTML/CSS/JS apps, I think we've all seen that this is not enough. Remember, first iPhone was in the same position - no SDK, just "widgets" and that didn't exactly fly with the developers. As somebody who's developed some widgets, I can say that there just isn't enough to go on in JavaScript to create full-powered apps, such as the ones available on iPhone now.

More importantly, in regards to this:

"any average web developer will be able to immediately pump out an app without breaking open a iPhone SDK tome."

Any average web developer can pump out a widget for iPhone, afaik, so I would disagree that this is an advantage that the Palm Pre has.

<comment><USER11> Widget, maybe. I was specifically talking about something akin to a "native" app. You need hooks to the OS, period, for developers to be happy.

Maybe we need a new word for HTML/JS/CSS apps that have OS-specific hooks. Widget is a horrible word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> But Apple did it first, that counts for a lot. Palm's UI looks awesome, but it wouldn't be as cool if Apple didn't pave the way a bit. Not taking anything away, they did a much better job at building off of Apple's innovation than RIM did with the Storm (the phone I currently have - forced to stick with BlackBerry for work).

<comment><USER14> I agree. I'm extremely happy that Palm is back in the game. However you can't count apple out, the current iPhone is still 2 year old technology, and I expect the new incarnation to blow everything out of the water.

I still want a pre, since its a gorgeous UI.

<comment><USER15> Apple is swimming in money. You really can't count them off. On the bright side (for Palm), Microsoft is swimming in money too and they accomplished little more than licensing a sub-par Windows CE thing to just about every maker of quasismartphones and crushing Palm in the process.

Never forget Palm owned the PDA market after crushing Apple out of it and created the smartphone market with the first Treos. They did a lot of things wrong, but with adequate funding and adequate brains, they can do a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> nothing drives traffic harder than an "x > Apple at y!" post!

</comment><comment><USER17> The Palm Pre looks great -- but has Scoble touched/used one? Until then, definitive judgments are premature.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am very interested in all this talk about third party apps for the phone being written in Html + Javascript.

If executed well, it means an army of developers ready to start coding away and tons of libraries and existing apps ready to be plugged in.

If executed the iPhone way, it means mostly crappy mini websites, masquerading as apps, for a while and then a decent native SDK a year later.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now it's down to better marketing...

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it took an iPhone for the other guys to get innovative like this. I really like this interface, though unfortunately it'll take more than that to dethrone the iPhone; though I don't think anyone can be sure until they've actually used it.

</comment><comment><USER21> What he writes sounds good actually. I hope very much that he is right, because I couldn't yet bring myself to buy an iPhone, but there are no real alternatives yet, either.

</comment><comment><USER22> It certainly sounds good enough, and I'm stuck on Sprint, so I think this will be my phone unless an interesting Android phone hits around the same time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Palm has never been as cool as Apple.

Palm hardware has always been "organization pr0n," which only appeals to a small subset.

The iPhone is seen as cool; it is the most desirable phone. People are bending over backwards to afford one (the most iPhone growth over the past 2 quarters has been in low-middle and low class income groups). Apple paved the way with iPods.

I think Palm will have a very hard time selling the Pre to people outside the geeky / careering groups where orgpr0n still appeals.

Even if the user experience is better, the market hasn't been conditioned fr it.

</comment><comment><USER24> What is scoble smoking lately?</comment>


Tell HN: I want to solve your problems - <AUTHOR>

As a developer or an entrepreneur, what are your biggest problems? <comment><USER2> My biggest problem is resolving disagreements, especially those that have to do with time. Some co-founders work less than others, but negotiating a fluctuating ownership percentage leads to many arguments. As one person's ownership declines, his inclination to work goes down even further in a spiral effect. They lose interest and stop taking initiative on projects. They become an employee: doing the minimum necessary.

The next biggest problem is solving problems that are outside my expertise. I can hack through any code, optimize and scale any database, but I can't figure out how to advertise a product effectively or get users. These problems stem from my lack of ability to network with others effectively.

Of course, I think solving these issues are at the core of the difference between a wanna-be founder and a real founder. I hope I can learn it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks. I want you to solve my problems too.

