Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018? - <AUTHOR> If it works, which method are you using now? <comment><USER3> SEO works, and always will. However, trying to figure out the latest tricks is a losing game. Even if you do figure out how to make something work today, algorithms will change and you'll be punished for having gamed the system.

Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pain. Do have your title match your content. Do try to write unique phrases that are applicable to your content. And try not to copy/paste content around your pages.

Do all that, with clean markup, and your SEO will be good enough to beat out local competitors. (Even if agencies tell you differently.)

<comment><USER4> I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO.

This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade.

On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week.

A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for humans".

Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering behind the CFAA.

Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of. While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search.

Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases, Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere on their list, but it's not very close to the top.

Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you.

<comment><USER5> ^^This.

Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters.

Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormous success and the other doesn't -- there's probably a ranking lottery.

And at the end of the day, if a content moderator or employee at Google likes your content, you'll have a better chance at ranking regardless of quality.

<comment><USER6> I'm not the best at SEO but I agree with this - it seems that writing good content is only part of the story (but an important part.)

Similar to startups, I am curious as to how much of professional SEO success is about outreach. i.e. if I am mates with a uni professor and I write something about his topic, can I get a backlink from their valued .edu domain? What about .gov? Does this outrank better content? To what extent are forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, inc.com etc writers gaming this? (Or are they just looking for the virality?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been doing SEO as a side gig for many smaller local websites. The amount of traffic you can generate from locally ranking higher than your competitors is astoundingly high. You can literally bring tens of thousands of dollars of extra business to companies i.e. electricians, vet doctors, dentists, gardeners... honestly it's worth every penny.

<comment><USER8> Any chance you could share some ideas? Is it just getting it linked on other pages? That appears to be what a lot of "consultants" online suggest. Or purely content optimisation?

<comment><USER7> A comment wouldn't be enough, and ideas aren't worth a penny without a detailed execution plan. Honestly if you are interested you have to put the hours and do your own research, then test things yourself and see what you are most comfortable doing/what works for your niche or business. If you're really interested, lets exchange emails or telegram and chat, I would gladly offer some time helping you out (for free ofc).

<comment><USER9> Do you mostly do content generation, link building, or on-site html optimization.

<comment><USER7> all of the above + hyperlocal seo

<comment><USER9> Between link building and content generation, which takes up more budget/time? Asking as I'm trying to decide which one to focus more on.

<comment><USER7> Great content takes time but it's impossible that you won't have an output. Link building is hard and can lead to nowhere. If you were to get started and only had a finite amount of time, I would focus on great interactive, captivating and insightful content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, definitely. But not in the traditional "hacks" sense.

I get a lot of search engine traffic to my blog, with the following strategy:

Stage 1: Technical - Clean up your act.

If you structure your site properly and make it accessible, search engines will crawl and index it properly. Make your content accessible from a technical standpoint.

Clean up your HTML

Make your URLs reflect your content, cleanly

Build and submit sitemaps

Make the navigation on your website simple and effective

Make your website load quickly

Stage 2: Content - Make great stuff.

If you build great content, people will share it. They will link to you.

Build great content

Make things that help people

Stay within a niche if you can

Create content that helps people, even if you're giving a little of your service away. (For example, a roofing company featuring an article about how to choose a roof, even if it sends them to your competitor, or some DIY stuff)

If you do these things, you'll do well in search engines. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but this is way more effective than keyword stuffing, link purchasing, etc.

Just keep it honest.

<comment><USER11> I could repeat everything that was written above. Exactly my experience. Just do the right thing and SEO will happen by itself.

As a side note, I noticed that simple quick-loading pages seem to have more of an advantage recently than people think.

<comment><USER10> Yep, Google has been quite public about page loading speed being a factor in rankings. It's not a "make or break" and it won't instantly put you on page 1 for everything, but it makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a little biased because I currently work as an SEO Manager at an agency, but I would say yes. It REALLY depends on the type of business, what stage the business is at, their goals, and probably a few other things. SEO should almost always be a part of a larger overall marketing strategy.

If you're an ecommerce shop optimizing product and category pages - SEO will help.

If you're a plumber and ranking higher than your competition will bring in new leads & jobs - SEO will help.

If you're an established SaaS company launching a new product - SEO will help.

If you're a brand new SaaS startup - SEO is probably not the best thing to spend money on. That money is likely better spent on PR getting press mentions, and on PPC ads promoting your brand.

The main problem I see many small businesses making is relying solely on SEO to bring them leads while having no other marketing strategy. This may have worked well for them back when you could spam websites to the top of SERPs, but it's not the case today.

<comment><USER13> Give us some more counter-examples? Where will SEO definitely _not_ help?

<comment><USER14> If you're doing something completely new, there might not be too much organic traffic. E.g when AirBnB was launching, the users were not googling for "home accommodation", they were looking for hotels. Same for Twitter, nobody was looking for "sms blogging platform"

<comment><USER15> Thats not an SEO argument thats a keyword choice argument. If demand is minimal optimize for competitors brands or comparisons to related solutions to what your audience needs when they are potentially in the market for what you offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes it does, but a little goes a looooong way to Google.

I've also been starting to notice that having custom HTML / CSS is boosting things more than before for smaller sites.

Also, even if using JS for SPAs doesn't matter to _Google_ there is a reasonable long tail of other web crawlers that may or may not be helpful to your ends and you'd be surprised at how many of them just use mechanize or nokogiri instead of something more robust. Basically it comes down to cost, last time I was in the custom crawler trade it was around 50x more expensive to do things with a virtual dom than it was to either straight parse the HTML or figure out the main API calls JS was making from the browser that actually had the data I needed and just run those.

<comment><USER17> Out of curiosity, what options beyond nokogiri, mechanize, etc. are you referring to? Something open source, commercial, or custom?

<comment><USER16> Well I've done it a bunch of different ways, and granted this take is about three or four years out of date, so take it with a grain of salt.

Selenium / headless Firefox with JS running in the browser waiting for things to load / resolve. This is the worst case scenario.

Sometimes you can use a layered approach, first do a normal mechanize request then if the page doesn't 404 you can try to parse it there. If you detect that its relying on infinite scroll try to run the JS command via Ruby Racer then if that isn't [semi-]automatically possible put the URL in the "requires full DOM queue" all of this on a bunch of code that lights up different servers to evade log analysis. Some URLs are behind a CAPTCHA, and some people will then add those urls to the "Use a human to do the work" queue, but I've never really felt right about doing that. To me a CAPTCHA is basically someone saying, "no seriously, bugger off" plus I don't want have some poor soul waste their life copying and pasting text. It's easier to just convince a client that last 0.01% of data isn't worth getting.

What's really funny is the meta game that stores have. There is no "price" any more for many of these people. There is "the price you happen to see" and they use a bunch of tricks to try to figure out if the traffic is real or not because they know that other places are dynamically setting their price to undercut them by some optimal amount.

It's just an arms race, but you know what arms races are really good for?

Arms manufacturers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I worked for a company that does internet marketing, what I can say about SEO is that there is only one strategy that will work.

If you want to be featured at the top of search results you need to have content that is actually relevant to the search term. It has to be genuinely relevant and of high quality and ideally, linked to by other respected sites.

You can spend all the time and money you want on the gimmicky stuff, google will update the algorithm and wash away any progress you make.

<comment><USER19> Not a "SEO person" and can't say if it works or not in 2018 but I've helped with a couple of web projects and it has surprised me how little work it took to get ahead of local competition (basically write something meaningful) - <USER2> how unenthusiastic business owners are to do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I believe the best methods to remain the same that it has always been, create quality content by delivering value to your visitors and keep your webapp running without maing your page hang on clients as well as presenting a clean interface, that should be cross device.

<comment><USER21> That must explain why w3schools is always at the top of my search results.

/s

<comment><USER22> What's wrong with w3schools?

<comment><USER23> W3fools used to have more detail:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.com/)

Even if w3schools have fixed all these instances since then, that all those errors were ever produced is a bad sign, especially when there were better alternatives even then.

