skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEO has two basic components: making your site seem good and worthwhile, and associating it with particular search terms. Making it good and worthwhile and not-spammy mostly has to do with incoming links, and having fresh content. Reach out to blogs and other sites in your domain to try and collect back-links.

In order to find what terms you should associate with your site, do some basic research on search volume (google has some tools for this). Once you have the terms you want to rank for, it's a matter of making them more prominent in your site. Header tags, the title tag, the first 100 words of your body copy (p tags), and your URL structure (readable & hierarchical) have the strongest impact on this, as does the anchor text of both internal and external links. Meta description doesn't impact your ranking, but it does impact click-through in the search engine listings because it's the default text the search engine will display under the title.

The last part is making sure that content is available in text form on your page. Banners that are in flash or image files should either be replaced with images, or you can do graceful degradation by having the text be replaced with images via javascript (this is consider OK by google so long as the replacing image contains the same text). If you have videos, include transcripts or at least summaries. If you have lots of images, use the alt attribute. Don't make things Ajax unless you really need to.

The last recommendation is don't spam. You'll get penalized. Spamming is putting more SEO-bait than content on your page, and/or placing content that search engines will see but most users won't (putting the same content in different forms is ok). Most tricks you can think of, someone else has thought of first, and you will get burned for it. Done properly, white-hat SEO and accessibility overlap very well, since search engine spiders are basically low-capability browsers.
Oracle is losing the most valuable assets at Sun - the brains. What a clusterfuck.
That's not an argument, it's just an assertion of taste.
HTC’s lackluster patent portfolio may be behind Apple’s recent lawsuit
Canadian Government removes tax barriers for startup VC
Investors Say “Count Me In” To Plancast
He gave an example ... sponsor content, a.k.a. branded entertainment. It's the only thing that works in world of online advertising right now.

But I think one of the main points is, be smart and use restraint when necessary. If a publisher comes to you and says "Hey, we have a new ad unit that takes over the page!" the advertiser should know that it's a bad idea and use restraint instead of buying up any new ad unit that's presented to them.

If you look at mobile advertising, the click-through rates are 10 times better than online. Why? Mainly because there is less screen, so there is less ad clutter. So it's an approach that works.

But basically, publishers and advertisers are lazy and instead of looking at data and figuring out creative ways to grow, they just spend more money to try to increase return.
I'd recommend against it, although I don't have experience.

1) if they're reputable, they will just review you (not charge a fee). Also recall that the FCC requires bloggers to include financial disclosures now, so that will lessen the impact.
2) if it's not a reputable blog/site, then you're not going to get much PR benefit
3) a lot of these sites exist just for PR, and will eventually get revealed/shut down (there are few/no guarantees that the site will exist shortly, or that it will continue with any positive page rank. Chances are they built their PR on greyhat techniques)
4) Doubtful that you'll get any meaningful signups through this, which means that you're just thinking about your PageRank. Which leads to,
5) don't manipulate your PR; it will quickly become a full time job. The proper way is to follow all the google guidelines and build longer lasting relationships with legit bloggers and review sites.
I agree completely. People will find things to complain about nearly everywhere. Frankly, if I had an opportunity to spend more time in India I wouldn't complain one bit because I really enjoy the country and I could be quite happy going without my usual fair.
The first eleven points are fairly regularly touted as the strong points of vi. I'm specifically interested in the twelfth point that states:

"Writing with vi is as close as you will ever come to writing in your own handwriting and still working on a computer."

Your thoughts?
I had to look that acronym up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_aint_no_such_thing_as_a_f...
Well, the idea of HN's scoring is to bring the most insightful comments to the top while burying the noise, correct? I think it generally does a decent job of this, though the scoring seems to be somewhat noisier than it used to be.
thanks, seems reasonable.
We shouldn't take the experience of publishers like Ars and techdirt as indicative of the whole industry. Both of those publishers have very tech savvy audiences who are not the best demographic for display ads.

While the effectiveness of display advertising is not as high as other channels (email for instance) it is still effective. The "american idol" demographic clicks on lots of ads.
Well, that saves me a bit of work!
When you measure something, like height, it's usually a uni-directional growth.

With karma here, it's bi-directional. So a downvote can actually take away your earnings so it's not that great of a measure because a polarizing comment could have +100 and -100 masked underneath a 0.

It is a learning experience. But just because it conditions people towards some behavior doesn't mean it's not also punishment. Punishment is a type of conditioning too, but it's also usually the less ideal method.
Google ultimately generates revenue from people using their engine and ad server to find things. If the quality thereof goes down, you will see people flow out of Google. If you say, no, that won't happen, remember people have to flow into Google in the first place... it's not the default search engine for the majority of installs...
Here's the basics:

- Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

- Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most)

- Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's, dl's)

- Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link's anchor text is your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow's don't count.