My biggest problem is that I seem to have lost the ability to enter a highly productive state because of interruptions. What do you suggest to help me enter that state more often that allows me to still keep on top of the things I am responsible for?

<comment><USER4> Read seven habits of highly effective people. And, be assertive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a developer my biggest problem is my organization's lack of testing across the board(unit testing, automated testing, poor testing done by the test team.) I have been pushing for better testing pretty much since I got here, but haven't made much headway.

As an entrepreneur my biggest problem is enough confidence in any idea to go for it.

<comment><USER6> Let me give you my method, it might help. Don't go head first full bore into an idea at first. Build a quick, cheap prototype with only the main features and see how your target customer responds. Gives you a ton of feedback while validating or invalidating your idea without wasting a huge amounts of time. You might find that you need to pivot your idea or target a different group. So don't waste time and money on an idea before you prove the underlying assumptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reall Freaking Big One: Effective advertising.

It's still very much an unsolved problem. Google figured out _their_ end of it, but the end-user is still left out in the cold. Ask anyone who uses AdWords if they think it's an intuitive or pleasant experience.

There are other kinds of advertising ripe for disruption too. A lot of people have money coming online and it's surprisingly hard to spend it effectively.

<comment><USER8> staunch13, this is a very fascinating area for me as well, and I am looking to disrupt it. What is your biggest frustration?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Studying English. There is no effective and low-cost way to study speaking English while living in Japan.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know what I don't know. I wish there was a site where I can tell how stupid I am in any subject :D</comment>


SpaceX CRS-4 Launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YkCh7uOw1Y

<comment><USER2> Interesting internal shot of what I presume is the fuel tank? Clearly some sort of liquid. I note that the Wikipedia page [1] had this one as an F9R mission but the rocket did not include the landing legs. In theory the next mission they will try to re-land the first stage on something solid. I am so looking forward to that.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_launches](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_launches)

<comment><USER3> That's what it looked like to me. I wonder what they wanted from that shot; looking for slosh, remaining fuel, or how the remainder of the fuel influences the momentum of the craft after engine cut-off?

If it's something operational, I'm kind of surprised that they would show that on the public stream.

<comment><USER2> It is entirely unclear to me how they 'pick' what are the things they put into the feed. I have wondered if the initial decision to stop doing live coverage of launches was to enable more operational stuff to be done "live" but hard to know.

One of the more interesting parts of the ULA discussion of on orbit refueling capacity was how you might "settle" the tanks. Gravity does that wonderfully, and of course while you're accelerating you have it covered, but when you want to 'restart' you are in a microG environment and the fuel might not be at the end of the tank where you want it. Simple pressurization doesn't help, the fluid gets evenly distributed in the volume. Not much help. A fuel bladder might work but you'd something that was very light and compressed well. I also discussed with one of the ULA folks a movable "piston" on one end of the tank. Basically do it like a pneumatic cylinder without the rod, You just pushed it to the other end. He pointed out that there aren't any pneumatics that work with hydrogen. It is just too "small" a molecule for wall seal to hold. That leaves things like spinning to create a centripetal 'hold' on the fuel with a narrower 'top' than bottom so that an axially spinning tank will accumulate fuel to the bottom. Ok for payloads, not great for astronauts though.

<comment><USER3> Traditionally, they use ullage motors, right? ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor)).

Perhaps they could dock with it a little harder than is strictly necessary or use a maneuvering thruster burn.

It seems like it'd be easier to use non-cryogenic fuels (hypergolics, or kerosene + LO2) which may make the piston idea workable. How do they keep cryogenic fuels cool in space in the long term? good insulation and vent a little of it off regularly?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visual Complexity of Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.sharjeel.2scomplement.com/visual-complexity-of-ms-windows

<comment><USER2> This is completely ignoring the fact that windows aren't viewed in isolation. The thick border makes it easy to see where one window ends and another begins.

I find that OS X windows tend to blend into each other a lot more because they lack the border and have much softer shadows.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only thing I am sure of after reading this article is that I really cant stand the term "User Experience" and the abbreviation "UX".