<comment><USER24> If you keep punishing someone for past mistakes there is no reason to improve. On the other hand MDN is a mozilla resource and had good stuff from day 1 so they deserve the traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Absolutely -- for paid search. Organic SEO is a little tougher. You have to really provide valuable, quality content for organic SEO. If you try to half- ass it at all, it will be snuffed out and mixed in with the other garbage. Provide incentive for users to browse your content and don't make it obvious that you are just having a cheap marketing page with a couple of blurbs any idiot can google to figure out the information you are providing. I think that is why sites like Bankrate and NerdWallet are good at organic SEO -- they have nice tools and good information.

<comment><USER26> > You have to really provide valuable, quality content for organic SEO

This is the key. Google wants to make sure your readers are getting their questions answered. SEO is constantly changing, but high quality and valuable content will always be king.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google is not a search engine.

It's an association engine.

We know what Google is trying to do - associate the best solutions to search questions.

To game Google you need to help them achieve their objective - associate their search queries with your solutions.

Broadly there are three types of search desire:

1\. navigational - the user wants to find a resource or place?

2\. informational - the user wants to learn something?

3\. transactional - the user wants to perform an action (pay a bill, book a flight, hotel, restaurant etc)

If a page satisfies a user's search desire - they won't search for it again.

This missing search trail is a valuable signal to Google. It provides some evidence that page A satisfies query B. The more these signals fire the stronger the association.

SEO 2018?

Ideally make pages that solve your users' search problems without them needing to go back to Google to search again.

<comment><USER28> .... Or let bots do searches on google, clicking on your link and never search again with same IP/browser/... combination. Or let bots do the opposite for your competitors.

As long as google uses a metric to determine how good a page A satisfies query B there always will be the possibilty to optimize for this metric instead of actually to solve users search problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Depends on the market. Google's move to 'entities' over keywords means broad search seo is beyond the abilities of "2 guys with some adwords experience" type agencies that were popular circa 2011/12\. Quality well thought out sites that (theoretically) align with intent fare better.

That said, if you're targeting a certain city, definitely still works. Most local sites are poorly optimized.

<comment><USER30> Yes, content should be much more closely paired with SEO. Googlebot's algorithms change a lot[0], so there is always going to be a lagging trend trying to keep up with it, which is why good SEO _should_ be an iterative process. You get what you pay for (or for the effort you put in) with SEO.

[0]: [https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change](https://moz.com/google- algorithm-change)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In my opinion, SEO will always work because Google will keep trying to be build the perfect system (search engine) and it will never stop mainly because Google has to keep evolving depending on the current human understanding. And you cannot have a perfect system.

The changes Google will do to their algorithm will sooner or later be gamed, SEO 'experts' will beat a small subset of the system, Google will penalize them and adapt making it vulnerable to more exploitation.

The search engine is interacted with by humans so no matter what Google does, at the end humans(SEOs) on the other end will try to present their content first the way they see fit for humans.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I used to have about a dozen clients with the agency I ran with a friend a few years ago.

I found out a number of things when I was working closely with my clients. Most were doing ok in the SERPS and a few did really well because of the niche industries they were in.

Some things I found out:

1 - SEO helps, but is never the determining factor in hiring any of the companies I worked with. This means you can be #1, #1 in Google and still not get any business because of it.

2 - Tracking contacts is critical. We mandated all of our clients use an answering service. They would contact people within 24 hours of receiving a contact form. The owner would then follow up to set up appointments, consultations, etc. Once we did this, we saw a massive jump in sales conversions which had nothing to do with SEO.

3 - If your design sucks and people can't find what they're looking for quickly, they're going to leave your site no matter how high you're ranking. We found this out with several of our clients who didn't want to redesign their site for various reasons. They ranked high, but their traffic and conversions sucked. We redesigned their site(s) for easier navigation, and prioritized content and got rid of other content that clogged their site. Conversions jumped by 43% over a 6 month period.

SEO does matter, but even if with massive amounts of traffic because you're ranking well isn't a magic bullet for success. You also need a good design and content people can find quickly and easily.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you have industry knowledge (outside of tech) you can rank very well for expert content because the stuff you need to beat is often written purely for SEO benefit by someone who's done 30 minutes of research and then bluffed their way through it.

From what I see, in the UK at least, small businesses aren't doing this. Either they can't be bothered or are afraid of giving away knowledge they think they could be charging for?

</comment><comment><USER33> I believe it does. If you write quality content people want to read and share, configure your pages so they can be easily understood by search bots and get quality backlinks, you're going to rank well. You should follow what Google actually suggest you do about SEO ([https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en)) but I don't think it's a good idea attempting to game Google by trying to figure out what they're measuring behind-the-scenes because their algorithms can changes.

Plugging my own project but based on the above principles I wrote a guide containing on-page SEO rules that authoritative sources say are important (e.g. Google) and created a Chrome extension that tests your site follows these rules:

[https://www.checkbot.io](https://www.checkbot.io)

</comment><comment><USER34> I do SEO for lawyers, mostly Family Law. I can tell you SEO works as in: Proven Measured Positive ROI, to the point I wish I was allowed to own a law firm. One thing I would say though is SEO should be one part of your marketing strategy but not all of it. You should have a diversified approach.

Edit: Let me offer a different way to look at it.

Does having a well organized website help turn visitors into clients? Yes. Well that's SEO, a well organized website.

Does having useful and well written information about the services and products you offer, or you industry, help your business? Yes. Well that's SEO too.

Can sharing your knowledge online across different relevant forums help you grow your brand and business? Yes. Well that's SEO as well.

It is just that people who do not know SEO think it is things such as keywords and metatags and url structure, but everything above and more is SEO. And all these things work to your advantage, therefore SEO works.

<comment><USER35> I also do SEO work for lawyers, primarily PI and mass torts type stuff. It does work - to an extent. There are certain technical things you need to get right and that alone can rank you decently, especially locally. There is low hanging fruit that can put you miles ahead of the competition and I've done this time and time again.

The problem with SEO and why I have a grudge against the industry is past success by gaming google with PBNs has led to hoisting up a few sites that can dominate because of their past. Those sites used spam tactics, then ranked high, that led to actual relevant backlinks, google got confused, and now keeps them at the top for any new content. Others must also utilize these dicey methods and pour serious money into it to do well. At least nationwide. I'm praying for the day that house of cards comes tumbling down.

Until then, having a better site, with better copy (done by a professional writer not farmed out), and using Adwords typically is the go-to.

<comment><USER34> I decided to stop pitching SEO and instead pitch "growing your business." SEO alone is not going to cut it and it is dangerous for any business to rely on one source of leads. Also thinking about Growing a business allows me to keep looking for sources of revenue and improving conversion rates. Haven't had success with Adwords (Family Law), you should email me so that I have your contact (email in profile).

<comment><USER35> Definitely agree. I tell most clients the same thing, you shouldn't rely on one source of leads forever, especially not SEO. I'm open to any medium. Radio, newspaper, tv (I wish I had the budget for tv commercials or could convince some to try it), whatever yields the best cost per acquisition.

I haven't touched Family Law but it might be similar to PI. PI on Adwords is brutally expensive and that's why hyperlocal SEO works well in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Yes, at least for Japanese.

Currently, most Japanese Google search results are garbages. It's all boilarplate texts(but produced by very cheap human labor writers so you can't easily filter it out) with keywords in it.

SEO won, Google lost.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can someone post or link to strategies for optimizing for local google seo?

<comment><USER38> The basic option for local lead gen is encouraging happy customers to leave glowing Google reviews.

After that comes paying for AdWords to get those reviews in front of more eyeballs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The tricks people used to call SEO stopped working amost 15 years ago with the Florida update. The next big one was also long ago, Panda in 2011. Writing relevant content (especially if there is new content frequently) works. Nothing else works and nothing else have had for a very long time. Most SEO services are selling snake oil. In a sense Google won and if you want to be featured at a high place in the result list you need to be relevant to what's being searched. No tricks.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's probably less relevant than it was, due to Google's aggressive internal linking. Google now surfaces more and more information (sports scores, directions etc) without you having to leave Google. If you run a service competing with Google in one of these areas - good luck.

Similarly, AMP has kind of changed the game in terms of publisher traffic. Users seem to be assuming that results that do not appear in those carousels are more outdated / less relevant.