To get links:

1) Ask directly
2) Mention them in your blog posts, hope they reciprocate
3) Pay them (but don't tell anyone you did)
4) Make interesting content on your blog that naturally gains links

- Don't use subdomains (i.e., put your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com)

That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are more interesting than your site's copy, so people will actually link to it.
>> " when users fundamentally don't want the thing they make - ads?"

It'd be good if we stopped pretending everyone runs adblock. 99.5%+ of people have no issue with ads, and actually find them useful.

That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much.
Warning: This will redirect every second google search result to your localhost!
Jason, it be better served if you address the original points rather than side step them..
This looks like something I could finally move to from Quicksilver. I love quicksilver, but to be honest, it's simply too complex for me to feel good about. That, and the fact that it's mostly dead have me itching to switch to something.

Wondering why this isn't open source thought. The FAQ doesn't really say, but it does indicate they don't plan on selling it at any point.
The article itself lists several examples of ads that provided value and didn't garner hatred.

Tech journalism aside it's perfectly possible to make ads that rise above the perpetual noise of CONSUME! advertising we all live with. Look at things like Honda's "Cog" or Old Spice's "I'm on a horse".

If there's a better example of why many people block ads than [1] I don't know what it is.

I don't even bother to block ads anymore. I see a double-underlined word, a popup or a 90%-noise blogspam page and I just hit back. There's so much content out there that doesn't abuse your attention why bother with the noise?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/akj4z/get_your_mcdigg_...
Once you're used to the idiom, I find point-free style at least as easy to read as pointful.

"Thus, now when you look at code you cannot say at first glance how many arguments a function takes."

In Haskell I generally look at the type signature - explicit or inferred - to see what a functions' arguments are.

I find this style is actually more beneficial for larger-scale examples than smaller ones. For example, if you have a memoizing combinator, most people would not find it odd at all to write:

fast_factorial = memoize factorial

instead of:

fast_factorial xs = (memoize factorial) xs

The key to point-free style is to think of all functions as potentially acting like combinators, and being modifiers for other functions.
You use 'principals' on this page when you should use 'principles'.
Congrats to Jaymon (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Jaymon) and Mark for building a kick-ass service!
I'm sorry the response sounded like "too bad" to you, because that really wasn't our intent. We do care about how ads affect users. We heavily Q&A our ads and they're vetted at multiple levels before they show up on the site. Not only that, but we have more aggressive ad policies than any comparable site I've seen. The pushdown ad that Techdirt mentioned, for instance, is against our ad guidelines because it expands without user intervention.

When an ad ends up on the site that violates our guidelines, we get it removed very quickly. It's an unfortunate fact that the ad ops people will occasionally put an ad meant for GQ on Ars, so you'll end up with something that expands by itself, does a popup, etc. They're never malicious, but oftentimes violate the Ars guidelines.

Part of our "solution" to this problem is better educating users about the economics of ads, the effect their ad blockers have on us, etc. It seems to be working based on a small 4 day sample.
Last time I used Steam I spent a couple of hours trying to debug a game that crashed on startup. Eventually I figured out how to start the game without Steam interfering, and found that when I start the game without Steam I would get a very helpful error message, that told me exactly what the problem was. When I started the game with steam, the game would just crash with no error messages.

After that, I did a lot of cursing at Steam.
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
Tufte is smarter than at least 99% of public school teachers, and he is one of the best humans alive at making accurate and concise visual explanations of complex data. It wouldn't be particularly surprising to see him succeed where others have failed, because he's better at this kind of thing than pretty much everybody who's tackled this problem before, and he is able to learn from the mistakes of previous attempts.

The data has always been accessible, for some definition of "accessible". The job of a guy like Tufte it to put it into a form where it doesn't take as much effort to spot patterns and other hidden trends. Essentially, he'll be trying to lower the barriers of entry to the "informed electorate".
Couldn't agree more. The reason why Mahalo gets so many up-votes is because we're all wanting to see how Google reacts. For now I'd say "dont' be evil" isn't really holding true, but they can't ignore it forever.
Yes, but not any substantive policy changes that Obama wants.

1. Obama administration policy. There's no limit to how fast a politician can spend money ^_^. (Well, to authorize the spending of money; as we've seen with the stimulus bill there's no limit to the amount of red tape a bureaucrat can then use to tie up a process.)

