skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can anyone recommend a good SEO / SEM company or individual in the bay area?
Hi,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but here goes...

I have a client who wants an SEO audit done on their website and on their main competitors sites, their competitors are far ahead in terms of organic search rankings and they want to find out why this is & what they can do in order to reverse the situation or at least catch up.

I'm looking for someone in the bay area that I can meet with for this and hoping someone can recommend or suggest a good contact for this project?

Thanks!
The quality comparisons here are quite helpful, but the pricing isn't that useful. If you're willing to do a little digging, you can find 30-50% off coupons for the big guys like PSPrint and VistaPrint. Not sure if this is also true for the smaller places like Moo. Also, the prices dive sharply at larger quantities.

We're currently using PSPrint for business cards, and would agree with this assessment: "flimsy, but otherwise nice". For our recent order with coupon, we were at final price of $130 for 10000. If you are in the Bay Area, you can pick up for free from their warehouse in Emeryville.
Thanks for the kind words - although many people have commented that I've missed out some discussion on Statistical Physics. That is the first thing to correct.

As it happens, Physics is not my main discipline. I did Maths, then Aero (CFD). I did get by with enough Cosmology/Quantum Mechanics at undergrad to be able to pick up some advanced undergrad/grad level texts however.

I can certainly agree that some of the more obscure aspects of compressible flow solvers would have been very difficult to grasp, if I hadn't been able to question my supervisor on the topic.

I visited the MadEvent/MadGraph wiki. I can see it is related to particle physics and symmetry models, but what does it do, out of interest?
Bizspark is like a pusher for startups. Why anyone would start off doing anything using Microsoft tools is beyond me. Everything you need is out there and its free.
Yes. Very misleading comment.
An amazing breakthrough in theoretical computer science.
I like overall look and feel. Also appreciate the fact that this must be hard to grasp in limited time but as such I am not target user.

Good work.
So long as the typical programmer is only working on websites (that have absolutely zero consequence if they fail) there'll be no need for that.
Another possibility:

Remember the guy that bought the AdWords targeted specifically to the hiring manager at Google?

That was a creative way to get noticed.

Maybe doing that + having the work to show for it (a landing page specifically for the manager! showing your work :) )
The FBI is probably researching the effectiveness of the back doors that they proposed.
Good boss typically needs no flattering.
If Bill puts his new e-mail address on Facebook - he has effectively chosen to give it away. It is now information that all of his friends own.

Choose your friends carefully, but choose the data you put on Facebook with even more discretion.
All their add-ons are based on either open source or third party solutions. You can keep using the open source solutions by simply installing them yourself and the third party solutions all have API's or even gems to work with.
Worked for me without going through Google.
"Don't tell me that you don't have any good ideas"
Thank you :)

When you say you're not the target user - is that because you're not a big books fan or because the site puts you off somehow? Any feedback is always useful. Thanks
Hulu CEO: We’ll make $240M in 2010
Nope, no voting ring - I'm pretty surprised it hit the front page to be honest. In fact, I was debating whether to post it at all as it is obviously not startup/tech related. Then again, I'd seen a few other physics related posts pop up so I thought it might have some appeal.

Given that you're a physics PhD, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the post could be improved. I'm keen to expand it and "fill in the gaps" that others have suggested.
Why aren't you mad at Facebook for not allowing the export feature which is causing this trouble? You could easily say the same thing in reverse: The people that use Facebook's services are being punished by Facebook because they don't want to open their data (as they already do with Yahoo and Hotmail). You want to know the reality of most people? When they end up at that page coming from Facebook, they'll get mad at Facebook not Google. Another reality is also the fact that most people that use both services rely on Google and are more likely to leave Facebook, than to leave Google if it came down to it.