</comment><comment><USER41> I thought I'd try my usual check to see what the state of the art is. Googled "rivonia plumber" (where I live) and got pages like this:

[http://plumber-plumbers.co.za/index-rivonia-plumbers.html](http://plumber- plumbers.co.za/index-rivonia-plumbers.html)

[http://www.plumbersgauteng.co.za/gauteng-plumbers- areas/plum...](http://www.plumbersgauteng.co.za/gauteng-plumbers- areas/plumbers-plumbing-rivonia/)

That is so gamed. Keyword stuffing, repeated exact pages. I assume it's better in the US but surely the algos are run over the whole dataset? Is this a worldwide problem?

When I first did that search I found nests of sites using exactly the same content and styles, with different areas. Same phone number across many sites, cross-linked out the wazoo. I don't have the interest to check now but it doesn't seem much better.

<comment><USER42> Google can't rank properly repost farm that reformat stackoverflow content, giving them more rank than stackoverflow itself!

If something of that profile can't get ahead of pages gaming pagerank, independent blogs focusing on content have zero chance without at least doing some legwork on backlinking and keyword optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yes. SEO works. The mistake is believing that SEO is just about Google. SEO is also important for places like Etsy, where carefully crafting your listings is important. And despite the belief that SEO is slimy, it's really all about ensuring that your product gets in front of the person that wants your product. So for Etsy, it's not just about the number of people seeing your product, but the number of seeing your product that want to see it, and are willing to buy it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes it does! However, now that the algorithms are all grown up it's about FAST sites with high quality content. There are no more games to be played. It is important to do your keyword research to understand the market you are attempting to reach, but that should only inform your content production and outreach plans.

High quality content isn't cheap and you have to be in it for the long game.

</comment><comment><USER45> SEO works but actual focused content is better.

<comment><USER46> Thats what I thought was SEO.

Everything Calories Per Dollar bring in hundreds of people to my website a day. As a result, I studied more restaurants Calories Per Dollar, studied Calcium Per Dollar, and other things like Caffeine Per Dollar.

All relevant to my website, all quality content IMO. Google is easily my best source of traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you can SEO yourself to top rankings for tons of keywords, probably. But you probably can't do that through pure SEO without strong existing organic ranking. Also highly product dependent if SEO is a viable channel. Probably best to cover the basics, optimize page load, and forget the rest.

-t. my impression from dabbling briefly with it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Others are saying: "SEO Works" but Google is steadily moving towards a pay for placement model.

</comment><comment><USER49> At it's core SEO boils down to a protocol for helping search engines make sense of your website/content. If you look at it that way, then yes SEO still works in 2018.

But more often than not, SEO is an umbrella term which encapsulates both the good and the bad practices. Given the work Google and others have done on weeding out the latter using ML/AI as well as human intervention [0] I would say you can't be sure whether those would work. It's contingent on Search Engines being aware of the practice and penalizing that behavior. So it may work today but not guaranteed to work tomorrow.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658)

</comment><comment><USER50> SEO is more interesting now that search engines are seeking greater engagement and insight on user preferences. I maintain a small application at [http://prettydiff.com/](http://prettydiff.com/) and both Google and DuckDuckGo have widgets or features available that come up in the search results depending upon the search terms.

This saves the user time because they may get what they need directly from the intelligent search engine result data so that they don't have to enter my site. On the other hand Google makes deep links into the site immediately available as "sub-results" so that a user can enter the site more directly without wasting time on an entry point.

</comment><comment><USER51> SEO is sometimes seen as a dark art to get your stuff to the top. I'ts not.

Really, SEO means labelling your content so google understands what it is.

After that, it's all about links.

</comment><comment><USER52> Valuable Content on the internet is a fairly good approach. Outreach to related media companies to cross promote is a good approach.

</comment><comment><USER53> I firmly believe that one cannot be a webmaster and ignore how search engines work.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the Biggest mistake people make is asking, "does it work" about any marketing strategy!

The question itself begs for an anecdotal answer that is completely irrelevant to your circumstances...

More importantly, the amount of people who have given up on strategies too soon or because it wasnt done in a way to provide empirical evidence, is staggering... and the amount of misinformation that flows out into the wild built on those flawed premises is really problematic for those without the context of your situation and the relative context of the situation where those opinions were formed.

The second problem is that opportunity cost is rarely measured by marketers. The third problem is that your resource allocation relative to your objectives is arguably more important than any other factor or opinion about a strategy.

Marketing decisions should be made in the context of your resources, goals, and your broader marketing mix.

The idea that you can evaluate a specific strategy and measure its return in a Silo without considering the opportunity costs and other available strategies relative to your specific resource limitations is very dangerous and needs to be killed off!

The ideal scenario is to optimize to cashflow relative to lifetime value and time value of money...or get as close as possible to this...and choose strategies within the context of this calculation.

You want an SEO strategy? First, figure out if your audience is there and the cost to reach them with paid search and how long it takes to turn into cashflow and the lifetime value of that customer...than evaluate the costs to optimize to rank for that keyword, and how long it will take, than look at your other resources and strategies relative to the likely costs and returns and time to get cash returned relative to those strategies and decide if its worth investing in ranking there...

Once you identify a proven keyword and have context for the cost and value and time and oppirtunity costs, than figure out how to rank for that keyword... maybe you buy a site that is already ranking. Maybe you advertise on sites already ranking. Maybe you think about the user and find a way to create a resource that Google will want to rank because of its utility... and than create empirical tests to measure progress and than you invest !!!

\</comment><comment> The shortcut SEO strategy i like is to ask yourself, what resource can I create for my industry that is not online but would offer so much utility that google has no choice but to optimize their algorithms to rank my resource... like wayne gretzky, go where the puck will be in the future...

When is SEO is done right, its Google trying to optimize its algorithms to rank your content, not vice versa!

Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yes. For SEO related content, I always check Backlinko - [https://backlinko.com](https://backlinko.com)

The guy Brian Dean has many years of experience about SEO

<comment><USER7> Funnily enough reading studf from this site's (i.e. rank brain 2018 guide) on mobile makes my phone lag hard (octa core from last summer). I think the 5000+ heavy images content needs some mobile optimizing... Here's a little audit with Chrome's own tools: [https://i.snag.gy/eX7IB1.jpg](https://i.snag.gy/eX7IB1.jpg)

<comment><USER54> Jesus Christ didn't knew that. Someone told me few months ago that's the SEO guy & the way he talks & all is solid content. Didn't knew it has so bad LightHouse perf.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The new SEO is really branding just over a long period of time. Expect SEO to take 6 months to 2 years.

<comment><USER56> If it takes you 6 months to 2 years to become prominent in local searches, something has gone very wrong. The answer to the original question is really one of "over how big a part of the internet?" first. Global SEO is a slow process, local SEO should be a matter of months at most, if the site you're optimizing for isn't "yet another one" in a saturated local market.

<comment><USER55> Local SEO can be very competitive depending upon what you are doing. Having a physical address is good and so signing up for a cheaper local listing manager (cheapest I have found is from Vistaprint [https://www.vistaprint.com/digital- marketing/local-listings?...](https://www.vistaprint.com/digital- marketing/local- listings?couponAutoload=1&GP=04%2f17%2f2018+12%3a04%3a38&GPS=4974675686&GNF=0)) will get someone's website on 20-30 sites with authority immediately. Then having long articles and having keywords that focus on the local market. But depending upon what you are doing that might not be enough... for example local insurance agencies there is a lot of competition sometimes with up to 100 insurance agencies in a tight geographical radius. Time helps to rise above when there is a lot of local competition.

<comment><USER42> Could one do that landing users on a facebook page instead of a real site? I got some question from a friend owning a local business but it's quite outside my competency and was just looking around for info when this hn popped up

<comment><USER55> Instead of Facebook I would suggest focusing on getting a lot of positive reviews on Yelp. If your friend can get 20 or 30 reviews on Yelp he will totally dominate the whole local market with a number 1 listing organically on Google without hardly any effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Disclaimer: I work for WordLift.io, which focuses on Semantic SEO and on-page SEO automation. Thus my opinion might be biased.

The answer is SEO matters a lot. Yet SEO today means something entirely different from what it meant a few years back.

Back in 2015 when I started my blog, I was writing what would be defined quality content. It was very in-depth, researched (at times it would take me weeks to write a piece of over three thousand words). However, when I hit the publish button I wasn't getting any traffic (at the time a few dozens visits per month!). True, quality content is the baseline, but if you don't have an idea of how search engines work, you might gain traction over a few years time, but the process is quite long and not guaranteed to succeed!