</comment><comment><USER4> The thicker border provides a larger area to hit when trying to resize a window.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you don't like the transparency, turn it off.</comment>


The Lynx Queue - <AUTHOR> http://www-dyn.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/wordpress/the-lynx-queue/ <comment><USER2> Why do the authors report performance at O0 and O1?

AFAICT, the experiments are all single socket. There's an important difference in coherency overhead for single VS multiple sockets; same for futzing with page protection. It also looks like they only tested a single producer/consumer pair. I expect page protection tricks don't scale as nicely when you have 20+ pairs on two sockets: contention on the page table _and_ IPI storms. The mprotect trick also seems to depend on using small (4K) pages, unless you're OK with fairly stale data; probably not ideal for overall app performance.

Also while they indirectly mention the batching trick of the disruptor (keep a reader-local copy of the write index and vice versa), it's not tested… and also not tested with a forced lag between the reader and the writer. If you want to avoid the ping pong, you can let the reader keep a copy of the writer's write pointer (and update the copy when the reader catches up), and artificially make the reader lag behind the writer. That lag gives much simpler code on the hotpath than the MCQueue they mention, which would be the closest equivalent to a laggy disruptor (keeping in mind that the disruptor pattern tends to be used in low latency settings, so that configuration is unlikely to be benchmarked, except indirectly, with cacheline-sized queue items).

It's interesting work, but as is too often the case, the benchmarks give me no actionable information.

<comment><USER3> I think the single socket assumption is justified because they are talking about pairing each executing core with a checker core partner, right? So I don't think the paper is misleading for that use case.

(I do agree that they aren't really fairly representing prior work in this area, though, and that nobody optimizing for high performance on commodity hardware is likely to be using 4kb pages).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's an interesting technique that I haven't seen before in the context of a queue.

It's not without drawbacks, relying on handling sigsegv is a pain to make portable (libsigsegv helps!) HotSpot handles sigsegv, but I think it's possible to install your own handler as well by setting it before loading the JVM. When the JVM loads it will chain pre-existing signal handlers behind its own, and they'll be invoked if the signal doesn't pertain to HotSpot. LD_PRELOAD can be used to accomplish that. My information may only apply to an older version of HotSpot though, I don't know if that's still the case.

The other thing is relying on the TLB here becomes trickier with huge pages. It seems to me that the section and queue boundary trap pages are set just once at queue init and then never changed - so one could do the same with 2mb huge pages, without wasting memory, if the sections are sufficiently large. The problem is that requires the producer and consumer to be at least 2mb of queue apart, which is probably too much delay for many applications where latency is important. But I really don't see the need for huge pages here. A queue where both producer and consumer are repeatedly touching the same page seems like the ideal use case for the TLB anyway.

Not all applications can tolerate a sectioned queue though, for example what happens when the producer writes less than a full section of items to the queue and then pauses for a long time? The consumer won't be able to access that data until the producer finishes the section.

<comment><USER5> _relying on handling sigsegv is a pain to make portable_

Is there any effect due to virtualization?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ekFSEe6...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ekFSEe6ogcAJ:www- dyn.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/wordpress/the-lynx-queue/+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl)

<comment><USER7> Remember to use the text-only version, or it will hang fetching other resources: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ekFSEe6...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ekFSEe6ogcAJ:www- dyn.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/wordpress/the-lynx- queue/&num=1&hl=nl&gl=nl&prmd=ivn&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

<comment><USER6> Ah, sorry. My content blocker does that for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article is quite simplified I presume to make the reader understand the technique. There are many more details in the paper. I like that the simpler version is available, kind of like the simple version of an article in wikipedia to quickly skim through before diving deep.</comment>


Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming" According to Dr. Alan Kay  - <AUTHOR> http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht24Ht/doc_kay_oop_en <comment><USER2> Maybe this should be teached in the very first lesson of any introduction to OOP? (Just to show the _real_ motivation behind that concept...)

In my opinion you can program 'object oriented' in a very implicit way, without ever using a generic function or class.</comment>


Chinese criminal gangs spreading swine fever to force farmers to sell pigs - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chinese-criminal-gangs-spreading-african-swine-fever-force <comment><USER2> See also: [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3042991/chin...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3042991/china- flight-systems-jammed-pig-farms-african-swine-fever)

A farm affected by this was jamming transmissions nearby to try and prevent drones from being used to drop tainted items into their pens.

