skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How we broke the Alexa 100K!
BlogTBT.com has only been live for 8 weeks since launching on January 23rd 2008. We broke the Alexa 100K barrier in such a short period of time. Don’t be fooled, I worked really hard during these 8 weeks to achieve this mark. Our current ranking is 99,820 and we thank everyone who has been a visitor here. The most important visitor is one that reads my blogs and leaves a comment.

I have provided a lot of information on how to increase traffic to your blog site. Here are some of the blog posts I would like to share once again:

http://blogtbt.com/wordpress/improve-web-traffic-using-multiple-campaigns/

http://blogtbt.com/wordpress/how-to-increase-web-traffic-with-wordpress/

http://blogtbt.com/wordpress/web-site-promotion-techniques/

It’s important that you have fresh original content that will provide interest to your readers based on your niche. This is how you can create a fan base that will frequent your blog site. Be creative and write something that visitors will gain knowledge based on your niche.

There’s a blog site that provides excellent, original and helpful content. It’s a blog site I visit each day Josh’s Unconventional Marketing Blog. Josh provides some of the best techniques in getting the most out of marketing your blog site. His latest blog provides insight and strategy on how to capitalize on Entrecard. This is how you get your readers to become fans based on the value of information that you author. Way to go Josh, you have a fan!

Josh’s latest blog on “How to capitalize on Entrecard”
Let's be thankful we have a venue for intelligent discourse.
Any Wall Street hackers reading this? I heard that while you earn big chunks of money at investments firms (nice 200-500k bonuses if you are really good), you are still seen as a second class citizen to the actual people that deal with the money stuff.

Is it possible to attract such talent in NYC through a great start-up working environment (like described in Joel on Software) while paying less, or are money and prestige too though to beat?
PageRank and Backlinks Oh My
It’s all about PageRank that most web authors work towards achieving. We work hard everyday to create a niche and to build a fan base that will frequent our web site daily. The money maker to me is achieving a high Google PageRank. This is far more important than an Alexa Ranking, though Alexa is still important to gauge your sites overall rank amongst 16+ million other web sites.

What is a PageRank?

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance according to Google. The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links (backlinks) as well as importance of the page providing the backlink as indicated in the first paragraph.

You can get a prediction of your Google PageRank by visiting IWebTool.com or click here to see what they predict your site PageRank will be on the next Google update. There’s also many other webmaster tools you can use at IWebTool.com, such as Alexa Rank, Keyword Density, and so much more.

Need Free Backlinks?

There’s a new site called Qassia that provides free backlinks. The site is still in beta and is invite only, but they have over 12,000 members already. If you would like to get started just click on this link > http://blogzilla.qassia.com/. Once you create an account you can begin to add your web site and create Intel. Visit Qassia for more details on how to get started.
This disappointingly reads more like motivational speaker pseudoscience. It also isn't clear what "smart" means here. "Reading and learning are important, but people learn by doing, by tinkering." Doing and tinkering are aspects of learning. Smartness follows learning.

Here's from one of the "smartest" people in the world: "Continually aim just beyond your current range"

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/continually-aim-...
Thanks for the support. I have been the same way about not making black-or-white decisions, and I have seen the same periods of increased and decreased usage. Near the beginning, I used Startup News a ton, and I was interested in nearly every story on the front page. Some time in the middle, I was only an occasional Hacker News user, and much of the content seemed fresh and interesting. Recently I have begun visiting more, and I have only seen a few gems per day that I think are worthy of being voted up.

Perhaps more than anything else, this post was a note to myself to reinforce my decision. I remember hearing advice some time back to tell as many people as possible when you resolve to do something so that you will have that additional motivation of not wanting to seem like a failure. Lately I've been trying to prioritize the things in my life, and since I'm not getting as much value as I used to, it makes sense right now to leave.
I'd really like to know how friendfeed works, uses apis, and how it is in any way legal. All of the sites it aggregates have non-commercial APIs. So how does that work? Sweetheart deals all round? Is it just because they don't have ads yet?
I'm implying there is no such specialist. The literature is so sparse on long-term studies that no one possibly can be, yet.

It'll be a few more years before we start getting real, credible answers back to these questions.
Added. I didn't realize that e-mail was only visible to admins, although I supposed I should have guessed that.
If it works, good luck. I appreciate that you are excited about it, but this is not the way to get others excited, especially this infomercial writing style that SHOUTS words that SHOULDN'T be shouted for FREE.