Users in Facebook are more volatile. While Facebook is a lot more 'addictive', with time the lack of value it actually provides becomes apparent and it becomes two things for most people: an open-id provider and a distraction hub. Google offers actual value to their customers and therefore commands a sense of loyalty that Facebook doesn't get because of main issue in this fight. Opening the data Facebook collects to fair use of their customers is a big step in providing value, Facebook is just afraid that this integration might fuel competition. How very Microsoft right?
Google Unveils New AdSense Interface
This advice worked for Feross Aboukhadijeh, see http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/youtube-instant-instant/ for proof.

However most applicants would be better off brushing up on basic algorithms and CS stuff that most people have forgotten.
When most people claim that language X is "not cool" it's a defense mechanism. They do not know or have no interest in learning X, so it becomes worthless and uncool to them.

Spend more time focusing on theory and less on stack.

As for stack advice, pick what you want to do.
America Online circa mid 90s is to the internet as Apps are to smartphones.

Apps will eventually lose out to the mobile web. Statistically most people prefer the mobile web over apps for a lot of things. It's only a matter of time.
I know this, but I won't spoil it for those who don't. It's a staple in some circles I frequent.
It was on my 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop. I ended up able to compile it by putting my laptop next to a large fan, but it was pretty ridiculous. The worst part was that I had to perform this whole song and dance just because I wanted to change some key bindings. (Using Alt+number to change between tabs like every other Linux program.)

This serves as a nice textbook example of why implementing things like menus and keyboard shortcuts by hardcoding keycodes in C++ is a horrible idea.
Ask HN: How do you list bad projects on your resume?
Before I had any kind of professional network to help me find jobs I had to take contract jobs at places like banks. In many cases, the approach to solving problems and technology used was just face-in-palm bad. But as an outsider, I was only there to crank out code and not make decisions.

How do I list experience on a resume in which I don't really want to talk about?
Google announces big raises and bonuses for all employees
That was my reading.
Amazon has been profitable since 2001.
While I don't disagree with the author's points of discussion I do disagree with the tone and attempt at humor. Sometimes even if you do have something valid to say your words won't be sweeter by sitting on a bee hive.
Exactly. For social networking, people go to the big, nice-looking site that all of their friends seem to like. It sells your grandmother on the slave market? Oh, too bad, no one told me this!

I think Facebook has survived long enough in a very competitive market segment that they can't claim to be stupid. They do care about privacy etc. - to the extent that they need it to remain in the market, but not one ounce more, and to some extent their business model (not charging their users, ever) means they have to do scary stuff on the side (with all privacy implications) to remain competitive with for-fee sites (e.g., Xing, LinkedIn) as well as sites that are financed through generic advertising.
Pretty nice idea. I like it, though I'm not sure I want to sign in with google. Maybe a simple account system like HN?

(I understand the concepts of using google/fb/etc sign ons, but I don't like to have to log into them if I can avoid it. Paranoid they'll know every website I have an account on. sort of..)

I think it'd be better if the recent books took me to the user's book description first (like in the book lists). Then if I wanted to go to Amazon, I could use the link from there.
Was the Wheel of Fortune One Letter Solve Really a Miracle?
"The present king of France is bald."
I wish they'd go into the nozzle geometry & physics!
I've experienced this problem as well. You do the work quickly, then the client drags their feet in even looking at it. When they do, they send changes in dribs and drabs, costing you time and money.

The solution? If you suspect a client is this kind of time-waster, include a clause about "XX days to review" and have a surcharge after that.
but the issue is not only about compiling is it?
I recall that a few of the patents (debatable as they are) specifically relate to runtime, such as the one about the security manager.
Such a patent would invalidate the whole runtime code as it was built around such a policy.

So if you want to avoid being sued you need to use a different language, a different compiler and a different runtime, which is what MS did with C#.