However, what SEO means today is different from what it meant a few years back. In the past keywords and backlinks were all that mattered. They still count. However, it will come a day when they will stop working. Why?

Since 2012, Google has been building a giant knowledge graph, which main aim is to gather information on the web, structure it in the form of nodes and edges to construct this massive graph. Thus, getting featured within Google's so-called knowledge vault becomes critical for an effective SEO strategy.

Thus, if in the past you might be targeting keywords to be positioned on the SERP. Today you might want to be more focused on long-tail keywords that can bring you in featured snippets or inside a knowledge panel. In fact, those are also the avenues to get into the Google assistant, thus voice search.

In short, while in the past it made sense to use backlinks and keywords because Google lacked the power to use more sophisticated methods to index and rank the web pages. Now you have to switch from a keyword centered content model. To an entity-based content model.

This kind of approach is more holistic and targets not only the SERP, but it allows you to get ready for voice search. What are some practical examples of having this approach?

\- an internal glossary that targets specific questions your readers/potential customers might have \- structured data in the form of Schema injected as JSON-LD (in this way you're giving better data that does not affect the performance of the page) \- use a better internal linking strategy, that connects articles to topical pages (like the glossary pages) and back

There are more strategies to adopt, but those are the ones that come to mind right now.

</comment><comment><USER58> It is still works like how past time its been working. Some algorithms are changed but technique of the seo is the same.

[https://www.overnightgraphics.com/](https://www.overnightgraphics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> As long as there is search, there are ways to appear towards the top of it.</comment>


"Meetup Everywhere is more important than the iPad" - Meetup CEO smashes iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXmucGwUvmg

<comment><USER2> This is a blatant rip off of the "Will it Blend" videos.</comment>


AMA: Covid-19 dr sanjog sharma - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/fhi75m/ama_covid_19_dr_sanjog_sharma/ <comment><AUTHOR> I will probably go for testing as my family is starting to show symptoms.

The helplines are telling people to not get tested and remain home. The whole travel ban is some bs (even my town had people coming from places like china 4 days ago literally). Exams are still going on. All metrics are fudged including the number of testing facilities capable of doing the tests.

This is gonna be horrible. Local hospitals are filled with people. This is not even close to some of the worst corona hit places. All have pneumonia or some other kind of respiratory problem. Heard from my dad when he got supplies from the medical store.

They are not doing ANY community testing at all and officially saying that there is no community spread without evidence.</comment>


You Won't Be Able to Sue the Next Gawker - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CodyBrown/you-wont-be-able-to-sue-the-next-gawker-e6c8a3900969 <comment><USER2> The second sentence contains falsehoods:

"Peter Thiel, who is a Facebook board member and Donald Trump delegate, secretly sued Gawker in a proxy lawsuit and, even though the case is unresolved, it was enough to bleed and bankrupt the company."

Peter Thiel did not "secretly sue" anybody; he is not the plaintiff. There is no such thing as a "proxy lawsuit." Paying the legal bills for a plaintiff whose lawsuit advances your agenda is not unusual; the ACLU, EFF and NRDC do this regularly.

Saying the lawsuit was "enough to bleed and bankrupt the company" even though "the case is unresolved" makes it sound like Gawker was bankrupted merely by the expense of litigation. But the verdict is in and gawker lost. The case is only "unresolved" in the sense that appeals have not been exhausted.

<comment><USER3> The term 'proxy lawsuit' is completely valid. It means he's bankrolling a lawsuit someone else is pursuing in absence of the ability to sue for what he really wants to. The EFF, ACLU, and NRDC bankroll lawsuits because they are trying to actively set precedent for other cases. Thiel backed this because he has a personal vendetta against Gawker, but he knew that his own lawsuit wouldn't succeed because it's not illegal to out a person as gay.

Similarly, when the US supplies rebels in central america against their country because they know they have no legal grounds for waging war against that country, it's a proxy war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does anybody believe there are constitutional issues with the case? Freedom of expression explicitly _does not_ cover the sort of revenge porn that Gawker habitually engaged in. There is absolutely no first amendment cover for their actions.

Thiel in essence insuring the lawsuit so that an unfavourable verdict would not harm Hogan is in no way an attack on free speech or the free press.

Something tells me that if Breitbart had decided to host Jennifer Lawrence's nude pics and gloat about how they were refusing a court order to remove them, liberals would not be engaging in this hand-wringing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the culture will eventually change so that both JLaw's selfies and the Hulkster's closet porn will be covered by the First Amendment, but I agree that at this time, at least the former are not so covered. I also agree that what's sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose, so until that changes the latter are also not so covered.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what you are saying. JLaw's selfies are covered by the first amendment. They are also covered by the Constitution. That is she can release them, but some one with out rights can't. The first doesn't say you can use someone else's words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article came off as a disjointed rant at Peter Thiel. Why won't I be able to sue the next Gawker? That wasn't really answered in the post.

<comment><USER7> It was answered in the post:

>Thiel just crucified the most notorious dissenter of Silicon Valley and called it 'philanthropy.' If this is how Silicon Valley billionaires are going to treat their dissenters, then dissenters have no choice but to go underground.

>If the price of dissent in Silicon Valley is too high, dissent will find a darker avenue. The next ValleyWag is likely to be more like WikiLeaks. It could be anonymous. It could be outside the jurisdiction of The United States. And it could use all the shiny tools of the web, Tor, bitcoin financing, Zeronet, the blockchain, to exist above the law.

The author is saying that if you legally shut down businesses through proxy lawsuits, the businesses will no longer operate on legal means to remain online and as such, the next Gawker can very well become something unstoppable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> hey HN. I wrote this. hit me up with any questions and I'll answer them here.

<comment><AUTHOR> My question is, why did HN flag this into oblivion? Mysterious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Frankly, it's too late for Thiel. We know who he is and his tactics. The next Gawker will be ready, if not to destroy, then at least counter.

Of course, the perfect option would be to ignore his private life, but laser- focus on his business.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you "grandfather" beta users into a free plan? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,<p>Working on a freemium product and hope to be launching a beta soon. I was wondering what is the general practice with beta users when the product goes live. Do you give them a "free forever" account? Do you give them any significant discount? Or do you simply make them pay like everyone else from that point on? <comment><USER2> I was a beta user of an analytics site (Reinvigorate.net) during development and testing stages. When the product was released for public consumption, I was given double the features of the Pro account for 1/2 the price of the basic account.

The developer still gets paid, and they made me a huge fan.

</comment><comment><USER3> You simply offer them a discounted rate to sign up for the premium service. Those who are willing and able to pay will, and those who would have never (knowingly) given you ten cents will enjoy reduced service.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a user I would love it if I had a free forever account, but in reality as a producer I probably would just give a discount 25%-50%.

</comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely -- these users make your best continuing beta testers! People that are already in the feedback loop and which are using the site. Much more valuable than the few bucks they had to pay for a paid plan!

[Edit] Well, of course it also depends on the number of users and your costs for providing the service.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should give them something, yes.</comment>


George R. R. Martin Still Uses A DOS Word Processor - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg

<comment><USER2> This is related to what we mean we we say 'legacy' systems, do we mean it's simply an old system inexplicably holding out in the modern world, or do we mean that it's a tried and proven stable system that have continued to perfectly fulfil it's use case for 32 years?

</comment><comment><USER3> I seriously hope he's got a backup strategy for that DOS box.