2. Yes.

3. Unfavorable, since we don't believe that the ends justify the means and we don't believe him on costs. The CBO doesn't believe him, and that's not counting the "savings" achieved by gutting Medicare, which will of course be repealed in due course or "adjusted" every year as is already done for Medicare payments to doctors.
Some automatic, but to be safe I put a manual block on them, which I do for big "useless" sites I keep (or users keep) seeing again and again.
And where do you find the inferred type signature?
IPad's night out at the Oscars: beyond the inconsistencies
Or why sometimes it pays to look at what's happening in the background instead of the foreground in advertising.
I wonder if it's too elitist to be useful to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality content. I happily pay for the Economist, Stratfor and other similar high-quality sources of information and they seem to derive sufficient income from those subscriptions not to have to resort to asinine ads. Sites that don't provide high-enough quality content to be worth the subscription fee all get to fight over monetizing the eyeballs of their users and (I suspect) alienating the more discerning customers.
What's even better I think is the expansion of Steam Cloud into savegames altogether. The ability to sync progress on a game seamlessly and automatically across multiple machines is going to be a real treat.

It's already useful for hardcore gamers now - go to a gaming cafe, log into your Steam account, and all of your control schemes and settings are just the way you like 'em.
If this is hurting you, you should contact your representatives and complain. They generally do listen to their constituents.

On Thanksgiving day two years ago I got a call on my cell phone from my representative about the repeal effort for the recently passed "sales" tax on technology services in the state of Maryland. I had sent an email the evening before, and he asked for some more information and wanted to know if I was willing to allow him to use the information I had given in the repeal process. This was notable for several reasons, the speed of the response, the fact that he personally called on Thanksgiving day, and the fact that the tax was repealed through his efforts.
I hope this kicks off the gaming peripheral market for macs. It would be lovely to have a a handheld controller to play this stuff. Macbook Pro keyboards are not very good for gaming :) The tiny arrow keys are pissing off.

I hear the ps3 controller already hooks up with snow leopard easily, so that's good news.

EDIT: Google search for "ps3 controller snow leopard" shows a bunch of hits, just to confirm what I said. http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS368US368&so...
What Geeks Don't Get: The Limits of Moneyball
Yes, it is. It used to be substantially worse, though, and other than a few top colleges, it still is.

Example of the difference: my "estimated family contribution" according to the FAFSA is about $10k more than what Stanford estimates they'll make me pay (though I haven't seen the final number, yet).
I load the module into ghci and use the :t command. But I mostly do this during development. This is the big reason that production-quality code should generally have explicit type signatures for top-level functions.
Thanks, updated the page.
It's an unfortunate fact that the 40% of our users who block ads also block almost any kind of "advertising that doesn't annoy them". For instance, every user who saw blank content on our site when we decided to have a little fun was running EasyList for Ad Block Plus. You can see the global blocks here:
https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/file/d4e0b55077bb/easyli...

You'll note that adsense is specifically blocked by that list. The list also catches The Deck ads. Both of these ad types are things we hear people say "we won't block ads if you run them like this"... but they block them anyway.

The title is right, though, Ad blocking isn't killing any sites. We didn't really say it was either. This whole exercise is really the result of not being able to rehire people who were laid off last year specifically because our ad inventory is being hammered by ad blockers.
It is very easy to presuppose that the only way to get value from advertisers is through ads. But then you are assuming that only people who will sponsor your content are either add-networks, or corporations who will require that you use traditional forms of advertising (banner and sidebar ads).

If you are simply interested in generating revenue from any corporate sponsor, the question becomes a little bit more open ended.

I think that is what he is pointing out with his specific examples about UPS, Intel, and Sun. Not only were the companies sponsoring content, they were sponsoring a specific project that interested all parties involved (and disclosing that).

The interesting subtext of this discussion is that as users we really hate the sketchy tactics put forth by ad-networks, and that as content providers, ad-networks are the 'easy' solution (easier than doing real legwork to get actual corporate sponsors).
I did the same thing and have swore to never buy another game by them again. I never got the game to work...
You have the right idea. =]
See you there.
Not bad at all, but I still find Google Quick Search Box[1] more complete. Navigating the filesystem directly is what I miss the most in Alfred.

EDIT: It also doesn't seem to have a built-in calculator. :(

[1] http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/
It blows my mind that people actually mention sponsored content as a feasible alternative. It's true that ad blocking will ultimately drive many sites there, but I really value the firewall we have between our writers and ad sales. Not only that, but I really don't want to read a site running ads-that-look-like-content. It saddens me that so many seem to miss the implications of doing this.