But then why would you need a patent-minefield such as Jive-the-forked-java in the first place?
Consensus these days is pretty much that CSS hacks should be completely avoided in favour of conditional comments. Take a look at how we handle IE-specific styles on http://lanyrd.com/ (based on a trick discovered by Paul Hammond: http://www.paulhammond.org/2008/10/conditional/ )
So far as I can tell it's entirely fictional.
The csv is always available. This didn't affect that at all. I don't think they are obligated to provide export in every way you'd prefer, as long as they provide a standard and widely understood format.
In a corporate environment, you'll have the following options

(1) Elicit Business Requirements
(2) Design Technical Solutions
(3) Coordinate Project Activities
Hacker Monthly Breezed Past 2,000 Paid Subscribers
That sounds like a pretty reasonable thing to do. I'll do it next time.
The Oracle-Google lawsuit is about patent claims over implementation details in Dalvik and the standard library. While all your details are correct, they're not at issue.

Getting back to the OP's point -- any Java-clone will run afoul of Oracle's patents even more so than Google has with Dalvik. Even Microsoft's .NET CLR likely violates some of these patents.
The problem with auth is that it was designed before model inheritance was available, hence the crappy get_profile() hack.

A better solution (with hindsight) would be a base abstract UserBase model with a bunch of useful features (e.g. password encryption) extended by a default User model, plus a UserForeignKey field similar to the one in GAE. Therefore instead of this:

class BlogPost(models.Model):
author = models.ForeignKey(User)

you would have this:

class BlogPost(models.Model):
author = UserForeignKey()

The exact user class would be set in your settings, e.g. AUTH_USER_MODEL = "myapp.MyUser".

That would provide more interop between Django apps requiring some form of user authentication. Not sure what other implications that would have though.
Yes, at some point I want to greatly improve the login system and offer both direct login but also twitter/google/facebook. Unfortunately it's a little beyond my coding abilities at the moment! Also, as soon as I start storing passwords I need to ensure they're secure and I'm not quite confident enough in my coding abilities for that yet. Still, I'm learning fast so hopefully soon :)

Yes - I'm going to completely change the homepage soon with a much stronger focus on featured/top lists rather than just recent ones. Also, that top books list is pretty rubbish at the moment, I should change it like you say to go to the list with the book on.

Thanks for the feedback
minor note: Title tag should be "Keywords Go Here - Dropjobs" for maximum SEO benefit, of course it could potentially be more usable to have "Dropjobs" be the first word in the page title. Typically in my experience the SEO boost was more valuable.
Does malware count?
Both your list and your comments look good, generally, but I have to wonder about your mention of logic programming.

I think logic programming has a lot to offer the world, in theory, but in practice it seems to be pretty much dead. True, there is probably more going on with Prolog now than, say, a decade ago. But widespread use is not happening, nor is inclusion of logic-programming features into other languages. Further, I don't see this changing in any truly significant way in the near future.

Apparently, you do see it changing. Would you care to comment on that?
I think you messed up the formulation of the problem. As stated, a strategy would be
- first prisoner opens 50 boxes.
- second prisoner opens the other 50.
- each prisoner finds the box with the paper with his
name on it.

Success rate: 100%. There probably are other constraints but I can only guess at them (do they visit the room one by one, and must they decide on a box to choose before leaving? Who can talk to whom? Must they close all boxes before leaving the room?)
O'Reilly called this a "mortgage hack", which I love:
http://twitter.com/#!/timoreilly/status/2414447138177024
It's not purely theoretical — it's just not universally applicable. Even Ruby is fast enough to do most things faster than I can perceive, but I know from practical experience that there are fast and slow ways to do those things even in a "slow" language. I've tweaked Ruby algorithms before to make programs go from "OMG Ruby is so slow!" to perceptually the same as a C program (though a few tenths of a second slower in absolute terms).

What you're arguing here is that because there are some cases where pure Python is simply not fast enough, there is no point in thinking about performance at all in a Python program. It's a false dichotomy. There's a wide range of performance options between "just forget about performance altogether" and "rewrite the entire application in C++."
Clickable: http://www.7bks.com

nice work, bro

Edit: also https://gist.github.com/670034
And http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001
Analyst: Android grows 628 percent year-over-year for third quarter
Same with me. I tend to use sitting as a way to let go of something frustrating/troublesome that came up while working on something.