</comment><comment><USER4> I get that it's all about familiarity and simplicity (and maybe a little superstition), but I can't help but think that with how complex his books are, something like Scrivener with organizational tools for writers might speed up his process. Then again, I think he likes not being hindered by having to look things up as he goes.</comment>


Ask HN: Expert Connect for school students? - <AUTHOR> Hi, we are a new startup helping school students in choosing their field, tell them about your field and how you got there so that when they choose a career it's an informed decision. We are looking for enthusiastic people to come on board as experts, get in touch if you'd like to help(based in New Delhi, India) goo.gl/T6RLmR<p>We are planning to host workshops in schools for student expert sessions. The problem is when getting out of school most students have no idea how to choose and what to do? Some sure have some idea but most of them are lost and choose engineering and figure it out later we want them to take this decision in an informed way. <comment><AUTHOR> We are planning to host workshops in schools for student expert sessions. The problem is when getting out of school most students have no idea how to choose and what to do? Some sure have some idea but most of them are lost and choose engineering and figure it out later we want them to take this decision in an informed way.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting idea! I've submitted the form. Might be easier to get a few more people to sign up if you provide a few more details about the problem you're addressing and what you're planning to build.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, man, I have updated it with your suggestions. Don't forget to share it with other experts.</comment></comment>


Visualizations for machine learning datasets - happy-go-lucky https://github.com/PAIR-code/facets <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure why this is described as being for "machine learning datasets" when it actually sounds useful for any exploratory data analysis, regardless of what the user intends to do with the data. Anyway, this looks super slick, and I definitely want to try it out in a jupyter notebook.

<comment><USER2> Probably for the same reason that predictive models are described as powered by "AI" instead of by "statistical learning": Some terms are simply more in vogue even if they're more vague.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For nice looking basic statistics of your dataset the pandas-profiling library will do the trick [https://github.com/JosPolfliet/pandas- profiling](https://github.com/JosPolfliet/pandas-profiling)

</comment><comment><USER4> The front page [https://pair-code.github.io/facets/](https://pair- code.github.io/facets/) is more useful, because you can load up your own data and try it out.

</comment><comment><USER5> They have an example of using the tool on the quick draw dataset: [https://pair-code.github.io/facets/quickdraw.html](https://pair- code.github.io/facets/quickdraw.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does this also work for larger numbers of features? (like, 2000, as opposed to 6-9 in the demo)

<comment><USER7> Only if your dataset is really small. It only supports up to a low millions of points</comment></comment>


Rust 1.0: Status report and final timeline - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/02/13/Final-1.0-timeline.html <comment><USER2> Rust looks interesting.

One thing I'm not clear on it if can do, and that I'm interested in, is secure destructors.

Say I'm handling crypto, and I'm carting around an ephemeral key. When this goes out of scope, I definitely no matter what, want this _zeroised_ by its destructor - as opposed to just having it (or a temporary copy made by a compiler optimisation!) zombling around the heap, stack or forgotten unused xmm registers because the compiler figured since I don't reference it again, the memory's contents are no longer important.

Current approaches to this involve explicit_bzero(), or other similar memset(0)-and-I-really-mean-it-don't-optimise-this-out techniques. (And a fair bit of testing and prayer when it comes to potential temporary copies or registers.) But unless you're doing it in assembly language, you don't really _know_. (The stack beneath you, such as the OS, any hypervisors, SMM, AMT, SGX, µcode etc, aside, of course!)

I'm not quite clear what Rust's behaviour with this scenario is. If it can do this easily, even potentially, I am _very_ interested…?

<comment><USER3> This keeps coming up, but I think it's a _very, very bad idea_. It's false security.

If you are running in an environment where you don't trust code running in the same compartment/sandbox/process, then it's futile to zero out memory. The caller could have prepared things such that the memset doesn't work, if the key material went somewhere else.

If you ever find yourself thinking you need to do this, what you instead need is a helper process who's only purpose is to do primitive operations with sensitive key material.

Particularly as Rust is already a "safe" language - it doesn't even make sense to zero memory which by definition another piece of code can't access. Unless there's declared "unsafe" code lying around, but you wouldn't put that in the same process, would you? At which point, what are you even protecting against? If an in-process threat is that advanced, then you're not achieving anything.

<comment><USER4> Well, heartbleeed is a fiasco that would have been avoided by this—a vulnerability that rust shares without these secure destructors.

<comment><USER5> No, it wouldn't. For example, the "Heartbleed in Rust" blog post [1] re-used a buffer without freeing it. No destructor runs in between the two uses, so a zeroing destructor could not possibly prevent the bug.

Maybe zeroing destructors make sense as defense-in-depth, but I don't see how they can fix a Heartbleed-style exploit in Rust. In code where the buffer is freed and its destructor runs, Rust's memory safety guarantees already prevent it from being accessed after free. In vulnerable code that just uses the same buffer twice, the destructor never has a chance to run so its behavior doesn't matter.

The _real_ Heartbleed vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160 in OpenSSL) involved reading into uninitialized memory in a newly-allocated buffer, which safe Rust code already prevents [2].

[1]: [http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/heartbleed-in- rust](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/heartbleed-in-rust)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984169)

<comment><USER3> Thanks - that's a good example of what I was trying to convey.

The point is Rust already provides safety guarantees. If you don't trust the runtime, then why would you trust the built-in zero'ing? I get the "defense in depth" argument, but it feels a bit like doing this:

        {
          int a = secret;  // Get secret.
          assert(a == secret);  // Check "a" is actually that.
          a = 0;  // Ensure "a" is zero'd on exit.
          assert(a == 0);  // Just because.
        }

And yes, I get that you can build this into the language so it's not quite as ridiculous - you actually wipe tainted stack, for example.

But the point is: the runtime has an ABI and a machine model. Information is allowed to leak across function boundaries, beacuse _it doesn 't matter_. Without using the "unsafe" keyword, there are no methods of getting around the machine model and dipping into the underlying actual machine.

Even if you don't have a "safe" language and runtime, it's still of limited value. It protects against threats involving data or control flow corruption _after_ key usage, and where there isn't sufficient control of the program to perturb the secret-consuming functions. That's more of an annoyance than prevention. On the other hand, it gave the programmer a false sense that it was properly wiping secrets.

<comment><USER6> It is very probable that a sufficiently smart optimizer could see the assertion was always true and delete it. Then see no one reads "a" and delete it as well. In certain circumstances this can cause a secret to be leaked in, say a register, making our safe function unsafe. You need to be very careful writing secure code, and probably need to go down to the level of writing assembly to be sure the optimizer isn't turning your safe code into unsafe code.

We actually have an interesting project in rust where someone is writing a syntax extension to take rust like code and generate assembly [0]. It's probably unsafe to use right now but if sufficiently well implemented it could be the foundation of a lot of interesting cryptography work.

[0]: [https://github.com/klutzy/nadeko](https://github.com/klutzy/nadeko)

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I wasn't clear enough that my code was intended as sarcastic. It's obviously silly to zero variables because the compiler is free to ignore you. The point is, the underlying machine is going to do the same.

There are many ways to dig out stale memory if you're running at sufficient privilege, for example. Direct cache introspection, for example, or bypass. Zero-izing alone is not sufficiently strong to mitigate the threats people imagine it works against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even though 1.0 isn't out yet, today you can use Rust for many real projects. I'm unsure whether I'd bet my business on it yet, but I'd be open to the idea. And I'm usually a very late adopter.

I've been building a 3d game with Rust and OpenGL, ported from a C++ codebase. So far, my experience has been very positive. Despite Rust's supposed immaturity, it feels more polished than C++ in many ways. Forward progress has been much faster than it was with C++.

Does anyone else have a story (positive or negative) about using Rust in real projects?

<comment><USER8> I'm betting my business on it. I've written a network search engine in F# and it's in use on the VoIP arm of one of the public telcos. VoIP can generate terabytes of _signalling_ data a day, even while not making much money. (In wholesale, many calls simply don't complete, so you've got a huge amount of data and transactions that pay you $0.)

The challenge with F# is controlling memory usage. Even one extra allocation per packet can make a measureable difference in performance. I ended up doing a ton of unsafe code and manually managing most of the heap. Rust allows me to write fairly high-level code (not as expressive as F# yet but whatever) while getting "best" performance. Inline asm is a bonus, as there's some algorithms for integer compression that can use SIMD for big wins (I can do that in .NET, but it's ugly, and doing it safely means a ~30 instruction thunk). And sometimes in tight loops, I've found it difficult to get .NET to do acceptable codegen, causing double-digit% impacts.

There's also the safety issues writing unsafe code for network-exposed traffic. So Rust is actually _more_ safe than .NET, because I have to toss .NET's safety to gain performance.

The backend management code I can continue to write in F#, and Rust's C-compatibility means it's trivial to interop the code. So I can do "orchestration" of indexing daemons and management APIs and such things in a higher-level language, then for actual indexing and whatnot, just jump over to Rust, seamlessly.