</comment><comment><USER3> No they are not. It's hysteria

One farmer has claimed to have seen a drone drop something. It makes zero sense.

Gangs are however faking swine flu to reduce prices.

<comment><USER4> Swine flu is not related to African Swine Fever. They're different. The article is focused on African Swine Fever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is wrong: it should reference African Swine Fever which is not the same as swine fever, which really would be labeled classical swine fever.

And swine flu is something else; swine flu is H1N1 and is not related to African Swine Fever.

</comment><comment><USER5> The U.S. and Canada already have a growing infestation of wild pigs, descendants of European wild boars brought for hunting and domestic pigs that escaped.

If someone contaminates these wild pigs with African swine fever or foot and mouth disease they would endanger the domestic pigs from Canada to Mexico and the worldwide pork prices would skyrocket.

Canada and U.S. without bacon, that would be a cause for a revolution.

<comment><USER6> 9 months ago I purchased another deep freeze and filled it with bacon. I'm going to be rich.

<comment><USER7> I know it's a joke, but I wonder if bacon can stay edible for that long. After some googling it looks like meat, depending on type, is "good" for up to a year. Some should be eaten within few months.</comment></comment></comment>


When will Twitter start charging its API users? - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081217/twitter-launches-another-business-it-doesnt-make-money-from-trading-site-stocktwits-raises-800000/

<comment><USER2> Here is another spam post from pakafka. This guy is in the habit of submitting every single one the stories he writes for the Wall Street Journal's tech news site. Like most of the others, it's a sensational headline on top of a baseless article. But on the bright side, at least he spelled his headline correctly today. A job posting for "Business Product Manager" is supposedly the smoking gun here. Sheesh... If publishers are willing to pay for this stuff then I'm in the wrong business.

Hackers News is not your own personal advertising outlet. If you've got something worthwhile by all means submit it, but it's getting a little old seeing every article you write pop up on here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! jm4! Missed you. Thanks for checking in.</comment></comment>


Secret Button Sequence Bypasses iPhone Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/iphone-snoop/ <comment><USER2> (Note: this is a pretty technical post.)

The iPhone's passcode is pretty superficial. Only the UI code actually enforces it, and this is one of the results of that distinction. In fact, when you unlock, you are still viewing the same process as you were before it was unlocked. It just called the "_unlockWithSound" method and set an internal state to unlocked.

Edit: as pointed out to me on IRC by comex (author of JailbreakMe), there is lower level protection in the "lockdownd" service, but since the UI controls that, it doesn't really provide any additional security except it blocks iTunes syncing and such).

However, with this "hack", you are still locked, so you can't do anything like opening apps (again, the UI process locks opening apps, as part of their "security"). But, I did some experimentation, and here's what I found for impact:

      - You can read and edit contacts, of course.
      - I am not sure if phone calls work, but they didn't appear to.
      - While clicking an email address does nothing, clicking the "send contact"
        lets you send an email to whoever you want, custom address and all.
      - You can view all the photos by pressing the "add photo" on a contact you edit.
        You can also take new ones saved to there.
      - You can send SMS and MMS using the same method as for email, but selecting MMS.
      - You /cannot/ enter Safari or go to the homescreen: unless someone finds another
        similar "hack" to exit the app, as then you could see the icons
        (but, as the "is locked" flag is still "true", it won't let you launch apps).
      - FaceTime doesn't seem possible.

This is a serious issue, and with the publicity it already has, I would only expect Apple to fix it (with a 4.1.1 firmware release, of course, I don't expect them to care about their iPhone 2G owners back on 3.1.3) within two weeks. However, if they want to fix this, they need to redesign the workings of the lock screen. The current way it works is incredibly simple to circumvent.

Finally, on an unrelated note, the same exploits used in the jailbreak tools like "greenpois0n" and "PwnageTool" can be used to get around the passcode and get full filesystem access, or just remove it altogether. But you do need a computer for that, which you don't with this.