It's makes getting back to work much easier.
But it is true that Facebook doesn't allow exporting user's contact data. So I think Google is making a valid point here. You are still free to do whatever with your own data - unlike Facebook. They are just making sure that you understand the risks in doing so.
I believe each physical host has at least 8 real cores. They give each instance 4 virtual cores. As long as CPU time is available, an instance can use the full capacity of four cores. If there is contention for CPU time, every instance gets an equal share of CPU, which is also their fare share of CPU, because all the instances on a box are the same size/pricepoint. Further, larger instances are shared with a proportionally smaller number of other instances.

My experience, which seems to be shared by just about anyone who has published benchmarks, is that Linode is appropriately conservative on the degree to which they oversell CPU, because generally, it appears that a task that wants 100% of four cores does in fact get close to 100% of four cores.

The only thing to look out for is that there is quite a difference in single threaded performance between their newer hardware and their older hardware. Our app is written in one of the popular interpreted dynamic languages. Generic benchmarks for that language showeda 2-3x difference on some tests when run on the different hardware, and our app showed similar differences on CPU bound tasks.

There are a few implications of this:

First, it complicates things when you try to make your staging environment mirror production. The quick check is to look at /proc/cpuinfo and see if clock,cache and model line up. If not, open a ticket and ask them to migrate instances so things match.

Second, while they try to size things appropriately so that your guaranteed CPU Is the same, regardless of which generation of host you are on, your peak CPU is going to vary dramatically since you get 4 cores, irregardless.
"The Greatest Discovery Since Fire" (inventing and marketing the microwave oven)
What does the Dropjobs widget look like? Slightly annoying to sign up, see widget code, but still not seeing any examples of what the actual widget looks like (and the customizing options!)
You have 8 years of Microsoft development experience that's pretty decent and I bet this will bring you a lot of good jobs because many companies are using Microsoft technologies even the crappy ones (VB.Net, Classic VB).

However you are absolutely right about Microsoft. Yeah they doing good lately but from which standpoint? Microsoft has a really bad reputation under hackers and I think the reason is not that we all love Apple and Mac's. No, I think those reasons become clear if you look at what Microsoft is doing all the time, what are they implementing, how are they implementing new technologies.

For example Internet Explorer 9. This time Microsoft has to be really good cause they are losing market share month after month.
And luckily Microsoft did understand that and they are doing good with Internet Explorer 9 but again they are making things their own way and that's what is bad about them.
If Microsoft thinks it needs something they are always developing it on their own without looking what other developers are doing and how they solved those problems. No, they have always this one Microsoft solution doesn't play really good with the rest of the world (and sometimes even with Microsoft software).
That's Microsoft.

However I think you are on the wrong way. If your profession is Microsoft technologies and you want to stick with that cause you have a job and you like Microsoft platforms then you should stick with it and become better and better.

But look what other developers and hackers are doing, which new thinks are coming, which things are slowly going and compared to that what is Microsoft doing.
Don't turn into a developer who has a Microsoft hammer in his hands that's the worst thing you can do for the world and for your career.

I hope I could help you.

BTW: I learned programming with C#
From the other direction, I use one email address for public facing stuff and one for actual emails. So for me the email address Facebook has is actually worthless to me and the email address other people have for me in their Gmail accounts is hugely valuable to me.

Honestly I could care less if the email address used for Facebook is publicly posted and I get spammed from every penis enlargement pill salesmen on the planet, I never read it.