Finally the static compilation means a smoother installation experience for customers. And if I ever ship a closed-source module that executes on the client, I don't need to license Mono for static linking. So that's nice. And the safety guarantees are good, because similar, existing, software in C has put customers at risk before. (I'm not sure if I can effectively market that last part, but hey.)

Rust would appear to have a unique value proposition and I'm very pleased to see it progressing so damn well.

<comment><USER9> Did you give a shot at other languages in the same category as F#, like Haskell, Ocaml, Clojure or Elixir?

<comment><USER8> To replace the F# side of things? F# is pretty unique as far as performance/language/tooling goes. It's outclassed in specific cases, but overall it's a great package.

The alternatives you listed aren't known for being able to write top- performance idiomatic code (I've got something _working_ in F#, but it's ugly non-idiotmatic code). The overhead of a GC is just too much to pay when doing linerate networking. Rust allows me to keep nice, high-level, idiomatic style, without paying any overhead. I can account for almost every byte.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm very happy to see Rust stabilize, about time we get a systems(ish) programming language with a half decent type system. With that said... I need to get some bikeshedding off my chest:

I hate to let such a triviality lower my enthusiasm for a language so much, but I just can not get over that awful inconsistent closure syntax :/

I don't get it. Most everything else has a nice unique keyword syntax, fn uses (args, in, parenthesis), proc syntax made consistent sense, then lambda is this crazy || linenoise thing that doesn't fit in at all. The "borrow the good ideas from other languages" approach has resulted in a great language, but "cram random syntax from other languages that doesn't fit" doesn't work out so well.

<comment><USER11> The natural thing to want in a C-like syntax is the "arrow function" closure syntax (like ES6 or C#), but that required too much lookahead to parse. Having a keyword discourages functional style, which would be a shame in a language with a powerful iterator library. So Rust went with the Ruby/Smalltalk-style bars, which are nice, concise, and easy to parse.

<comment><USER12> It seems like the human parser should be given priority over the computer parser, when considering what is easy and what is hard. The machines work for us!

<comment><USER13> As far as I know, Rust now has an LL(1) grammar, which means that writing parsers for it can be done by hand (or with the more powerful LALR(1) and LR(1) parser generators). This is very important for humans too, because it means more people are likely to write tools to process Rust code. If you hope to have automatic indentation, auto-completion, refactoring, formatting tools, etc. keeping the syntax simple is really important.

<comment><USER14> Can't they just expose the parser as a library? Actually, it looks like they did, with the rustc crate.

Hand-writing a parser for some other language leads to madness - just ask the folks who've done SWIG, GDB, or most IDE syntax-checkers. You'll inevitably get some corner-cases wrong, or the language definition will change underneath you long after you've ceased to maintain the tool. Instead, the language should just expose its compiler front-end as a library, and then you can either serialize the AST to some common format for analysis outside the language or build your tools directly on top of that library.

<comment><USER15> You missed the whole point.

By making the language simple you can easily implement your own parser. This opens up the ability to write native parsers in other languages, say vimscript. By keeping it super simple there -are- no corner-cases.

There are many benefits to this (like the formatters etc that others have alluded to) from things like IDE integration (imagine lifetime elision visualisation, invalid move notifications, etc) static analysis tools and more. None of these tools then need to be written in Rust. It also means it's easier to implement support in pre-existing multi-language tools.

Don't underestimate the necessity of a simple parseable grammar. Besides, people have endured much worse slights in syntax (see here Erlang).

<comment><USER14> The vim formatters/syntax checkers I've used that actually try to parse the language - other than Lisp, which is the limiting case - are generally terrible. They all miss some corner case that makes them useless for daily work, since they generate too many false-positives on real code.

The ones I actually use all call out to the actual compiler - Python, Go, or Clang for C++.

Just because people write their own parsers doesn't make it a good idea. It may've been necessary when most compilers were proprietary and people didn't have an idea how to make a good API for a parser. But now - just don't do it. You'll save both you and your users a lot of pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the outside looking in, I am mostly impressed with the governance structure of the whole endeavor. It seems to me that it is a great model for other open source projects.

Edit: as someone involved with other, less mature (and less ambitious) open source projects, if you know of pain points in the governance of rust, i'd be interested in learning about them.

<comment><USER17> There's a governance structure? That's news to me.

I was under the impression that a few primary contributors (mostly/all mozilla employees?) are gatekeepers to merging anything.

Having an "RFC" issue tracker isn't the same as having a governance structure.

Edit: I suppose you could call the above a 'governance structure', but I'm having a hard time seeing anything impressive/different about it from other open source projects

<comment><USER18> In addition to what aturon said, for actual patches these are the people who decide on merging: [https://github.com/orgs/rust-lang/teams/rust- push](https://github.com/orgs/rust-lang/teams/rust-push)

Maybe a third to a half are Mozilla employees (although it's infamously hard to tell who actually works at Mozilla and is just weirdly into maintaining Rust).

<comment><USER19> FWIW, the Rust-push team doesn't match the set of reviewers (people to which the integration bot bors will react and merge a PR). Being on that list offers powers like issue tagging and the ability to push to the 'try' branch, but manually merging a PR or pushing straight to master is essentially banned (and would be reverted immediately).

<comment><USER18> Huh. I thought it was basically a bijection, though?

<comment><USER19> There is an injection from the set of reviews to the rust-push team (Or, at least, there should be), but e.g. people have got privs because they've been doing a lot of triage or need try push, without having review powers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am going to be happy when I can program in rust and not spend the first hour making all my code work with the latest compiler changes. I really do like what rust is offering, but tracking head has been difficult

<comment><USER21> Me too! I have yet another NES-emulator-in-rust project [1] and I've been hesitating on picking it back up because I only want to convert to "new rust" once.

It looks like April will be a good month.

[1] [https://github.com/breckinloggins/rusticom](https://github.com/breckinloggins/rusticom)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I saw that integer overflow has been revised: it now defaults to checking overflow in unoptimized builds. I got a little nervous about this when reading the performance-related objections of @thestinger here: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/560](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/560)

At least optimized builds aren't affected, but it sounds like lots of code (including Rust nightlies) aren't built optimized.

<comment><USER23> The final draft made an effort to address those concerns -- but also they are completely inapplicable to optimized builds, as kibwen points out. (And if you care how fast your code runs, you really _do_ want optimizations...)

<comment><USER22> AFAICS these concerns apply even to optimized builds unless they are also "ndebug", right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm excited by what Rust will eventually bring to the table if it ever gets popular - a higher level C++ (tools for writing safe native code) replacement without the legacy crap (header files...)

At the same time I don't think I would use Rust 1.0 in production for two reasons :

* the language doesn't seem to be mature enough to be highly productive, for eg. the type system isn't powerful enough to express stuff like Iterable or VectorTN and I'm sure there is plenty of tedious stuff like that along with pains from ownershinp systems

* tools and libs are obviously not there

So I guess I'll wait for early adopters to write the libs and give feedback on their painpoints to the devs.

I've said this before - I think Rust 1.0 is something that I could use (ie. working and stable) but I don't think it's something that I'd want to use yet.

</comment><comment><USER25> I haven't been tinkering with Rust, merely keep an eye on it until 1.0 lands. For those who are currently more in touch with the situation, does this release date look realistic, without quality suffering? Is the 1.0 release premature, aggressive, or very realistic?

It seems like the standard library has seen a ton of work in the last month or two. I'm surprised at how aggressive the release schedule is, given how things are still churning a good deal.

<comment><USER26>
      > For those who are currently more in touch with the situation, does this
      > release date look realistic, without quality suffering? Is the 1.0
      > release premature, aggressive, or very realistic?

I think it's aggressive, but I don't think it's unrealistic. Personally I had hoped for a late June/early July release to give more time to solidify the docs and to shake out bugs in the compiler.

There will definitely be people who say that the release is premature, but I'm personally not one of them. The core of the language is ready, even if some pieces around the edges could still use some refinement (and will see refinement, backwards-compatibly, in the coming releases).

      > I'm surprised at how aggressive the release schedule is,
      > given how things are still churning a good deal.

You'd be surprised at how much of a motivator a concrete release date is. :) Churn is happening now _because_ of the impending release, not despite it. The language intends to have a solid compatibility story (via semver) for post-1.0 releases, so everyone who'd been holding off on changes for the past few years has suddenly come out of the woodwork to implement them.