Show a working product that is obviously different from AllAdvantage or iWon or the dozens of others that have failed to make good on the same promises, and be prepared for a lot of skepticism afterwards. The world will NOT stare at your launch countdown page with bated breath.
Do you Quantcast?
I know many web site owners utilize Alexa as their tracking vehicle. Quantcast is another great web information company that also provides various tools and web ranking statistics. I use both of these companies to measure my web sites analytics.

Quantcast rates over 20 million web sites and Alexa rates just over 16 million. Quantcast has a great free service called the Quantified Publisher program. This enables publishers to tag their sites and services for measurement. You can then gauge the actual reach, frequency and popularity of your websites, videos, widgets, games and more.

How does Quantcast collect data?

They collect data through affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks. All the data they collect is anonymous and contains no personally-identifiable information.

General Analytics:

* Global Reach: 5,793
* US Reach: 3,360
* Rank: 339915
* Monthly Page Views: 17,469
* Monthly Uniques: 5,793

Quantcast provides many analytics such as web traffic, demographics, and geolocation. You have the ability to get vital information on gender, age, and so much more.

Easy to join! Get quantified with Quantcast!
News.YC is a conversation in English. It is neither a Perl script nor a super-secret members-only club.

Use words.
I have recently written a Beautiful Soup / Twisted crawler. To make it distributed, presumably we'd use Amazon's queue service.

Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in the details.
"In fact, that will help more than hard cash."

Totally agree with that. If I ever decide to take my ambitions any further, I can come up with a fair amount of money myself. But the advice and insight that could come from other players in the arena would be nigh-impossible to find where I am.
Will the Real Stumblers Stand
Are you curious to know who is really reciprocating your stumbles? There’s a really neat program that can provide you that information. I know for sure that many never stumble your blog, but yet they say they did. Below is the Stumble Alerter program that provides details of who stumbled a particular blog you wrote.

1. When you write a new blog you must open SA and go to Edit “Add Another Site”.

2. Post that same address you want stumbled by whatever community you participate in.

3. Watch who’s stumbling and who is also providing a review.

It’s kind of strange to only have 17 people who actually stumbled my blogs. Have you ever looked at some of the blog posts on the Entrecard forums? There’s a lot more people saying they stumbled, but never do. That’s why I wait to see who stumbles me before I stumble them.
Put your WordPress on Steroids
Is your WordPress theme loading slowly? If your web site is taking more than 5 seconds or even 10 seconds to load this could be an issue. Your visitors may just leave your site because of this. You can speed up your WordPress load time like it was on steroids!

Your header and footer templates perform PHP calls to your database in order to display your pages and content accordingly. This can have a lot of stress and load issues that can cause your page to load slow. You can reduce these PHP calls to your database by creating static URI’s.

Header Template:

Unnecessary PHP calls to your database that can be change to a static URI or removed.

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” <?php if (wp_version()==’21′) language_attributes(); ?>><head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”<?php bloginfo(’html_type’); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(’charset’); ?>” />

<title><?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title(”,true); } else { bloginfo(’name’); echo(’ — ‘); bloginfo(’description’); } ?></title>

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> <!– leave this for stats –>

<meta name=”description” content=”"/>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”"/>

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(’rss2_url’); ?>” />

<link rel=”pingback” href=”<?php bloginfo(’pingback_url’); ?>” />

<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’);?>/images/favicon-adstheme.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

<?php wp_head(); ?>

</head>

There are 8 PHP calls in the Header template that can be changed to a static URI or removed. This will reduce load times significantly.

A clean and faster Header Template:

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

<head>

<title>Your Title Here</title>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”<?php bloginfo(’html_type’); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(’charset’); ?>” />

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 2.3.3″ />

<!– leave this for stats –>

<meta name=”description” content=”Your description here” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your keywords here” />

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/style.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Your Blog Name”> RSS Feed” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/?feed=rss2″ />

<link rel=”pingback” href=”<?php bloginfo(’pingback_url’); ?>” />

<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />
</head>

By changing or removing these 8 PHP calls to your database you will improve your web site load time by up to 50%!

You can also download WP Super Cache. It’s a very fast caching module for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plug-in you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
WordPress must have Plug-ins
There are many bloggers that use WordPress. If you have a self hosted WordPress theme than you need to download and install the plug-ins below. They’re specific to SEO, Pagerank, Performance, Backup, and Statistics.