When my actual Gmail address gets passed to Facebook by someone who joined and imported their contact list, and then they email me, I find it to be far more of an invasion of privacy.
Re-Captcha
What's the split of digital / dead tree edition?
It's good to do business with someone you can scream at, if necessary.
But Facebook will allow me to export that friend's data to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Doesn't that seem to completely contradict Facebook's entire stance?
Vacuum Tube Chess Set Flickers and Glows
How Do Couples Divide Their Money?
Are there any publicly traded betting pool for this? I've got 10 bucks saying FB will open up their data silos (at least for Google) within the next 12 months :)
please explain your sentiment (speaking as a cs undergrad who failed physics once but is still interested learning)
looks very nice.

1) When browsing lists I like the spacing and big font, but I would also like to see all books without having to scroll. Like an easy way to take the list in.

2) Add more ways to login, maybe including your own system.

3) This might be a cheesy idea, but is there anyway you can theme book lists based on their topic/category. For some reason I think the layout of scifi fiction list could/should be different than a list of Perl books. Btw, when I say theme I just mean general layout stuff, not like MySpace animated gif theme.
Or "Private Browsing" if I'm using Firefox instead of Chrome? Having noscript installed didn't help. I still got the login page. Does private browsing hide the referrer URL?
Yea. I just added the New Relic analytics add-on and was pretty astonished at how much valuable information you get with _zero_ configuration. Totally worth checking out.
Dear Mom and Dad ...
Mob-sourcing: the prejudice of crowds
There's nothing inherently wrong with knowing Microsoft technology well. It's a tool. Learning more languages is a great goal because you can learn to use different types of tools. This gives you the ability to choose which tool is right for the job you're working on, instead of being limited to the one you know well.

My first experience was in VB and then C#, and I love ASP.NET MVC and still use it for some projects where it makes sense. But having learned other languages I've learned what the limitations of that technology is, and for most things I work on nowadays Microsoft technology is not the best solution.

Depending on what you spend time learning and what types of problems you work on, you may come up with different conclusions, and that's totally valid.
Logged in specifically to up vote Lakos.

Will log out and log back in again to attempt a second up vote.
Let's guess. I guess...92% digital, 8% print.
3D printing and "Intellectual Property"
> Using C++ the way authors intend

Like I said, you can write horribly inefficient C++ code if you really want, but that's not a fault of the tool. The fact remains you can write small and efficient C++ code, but that it's devilishly hard to do it with Java.

Or C#, BTW ;-)
Math skills improve with electrical brain stimulation
Manage your sales pipeline with cloud based apps
The US numbers came out a while ago:

http://www.gsmarena.com/report_details_os_market_share_in_q3...
So that would be a max of $15,363 monthly income or a minimum of $2,416.

Since he collected a year up-front, he has generated a max of $184,360 to a minimum of $60,755.
I'm totally adding animated gifs :-p

1) Hmm - I'm not sure how this would work but an interesting idea. I'll have a think about how to do this.

2) On my roadmap. See my comment below for more detail.

3) This is also on my roadmap! I'm going to run themed weeks where I get people to create lists on a specific topic (e.g. scifi) and then after the week aggregate all the lists on a special sci-fi page. Hopefully in time this will build a really good topic/genre resource while still having some editorial control to weed out poor lists.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts :)
The Switcher story:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt
Either you don't mention it, or you mention you did grunt work, what you've been told, even if you knew you could've done better.

Something like: "Despite my numerous attempts to convince the powers that be to implement $solution using $awesome_stuff, the policy remained the same: stick with $ancient_pile_of_dog_poo. But a job needs to be done, and so it was."

This has the advantage of suggesting that you will do what you're told - not neccessarily without trying to have your say first, but eventually, the job gets done.
Ask HN: Help alpha test our Heroku Add-on? (Tikt.ly)
We recently built a simple bug tracker for developers that integrates with Heroku as an add-on. We are looking for teams using Heroku that can help us alpha test our app. Adding the plugin is straightforward and any feedback you have would be much appreciated.

Here is the URL for our app:
http://tikt.ly

(pronounced Ticketly)

If you're interested in helping out, please shoot me an email at:
rbitar [at] gmail

Thanks in advance!