<comment><USER25> That's re-assuring to hear. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is it possible to estimate the amount of manpower and time required to develop a new language from scratch till it is stable and reasonably production ready? Adoption of language is different topic, since it depends on users.

Rust and Go are two reasonably new languages. I understand scope and priorities of each language may be different but my idea is to get some approximation/thumb rule for any one before starting similar journey.

As per Github and wikipedia:

Number of contributors for Rust and time taken so far: 840, and 2 years. Number of contributors for Go language and time taken so far: 424 and 6 years.

Financial details are not known.

It seems developing new language and bringing it to reasonable level is not trivial effort.

1\. Is above data correct i.e. are those contributors full time working on those languages i.e. is it full time job of those people?

2\. Can we get details like number of developers/number of test engineers/number of documentation writers ...etc?

3\. Is it possible to know the total amount of financial resources consumed so far in the effort?

4\. Is there any research into resources required for new language development in terms of man power, time, financial resources for various languages?

It is fascinating to see a new language developed in front of us.

<comment><USER28> Both Google and Mozilla have teams dedicated to their languages, but they represent a very small portion of the total number of contributors to the language. I couldn't find exact lists of the team members inside both organizations.

In terms of volume of contributions, for Go, Google employees are by far the most active: [https://github.com/golang/go/pulse](https://github.com/golang/go/pulse). In this graph, the 7 top contributors to the project are Google employees. The Rust pulse graph shows the same trend ([https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pulse](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pulse)), with the top 6 contributors being Mozillians (according to a few Google searches).

Something that noteworthy about Go is the "quality" of the team members: Google has Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Russ Cox working full time on the language. Mozilla may have a few great developers on Rust too, but Google is very serious about Go.

I don't have any information about how financial and human resources are used by Google and Mozilla for the development.

<comment><USER26> In the linked Rust graph, eddyb (the third-highest committer) is a volunteer (an unimaginably prolific one), not a Mozilla employee. kmcallister (the fifth-highest committer) is a Mozilla employee, but not actually on the Rust team (they work primarily on Servo (though there is a fair bit of spillover between the two projects)). Rust has a few other full-time Mozilla employees that aren't represented on that chart for whatever reason (working on feature branches, perhaps?), such as nrc and pcwalton.

<comment><USER29> sfackler is a volunteer, too.

<comment><USER26> Just goes to show how blurry the line is that I've never actually noticed that he's not an employee. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's good to hear that IO reform has finally landed. I expected to see an announcement in /r/rust. Did I just miss it? brb, updating my code...

</comment><comment><USER21> One thing I'm less clear on is what will happen _after_ 1.0.

Is there a "post 1.0 wishlist" somewhere?

<comment><USER31> A feature that has already seen many proposed rfcs and long discussions is "Efficient code reuse" (a.k.a some kind of inheritance), summarized here: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/349](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/349) It was explicitly postponed until after 1.0.

<comment><USER21> I just wrote a comment on that issue with some half-baked ideas, but I really think that this is one of those "line in the sand" features that will determine (at least for me) whether rust is really staying true to its emerging identity or whether it's on the road to becoming another opinionated kitchen sink language.

The thing about "efficient code reuse" is it probably requires dynamic dispatch. Once you have dynamic dispatch, you suddenly have vtables. But who decides what those vtables look like? Where do they reside in memory? What's the layout of that? If a struct suddenly has an is-a pointer, where is that mentioned in the code? Now my struct isn't just a struct.

I love the rust idea that tons of modern language design still allows for zero-cost abstraction. Inheritance in dispatch starts getting into the land of "putting a lot more stuff in my binary than I asked you to", and I would argue that it's this property more than anything else that keeps embedded programmers and kernel guys safely in the minimalistic land of C.

It would be nice to have a new C, finally. But the more a language has an opinion on runtime layout, behavior, and symbol names, the less C-like it becomes.

Rust got this right when it decided that GC was NOT the correct default behavior for a language. The reason you see people playing with OS kernels in rust and not as much in D is, I think, mainly due to this decision. I think rust should continue carrying this torch.

If not for the ability to have the best of both worlds (a modern language and access to to-the-metal programming with a controllable runtime layout and deterministic performance profile), where exactly is the value in learning how to use the borrow checker?

<comment><USER11> > The thing about "efficient code reuse" is it probably requires dynamic > dispatch. Once you have dynamic dispatch, you suddenly have vtables. But who > decides what those vtables look like? Where do they reside in memory? What's > the layout of that? If a struct suddenly has an is-a pointer, where is that > mentioned in the code? Now my struct isn't just a struct.

1\. We already have vtables through trait objects (though not for structs), so this would be nothing new. It's important that we have them, because otherwise common dynamic dispatch would be very annoying to write.

2\. Structure layout is already not defined. The compiler is permitted to reorder structure fields as it likes. However, you can force it to adopt your specified in-memory order with the `#[repr(C)]` annotation.

> It would be nice to have a new C, finally. But the more a language has an > opinion on runtime layout, behavior, and symbol names, the less C-like it > becomes.

The language already has an opinion on runtime layout and symbol names. However, you can specify the layout and symbol names manually if you like (through `#[repr(C)]` in the former case and `#[no_mangle]` in the latter case).

> Rust got this right when it decided that GC was NOT the correct default > behavior for a language. The reason you see people playing with OS kernels > in rust and not as much in D is, I think, mainly due to this decision. I > think rust should continue carrying this torch.

GC has performance costs, while trait objects and symbol names do not, as long as they're opt-in. Garbage collection and virtual dispatch are completely different things; having one in no way moves us closer to the other.

<comment><USER21> > Garbage collection and virtual dispatch are completely different things; > having one in no way moves us closer to the other.

Right, of course not. The comparison was philosophical rather than technical.

My point was that I believe there's a "sweet spot" for a language that is expressive and convenient and modern, but also tries hard not to stray too far from C's spartan abstract machine model (and when it does, it exposes that complexity in a composed pluggable fashion).

I'm beginning to believe rust really has a shot at replacing C and needs to court "bare metal" programmers as well as higher-level programmers to do it; I'm just preemptively registering my wish that rust continue to head down that path.

<comment><USER26> The best way to make that wish come true is to use Rust in a project where you would normally use C, and report your experience to help us discover the best ways to support that use case. :)

<comment><USER21> I think what personally got me excited about this direction were the many "OS kernel in rust" hobby projects [1, 2]. For some reason these strike me as a sort of reverse canary-in-a-coal-mine to judge whether a language is seen as a potential C replacement.

Prior to rust the hobby OS dev community was primarily C / asm with some honorable mentions for other languages. It's also something of a stand-in for the requirements of the professional embedded community.

For these use cases, it's just really cool to be able to use more and more "layers" of the language as you implement more of the underlying abstract machine model.

[1] [http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os- story/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os-story/) [2] [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Operating-system- deve...](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Operating-system-development)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anybody wants to bet some play-money on the release date? [http://www.knewthenews.com/Market/44777/Will%20Rust%201.0%20...](http://www.knewthenews.com/Market/44777/Will%20Rust%201.0%20be%20released%20before%20May%2016%3F)

</comment><comment><USER33> Is it safe to assume that anyone wishing to learn Rust can, by alpha2, study The Rust Programming Language and Rust By Example and not need to relearn anything within that scope after 1.0 lands?

<comment><USER34> The core language is almost completely fixed, and the only real changes will be in unstable areas like associated types. There might be some small API changes but all APIs are marked with stability levels so you should be able to figure out what is stable, and what is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Some language guy told me that Rust's ownership system is untenable. He said that researchers tried the same thing years ago and it was concluded to be impossible to work well. I know that's vague, but he claimed to know what he was talking about.

<comment><USER11> Rust goes a lot farther than academic languages that used regions like Cyclone or the ML Kit. In particular, Rust's regions are only used to enforce stack discipline, and the basic memory management is taken from C++. This way, we avoid the well-known limitations of "classical" region-based memory management.

Besides, consider the fact that we've written hundreds of thousands of code for working, non-toy projects in the language, including the Rust compiler, crates.io, Servo, etc.