<comment><USER3> Does this really qualify as pretty technical ? It's not exactly the guts of Haskell or Clojure or something like that.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a fair assertion. It's not especially necessary for the HN crowd since we're largely technical folks, but not everyone here does software, right? It does assume a little familiarity with some abstract software knowledge.

<comment><USER3> I've seen some stuff come by here that was essentially Swahili to me that carried no such warnings :)

<comment><USER2> I'm new here, but my reasoning was that it seemed a lot more technical than what else was being posted in that comment thread. Most of that seemed to be "is this a big deal?", not "why does this work?". I'm still learning, so is that kind of "disclaimer" something to avoid?

<comment><USER4> I don't think anyone's going to honestly yell at you for disclaimers if you feel you need them, but I think it's safe to assume that the folks here know how to use Google and Wikipedia and are fairly smart.

So long as you're not talking about something extremely esoteric relative to the sort of stuff that shows up here on a regular basis. I would feel comfortable referring to the Sieve of Eratosthenes in an offhand manner. Anyone on HN can probably look at the Wikipedia page and figure out what's going on.

If I refer to Negishi coupling, on the other hand, I should probably try to explain what they are and it might be prudent to provide a disclaimer that I'm going into esoteric O-chem stuff.

Cool?

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminded me of Epic Windows 98 Logon: <http://i.imgur.com/JPxql.gif>

</comment><comment><USER6> It's actually worse than the article suggests; from the phone app, you can get to Mail and SMS (Share Contact); from SMS, you can get to the phone's camera roll; I'd be surprised if URL expansion didn't get you to Safari via Mail or SMS.

On the other hand, it's not like the keypad lock was Fort Knox. I don't even bother with it normally.

<comment><USER7> Just tried it, tapping URLs, email addresses, and physical addresses in the contact list doesn't do anything for me.

<comment><USER2> You can, however, use the "share contact" button to evade that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me a little of jwz's comments on xscreensaver + toolkits: <http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html>

Although, while I don't really mind xscreensaver's unlock screen, I don't think Steve Jobs would give it the thumbs up :)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's been fixed in the 4.2 beta.

<comment><USER10> True, but nonetheless hilariously bad mistake.

Really, this is only a security threat to your tech savvy gf/bf/friend/thief since it requires physical access. And you know what they say anyway:

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore

<comment><USER11> It'll make corporate iPhone users (well, more the IT departments really) think twice (again??) about their iPhones on their network. For all the crap that RIM gets, they do get the whole corporate environment and security lock down thing right.

<comment><USER12> I think iOS was already on every sysadmin's shitlist for quite a while. I remember some of my friends on the networking side complaining a good deal about the iPad's DHCP lease shenanigans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know about others, but I feel that the iPhone is a terrible phone to use in an emergency. I currently have a 3G which contributes to this, but it takes me at least 30 seconds to go from holding the locked phone (I have no pass code on it) to actually hearing the ring tone. I've had to dial 911 twice on it and it was not a quick experience and since the second time it was for someone who crashed their car head first into a tree right outside of my back yard it was kind of critical that I dial quickly.

</comment><comment><USER14> After maybe 30 seconds it automatically returns to the lock screen-in fact I was barely able to get to a contact before it locked again

<comment><USER15> Really? I'm seeing something very different. Not only is it not timing out, but I can't even lock it again manually. Neither the home button nor lock button do anything (except take a photo if I press them both, which I just now discovered).

EDIT: I can re-lock it by holding Home to get to voice control, then cancelling that and pressing Home or Lock.

EDIT2: It takes a screenshot, not a photo. Damn, photo would be way more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> up-up, down-down, left-right, left-right, b, a...

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one who thought "wait, the iPhone only has _one_ button..."

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't seem to replicate it, but one time I was able to get to the home screen by double clicking the home button, switching to a different app, and then pressing home a single time to return to the home screen.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you need a secure phone get a Blackberry ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> By the way you can dial anything, it doesn't have to be three pound signs.

</comment><comment><USER21> Doesn't work on the 3 jail-broken 3G/GS iPhone I tried (3.2 firmware).

</comment><comment><USER22> works for me! i wonder how many accidental 911 calls will be made from trying this...