It works ok for entertainment, but do you really want to read an article like "Why you shouldn't move your sites to the cloud, brought to you by IBM"?
Disposable Toilet that will Change 40% of the World
Whey Jacked
> If your own state government is something you happily and comfortably state is "outside your control", getting fired by Amazon is the least of your problems.

Sure, however if Amazon is a significant revenue stream on my website, I know and track Amazon policies. I don't track all sales law changes with my regulator.

Hence, I would assume if Amazon come to know of a regulatory policy which might affect me, I expect them to send me a warning email, and not after you close my account.
(I dont use amazon, but I think AMZN didnt do that via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1176132 )
yay! i'm also thrilled about the new logo.
Why testosterone and stupid ads won't save Burger King
MIT Media lab opens doors to new, modern facility (video)
Opfr.lisp -- "Outer-Parentheses-Free REPL"
I have been training and competing for several years now in boxing as well as mixed martial arts. Just recently my trainer decided to completely change my supplement intake and put me solely on this product. I was a bit hesitant at first, but I had to follow his word regardless. One cycle in I have already noticed some great changes. My body fat has dropped 3%, I've added about 10 pounds to most of my lifts, and love the energy boost that this product gives.

Another thing that I like about whey jacked it that it mixes so easily, even with water, and actually tastes good. I would recommend this to everyone and suggest that at a bare minimum, check out the website and read up on all of the science and technology used to formulate it. http://wheyjacked.com
Many people wouldn't even consider those sorts of projects "ads". Further, I can't help noticing that you still have "actual"/conventional ads all over your site.

Clearly, companies find putting ads on your site worthwhile, even if they're less creative by doing so. You, in turn, find taking their money worthwhile enough show us those ads.

Which approach brings in more money? Is the truth ultimately that conventional site ads still tend to work?
This also means a lot more games will be developed with OpenGL rather than just DirectX, which might bring many more future games to Linux as well.
MIT Scientists discover a new way to produce electricity
> I'm sorry the response sounded like "too bad" to you, because that really wasn't our intent. We do care about how ads affect users. We heavily Q&A our ads and they're vetted at multiple levels before they show up on the site. Not only that, but we have more aggressive ad policies than any comparable site I've seen. The pushdown ad that Techdirt mentioned, for instance, is against our ad guidelines because it expands without user intervention.

I was sharpening the point a little: from what I understand, Ars does indeed have reasonably well-behaving ads when it comes to essentially the aesthetic side. The underlying privacy, security and psy-op/propaganda problems remain, though, and the sense I got from staff comments was that those were simply the Unchangeable Facts of Advertising and nothing could be done about it. These are by no means easy problems to solve, but I think projecting understanding those concerns and figuring out viable alternatives ("having a conversation" about it with the userbase, if you will) can go a long way.

> Part of our "solution" to this problem is better educating users about the economics of ads, the effect their ad blockers have on us, etc. It seems to be working based on a small 4 day sample.

I have no doubt! I think a big banner would have been a better way to do it to begin with, but the subsequent article addressed that part adequately.

I will subscribe once the short-term version comes out.
Hackers Announce Japan Nuked by N. Korea
I hate ads. I never ever ever click on them. I get pissed off when I see an ad in the way of content I'm trying to read and tend not to stay on the page.

AdBlock on my browser does absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of money that websites I visit can earn from my.
Does it also come in a "spam" flavor?
Launchy is a similar app for Windows and Linux. It's not super great for finding and opening files, but it's a great timesaver for opening websites and applications, especially if you use your keyboard more than your muse (as I presume most hackers do).

http://www.launchy.net/
Some ads may not garner hatred, but they don't provably garner sales. "Cog" may have been neat, but did it make you buy a Honda?

On the other hand, the grating "Head On" ads spurred a lot of sales.
The point of my comment, which was perhaps too subtle, is that I don't see how meaningless trite words like these could have any effect on an intelligent person. Does this disqualify me for human-hood?

At no point did I imply that I can take on challenges with the odds stacked against me and still cheerful about it. I mean, I can, but I didn't imply that anywhere. And I don't see how this crap would help me even if I weren't a superhero.
Most Americans (probably 80-90%) conflate corporate greed with profits, which is the wrong way to look at the problem. Most of the asshole greed we see today is not in profit per se, but in back-scratching compensation deals for top management. Note that CEO pay is not profit. It's an expense. Most Americans either don't make or are unaware of this distinction. Managerial overcompensation is strictly worse, because at least one can invest in a company that is "profiting too much".

I'd like to see the data for other years. Recessions are bad for health insurers, because when people get fired, young and healthy people tend to drop their insurance while those who are older stay on the plan (with COBRA). So adverse selection sets in and insurance companies lose.