</comment></comment><comment> nathell</comment>


Play free video games online with friends - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/products/stadia/try-stadia-free-today <comment><USER2> lol. The headline sounds nothing like one for a Google product</comment>


Philips LED bulb Tear-down - <AUTHOR> http://www.edn.com/blog/PowerSource/40512-Remote_Phosphors_Philips_LED_bulb_Tear_down_Part_II.php <comment><USER2> The LED technology used in that bulb seems a little dated. I believe it's using Phillips' Luxeon Rebel LEDs.

Looking at the pictures, there's 3 sections and each section has 6 Rebel LEDs. Total of 18 LEDs. All for output of 800 lumens.

A recent LED flashlight can produce 800 lumens with just 1 (CREE XM-L) LED. For example, <http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=141> If you want a warmer white tint, it's a little less lumens, but you can always use 2 LEDs..

LEDs have come a long way in the last couple of years. It's just unfortunate that light bulb manufacturers do not make and sell new models as quickly as flashlight companies. There seems to be a new model every week with the latest LED for crazy light output.

Another example, <http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=149> It does over 2,000 lumens with 3 LEDs!! This is just one company. There are many more that also have crazy flashlights.

If you want to learn more about LEDs or flashlights, head over to <http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forum.php>

<comment><USER3> Philips updates the technology in the Rebel LEDs several times a year. In fact, they have on several occasions demonstrated record-breaking output in this form factor up until earlier this year.

The reason that flashlights are updated so much more frequently than light bulbs is that flashlights don't require any consumer safety ratings. Where a company can release a battery-powered flashlight with no safety testing, a light bulb running on line voltage has to be brought through a rigorous UL, CSA and FCC standards compliance testing.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you are correct. I overlooked that important fact. It'd still be nice if they moved faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does the use of connectors imply that users could replace failed LED boards instead of trashing the entire bulb? Or even upgrading to more efficient LED boards?

<comment><USER5> It means its possible, it doesn't mean that the owner could do it. It would be good PR on phillip's part to include a postage paid mailing label that would let you recycle dead bulbs. They could recover most of it and save both e-waste and the energy cost of casting a new heatsink.

<comment><USER6> The energy cost of individually mailing a heavy bulb is greater than the energy cost of casting a heatsink.

Centralized recycling might work, but not a postage paid mailer. Plus who is going to successfully store a mailer for 10 years while waiting for the bulb to burn out.

And in 10 years they won't want this bulb back, there won't be anything reusable in it. Just recycle it for the metal.

<comment><USER7> Storing the mailer isn't a big problem. When I buy a new bulb, I'll get a new mailer. I toss the first round. I don't disagree with you on the energy cost though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what the actual color temperature of the "blue" LEDs is— I've been hoping for a while that the rise of LED lamps would finally mean shifting to more natural colors.

It's kind of absurd to me that in this day and age we're still trying to make our artificial light look like another kind of artificial light rather than sunlight.

(For reference, daytime sunlight is around 5500k— these bulbs are marketed as 2700k, which is about the color of sunset, sunrise, or a large fire.)

<comment><USER9> > For reference, daytime sunlight is around 5500k— these bulbs are marketed as > 2700k, which is about the color of sunset, sunrise, or a large fire.

Cold light will mess up your sleep patterns:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Light_and_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Light_and_the_biological_clock)

(unfortunately I can't find a better source)

<comment><USER10> There's a big difference between cold light a neutral light. Personally I hate "warm" bulbs. I use the "natural" bulbs which to me appear not cool but neutral. I've read that asian nations also tend to use much cooler bulbs and dislike the warm ones, but I can't find the reference now.

Also, according to your Wikipedia article "Lighting levels that affect the circadian rhythm in humans are higher than the levels usually used in artificial lighting in homes".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would love to see something like this on the new Switch bulb coming out (supposedly) this fall. More info on the Switch bulb: <http://www.slate.com/id/2298444/pagenum/all>

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know what this comment means:

 _Incandescent technology is still superior to any other lighting tech, especially solid state. When one factors in laser sintering of incandescent filaments that increases their efficacy to 3-5 times even LED's, incandescents absolutely rule when considering their performance and cost of production/recycling/logistics/..ect... I love bandgap technology, but it will be hard pressed to beat Edison's brilliance (it hasn't been done yet, despite articles such as this one)._

<comment><USER13> It means nothing. LED lighting is still an infant technology. Any shortcomings are a moving target given how fast the technology is progressing.

The reference to filament sintering is incorrect. First, it's not sintering, it's a process applied to a filament after is has been drawn. Second, the efficiency gain is around double, which still can't even come close to LEDs. Look here for a bit more:

<http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3385>

The reference to "production/recycling/logistics" is also wrong if it refers to the EROI of LED lighting, which has already bettered that of incandescent lighting:

<http://www.osram-os.com/life-cycle-assessment>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As previously seen on HN <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845306>

Note this is a $40 bulb. And it doesn't come with a 20 year warranty, the circuit could fail in a few years and then you've got one expensive lump.

<comment><USER15> This. In particular, I'm concerned by the little switchmode power supply on a non-user-servicable board potted into the depths of the bulb.

If that 5c capacitor dies, a $40 bulb gets scrapped even if everything else is still good. Hopefully Phillips have designed around that, but 20 years is a long time and they have little incentive to do so.

I suppose a proper, universal, standard for low-voltage DC in houses (ala 12v Halogen downlighting only universal, something like PoE) is probably too much to hope for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another thing to consider is other than LED being so much more complex compared to a glass bulb with a tungsten wire in a vacuum is why a bulb?

We have been limited to bulbs why not lighting in sheet form or around the edges of rooms rather than a point source in the middle of the ceiling?

I know manufactures have to be backwards compatible but in the future it would be nice to have the option of a different method to light an area.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hell of a lot of components for a light bulb. The joys of achieving feature parity with the (150+ year old) incumbent product/technology.

<comment><USER18> I'd be interested in seeing what lightbulbs looked like if we designed them from scratch today -- without, as you note, 150+ years of expectations and needs.

What could they do that the traditional old incandescent can't? What would they look like?

On a more general note, does this "design in a vacuum" have any valid applications? Can this lead to ideas that we can use today, or is it just pie in the sky thinking?

<comment><USER19> Perhaps even more interesting would be "what would they look like if unconstrained by technology"? A lot of science fiction proposes the uniformly glowing ceiling. This would provide a very consistent & uniform light without the eye strain caused when you look directly at a point source.

Another common idiom in science fiction is to replace your windows with giant transparent television sets, functioning simultaneously as window, television, telephone, artwork and light bulb.

<comment><USER20> Transparent OLED has the potential to produce glowing wall panels, and transparent screens.

<http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/6/10/19> [http://www.geeky- gadgets.com/samsung-transparent-oled-displa...](http://www.geeky- gadgets.com/samsung-transparent-oled-display-notebook-07-01-2010/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> ianaee, but the board from the led bulb looks just as hand soldered as the board from the cfl. I don't think the following argument holds up very well.

"I was quite impressed by the use of connectors in this bulb rather than relying on low-cost-labor for hand-soldering which has been used in the manufacturing of CFLs."

<comment><USER19> Daniel_Newby provides an alternative explanation: that it's wave soldered.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860140>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know where you can get the phosphor plastic they use in these?

<comment><USER3> It is a plastic resin that has been blended to a precise dosage with YAG phosphor. You can buy YAG phosphor easily from wholesalers, for example, phosphortech, a Georgia company, sells a variety of colors of phosphor. However, the trick is to precisely and uniformly blend it in with the plastic resin - the reason that it takes so much time and development money to make a light bulb like this.

<comment><USER22> Nice, who do you work for?</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Tim O'Reilly, founder, O'Reilly Media - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/3565600252

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money.

\- Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly)

<http://startupquote.com/post/3565600252></comment>


Moz-controller: Control Firefox from Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RenWenshan/emacs-moz-controller

<comment> 97-109-107 And a less advanced equivalent for VIM - [http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Automatically_refresh_display_of_h...](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Automatically_refresh_display_of_html_on_saving_file)

Just tested with Firefox Developer edition, MozRepl and VIM - works as expected.

</comment><comment><USER2> Note that one of the functions gets the URL of the current Firefox tab. If that works reliably, then my Emacs will soon take control of my bookmarks!</comment>