The Plug-ins:

SEO Title Tag: The most import plug-in for SEO (Search Engine Optimzation). This little plug-in re-writes your title tags so that spiders can index your site based on keywords within the tag. SEO Title Tag makes it easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.

http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

WP-Cache: Speed up your WordPress theme! WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster. It works by caching WordPress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests rather than loading and executing calls to PHP.

http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/

Google XML Sitemaps Generator: This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

WP Backup: Backup your WordPress easily and efficiently. You can have your backup executed automatically and sent via email or to a writable folder on your web server daily. I prefer to have it generate an email daily.

http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

NoFollow: NoFollow Free removes the “nofollow” attribute from your WordPress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FREE” is a useful attribute to conserve pagerank.

http://www.michelem.org/wordpress-plugin-nofollow-free/

WassUp: If you like statistics you will love Wassup. WassUp is a WordPress plugin to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits, current visitors online, visitors details and so much more. It comes with a “Spy” view in Ajax like the Digg Spy.

http://www.wpwp.org/

All in One SEO Pack: It’s all about SEO! This plugin does it all. Streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings recommended.

http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

It’s important that you stay current with all your plug-ins. You can check your Plug-ins link in your admin console to see if there’s any new updates for any plug-ins you’re using.
Thanks for pulling up that page. I have to take the opposite viewpoint, though, and say that I like that page much more than the ones I've seen recently here. Of course, back then, it was all startup-related, so that makes some difference.

I'm in the US, but I'm fed up with our politics and recession, and seeing how flawed the system is is just depressing. That's why I only visited the politics sub-Reddit for about a month before I quit going, and now I see some of the same discussions here in submissions and comment threads.

I also think you're right about the internal model. For me, though, my internal model of Hacker News isn't just about what I think is appropriate in a website, but what I think adds value to my life. When the site doesn't meet the model, it is inherently less valuable to me.

I will not go anywhere instead of Hacker News. I might pop in a couple times a month to see the "hacker sentiment" and to be referred to some interesting blog posts, but my overall goal is to waste less time on the computer and spend more time getting real things done.
Get your SEO on!
There’s many blogs that write about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and assume they’re the subject expert. Well, unless your results speak for themselves you can’t really label yourself as a true expert of SEO. I have read many publications and blog sites on SEO to further my knowledge. I am going to share a technique that can really get you positive results.

Questions:

1. Which of the following is a positive technique to improve rankings & traffic from search engines?

a. Submit your site to 2000 search engines and directories

b. Use meta tag keywords

c. Re-writing title tags on your pages to reflect high search volume, relevant keywords

If you answered (c) you’re correct. This is an effective SEO technique.

2. Which of the following character limits is the best choice to use when limiting the length of title tags?

a. 22

b. 65

c. There’s no limit

If you answered (b) you’re correct. Google & Yahoo! both display between 62-68 characters and MSN/Live hovers between 65-69.

3. Which of the following would be the best choice of URL structure for search engines?

a. www.mysite.com/music/led-zeppelin

b. www.mysite.com/music/index.htm

c. www.mysite.com/music/123.php

If you answered (a) you’re correct. This method provides the most semantic information, the best description of the content on the page.

Summary:

There’s so much information about SEO, but getting a basic understanding on how to get better results will help your site in ranking and page rank. Our results are incredible by just applying a few techniques to our blog site. In just 4 weeks our rank went from 12 million to 400K.

To learn more from a true leader in SEO knowledge, visit seomoz. You can also see how well educated you’re on SEO by taking the 75 question test. This test generally takes 30 to 45 minutes. You can even show off your level of knowledge and score.
1.) Don't do it yourself. Use Amazon's Alexa Web Search service (aws.amazon.com). Through that you can access Alexa's 10 billion page index, complete with all the pages, run complex queries etc. Plays nicely with EC2.

2.) If you must do it yourself, Heritrix is the most sophisticated crawler out there (crawler.archive.org).

3.) Nutch is an option, but nowhere near as powerful as Heritrix.

Don't try to reinvent the wheel, writing a robust crawler is a lot of work as there are endless edge cases to take care of (if you are looking into a general purpose web crawler)
Nope, no sock puppets, and I definitely didn't mean for this to be as depressing as a "suicide note". I was mostly curious to what extent older members feel the way I do, and at what point they, too, would consider leaving. Not that I'm trying to start a trend or anything, nothing like that, I'm just curious.
> I sure hope science comes up with a way to fix psychiatric illnesses.