<comment><USER23> None, unless you enter "911" for some reason. If you type "###" it just says "Emergency calls only."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Works on my 3G!

</comment><comment><USER25> Locks only keep honest people out.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sure it's a neat backdoor, but does it play Global Thermonuclear War?

</comment><comment><USER27> This is one of those rare kinds of mistakes where I really believe someone's head should roll. They gave away the privacy of potentially millions of people. It will have real world consequences for some of them.

<comment><USER10> If you know someone who would do malicious things with your contact list, I think you've got bigger problems.

And playing devil's advocate, sure a thief could steal your phone and use this exploit (if he even knew about it), but what's he going to do with the contact list? If someone steals your iPhone, they did it to wipe it and resell it. There are much, much easier and less risky ways of getting large lists of people's contact info if that's what they're after.

Programmers make mistakes. Saying they should get fired over this is a bit silly, IMO.

EDIT: I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness. It's definitely serious. I've known some people who would use this against their "cheating" girlfriend in a heartbeat to see who they've been calling. But I seriously doubt anywhere close to millions will be affected.

<comment><USER28> Okay, how about this scenario. Someone with access to someone's office steals their phone and sells it or its information to the highest bidder. I used to work in the same building as FOX News. One day Rita Cosby's Blackberry showed up in our office space ... totally separate elevator banks, different floor, different everything. Our best guess was that someone from the cleaning crew grabbed it, got scared, and ditched it, but someone with other motives could do some serious damage in a day where smartphones provide portable access to a massive amount of personal and private information.

<comment><USER29> Alright, say this glitch didn't exist.

Are you telling me that a sufficiently motivated entity couldn't get to the data stored on the phone? Once you have physical access to a device, things like this kind of become moot anyway, don't they?

<comment><USER28> Sufficiently motivated? Absolutely. But I contend there's a huge difference between something that takes technical skill to obtain versus something demonstrated on YouTube and is simple enough that my mom could make it happen.

<comment><USER29> Well, hang on, that's not fair. Your first example cited selling a device to someone vastly interested in obtaining extremely valuable data - imagine this happening to President Obama's iPhone. But now you're saying that the concern is coming from someone who can figure this out by watching a YouTube video.

<comment><USER28> They're not mutually exclusive. Now there's just an easy hack that both can use to get past the security mechanism.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


R in Action - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/01/02/r-in-action/ <comment><USER2> Will definitely check out this book. I recently learned some R and just used it for a very specific type of programming task (Morphometrics for a biologist).

Very happy to have learned a new language outside of my normal Python/PHP/JavaScript realm. If you're looking to learn a new language that is a bit different than what you might be used to and want to brush up on some math, I highly recommend playing with R for a while.

Another book to checkout is O'Reilly's Data Analysis with Open Source Tools, which has sections on R and NumPy.

</comment><comment><USER3> By the review, this sounds like it could be a great book. I've read, err skimmed, plenty of R books including the official documentation. Everything I've read so far about R was quite obviously written for a different audience. This seems to be aimed at telling visual stories with data, which is the only part of R I've ever wanted to learn.

<comment><USER4> I'm looking forward to digging into this book as well. I've gone through most of R Graphs (Packt) and R Cookbook (O'Reilly) which are great for learning the nuts and bolts of R and R in Action looks to be the next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Many R books are organized like a statistical text.

Can anybody suggest one of these? I'd like to learn statistics and I find playing with a language is a great way to learn a domain.

<comment><USER6> This one is free: <http://ipsur.org/>

I haven't really looked into it though, so read at your own risk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> everybody knows there is no R in action :)</comment>


Name.com is hiring a UI designer - watch video to see why - <AUTHOR> http://blog.name.com/2010/10/hiring-ui-designer/

<comment><USER2> lolol @video. I wonder what he was drawing?</comment>


Highlights from YC's First Female Founders Conference - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female-founders-conference

<comment><USER2> Segregation in technology makes me sad.</comment>


What does it take to become a death-row detective? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2019/12/18/what-does-it-take-to-become-a-death-row-detective <comment><AUTHOR> [https://outline.com/2SPnPa](https://outline.com/2SPnPa)</comment>