I actually don't think it will happen. If it ever does, that would not necessarily be a good thing. Many forms of creativity are strongly correlated with "abnormal" brain wiring. If you are bipolar, for example, your lows are below average, but your highs are also above average. One day you might be absolutely useless, but another you're capable of thinking things literally impossible for those who don't share your condition.
Seeing technology used to do things like this just makes me very happy.
The notion that brain surgeons are automatically qualified to conduct and evaluate complex biomedical research in oncology and neurology strikes me as approximately as valid as the idea that skilled software developers are automatically qualified to evaluate cryptosystems, compression algorithms, or semiconductor process technology.
It seems that things you can't say seem to trigger the lower levels of the disagreement hierarchy the most.
You need help finding a reliable source? Let me help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Clinical_Oncology
Yeah, must have... this article really reads like made-up gobbledygook...

Daniel
I've played with Lisp a little, and I'm amazed at how many complex things such as Emacs can be built from a few simple axioms.
Making fun does not add value. Hacker News is not about who's right, it's about making a point rationally enough that others can see where you're coming from.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149052
I think he has, but to paraphrase:

The amount of work put into making the initial copy of something has no bearing on the license. Some people don't care about the amount of work something took, after the fact. The current rights-holder may not have actually done the work. The current rights-holder may have political beliefs that conflict with copyright.

Anyway, if you're asking whether you should trust a third party about the license for something, the answer is no. However, you seem to be asking whether you should trust the rights-holder about the license they themselves used, which just seems odd.
I read Hacker News. Does that mean I can only date geek chicks? What if there aren't any?
Only one of these looks bad statistically,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149482

All the rest, as far as I can tell by statistical measures, are like the stories that would have made the frontpage in the past. They also seem to me personally about the same.
What sort of trust do you mean?

Do you mean trust in the quality of the product? You need to decide that for yourself, just like always.

Do you mean trust that the author won't be a jerk in the future and try to stop you from using it? They can't: they've released it into the public domain. They can decide later to release a new version under a new license or stop distributing it, but they can't stop you from using that version once you've obtained it.
Without proper garbage collection, aren't closures just another memory leak headache?
Gee, guys. Just go hands-free!
The field is called "epidemiology" or "biophysics", depending on whether you are studying the rate of brain cancers or the mechanism by which EMFs interact with tissue.

It does mean that he is most probably aware of trends in brain cancer, such as certain increases.

Not at all. To a brain surgeon, the world is full of brain tumors. They see lots of brain tumors every day. Meanwhile, cancer patients are even closer to "the front lines" than surgeons, yet they know even less about what causes tumors. In fact, they quickly seize upon whichever half-baked explanation the media offers them, which is why so many cancer patients now run around complaining about their cell phones, instead of cigarettes or environmental chemicals or obesity or -- just possibly -- sheer random chance.

What you're looking for is a paper by an epidemiologist -- a person who is trained in statistics -- that talks about the rate of incidence of brain cancer. The paper needs to be peer-reviewed, because even the people who are trained in statistics tend to make mistakes occasionally, particularly when the mistakes make their research more interesting or more personally profitable.
That is one real change. There are more Ask YC type posts on the frontpage than there used to be. I've been thinking of measures to fix that. One possibility is to have a karma threshold for posting them, but I don't want to silence new users. So I think what I may do is make gravity stronger for Ask YC posts: make them have to get e.g. 2x as many points to stay at a given position on the frontpage.
Startups are all about the quality of the people and their ability to work in harmony. The YCombinator type of company, requires even higher level of wisdom. If and when they'll decide to expand it will only be after they'll find the right people.
"Either some changes are going to be made, or this site will follow the trajectory that so many other great discussion-based communities have followed."

We may not be the same kind of internet user, but we do share the same fear. This is my 3rd "home" on the internet and by far the best. I hope I never have to look for my 4th.

(The whining remark wasn't directed at you. Just trying to make a general point about the fine line between constructive criticism and whining. I think the difference is in the action taken for improvement.)
I would add that if a submission has a high score but very few comments, that is a decent indicator of a good story. As PG said, much discussion begins with disagreement, so if a story is liked but not discussed much, it has probably covered its bases rather well.
They should just use the closed form solution.
I'm in the same boat. I'm a communication major, but I discovered Unix via Mac OS X, and I was hooked. Like a lot of geeks, however, I programmed in BASIC as a kid.

First, I'd start off with an open source Unix, probably Ubuntu if you don't have one installed already. Just learning to work the shell will give you some useful programming experience. Then I would start learning Python.