skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see no smoking gun here or evidence of paid linking, or even link schemes. I just see legit guest posts, that could just as easily be meant to drive referral traffic.

Ironically, Tampa is where BlueGlass was located before they went bellyup.

Personally, I think articles likes these are fine for SEO. The articles are NOT PAID FOR and while the links might not be totally organic, you could certainly argue it adds some value to the post. (i.e. expedia's app is a good app for finding cheap airfare.)

Google has announced several times that they are going to crack down on poor quality guest posting, and I think expedia should be a little more progressive in their anchor text (i.e. linking with a brand name, url or even not linking... but just mentioning the brand name could help their rankings.)

Bottom line, Good offsite SEO today is a more polished version of this...

Step 1: Create Linkable, shareable, emotionally charged content.

Step 2: distribute your content socially.

Step 3: Do outreach to bloggers and journalists to get exposure to their audience, and perhaps attract links...

That being said, aside from the overly optimized anchor text, this is legitimate link acquisition and its what all SEOs do today... They create content and try to get distribution far and wide.

These links and posts could just as easily be traffic generation strategies, not SEO strategies.
Look into the SecureShell chrome extension. I use a mac basically like a chromebook, using just chrome+SecureShell, and I do all my real work on a remote linux box through ssh. I do everything through SecureShell now...no more terminal or iterm. Chromoting is useful, too, if for some reason I need to use the GUI on said remote linux box, but this is rare.
Why do you suppose there are no competitors happily collecting this money?
Actually, I didn't know what "computer science" was until mid-high school, and I was extremely lucky to have attended one that happened to offer a few extracurricular CS classes (I'd toyed around with HTML and CSS and built a few Geocities sites when I was around 11, but that's certainly not what I'd consider "exposure to CS"). But I don't think that's an issue of gender so much as a failure of the education system to integrate topics of CS into standard curricula.

The "problem" is the girl with straight As in my high school BC calculus class who refused to take CS because "that's hard, I wouldn't be good at it" (true story, and it confused the hell out of me when she said it). The fact of the matter is people AREN'T just "not interested". I really wouldn't care if only 0.2% of the tech industry was female or <insert-label-here>, so long as it's because they either aren't capable or interested. But I don't buy that. We've come a long, long, long way, but we're not there yet. And all the screaming and finger-pointing, such as that which PG has received (misquoted or not), just distracts from addressing what actually matters.

P.S. We actually explicitly argued AGAINST affirmative action in the post. I could go on about that for ages, but I'll just say this: I want to be held to the same standards as any other demographic, be it race, sex, or shirt color, and I don't want to have to question the legitimacy of my failures OR successes. If I thought I'd been given a handout because I have two X chromosomes, I'd be pissed.
I see no proof or mention of paying bloggers for links.
Running OMXPlayer remotely from your Desktop via SSH/NFS
I'm taking about cash. For cards and digital services, the Bitcoin advantage is near zero transaction fees.
If a particular group is underrepresented there is a reason for that. It's not necessarily your fault, although unless you're very aware of ingrained sexist structures it's possible that you're contributing accidentally. It turns out that the reasons for the imbalance aren't good ones. It's not that women just love to do other things - there are pressures that actively dissuade them from pursuing technical careers. Most of this has happened long before they acquire technical qualifications and are applying for jobs. That IS sexism in our society, and it's not fair.

So where does that leave us white males working in tech?

1. We have to recognise that the gender imbalance is a problem and accept that it should be solved

2. We have to recognise there are ways we can help that are NOT simply "hire a weaker female applicant just to balance the genders"

3. Promote female participation! Sponsor school programs. Create female-only internships. Make sure that everybody in your workplace is actively educated about structural sexism so that things are as comfortable as possible for your female employees. Ensure salaries are equal.

We need to help send the signal to young women contemplating their careers that the tech industry welcomes them. Then, maybe 5 or 10 years from now, we'll be getting closer to equal applicants.
Notes and Books
C:\TAD\Text\EMILY.TXT

d
Bent to the water, shivered scarce,
Consented, and was dead.

And we, we placed the hair,
And drew the head erect;
And then an awful leisure was,
Our faith to regulate.

XXI.

THE FIRST LESSON.

Not in this world to see his face
Sounds long, until I read the place
Where this is said to be
But just the primer to a life
Unopened, rare, upon the shelf,
Clasped yet to him and me.

And yet, my primer suits me so
I would not choose a book to know
Than that, be sweeter wise;
Might
Yeah right. If the gold market collapsed then nobody would be making selling or wearing gold jewelry. The reason it is popular now is because it is expensive.
A cruise might be your best bet! Read this: http://tynan.com/cruisework

FYI, wifi is now a bit cheaper on some cruise lines. Last time I was on Royal Caribbeans they had an unlimited wifi package that wasn't so outrageous.
This is what Google was hoping too accomplish with AuthorRank.

Penguin is also discounting many of these links that have commercial keywords as anchor text. (I wonder if these links even help them.)
VPN.sh - £1/year VPN in 21 worldwide locations
Ask HN: How is your income split?
I'm curious to know how you guys allocate your income (e.g. 30% towards housing, 20% savings, 20% investments, etc).

I suspect allocations will differ depending on where you live, if you have a family or not, if you're newly graduated, etc.
I think you are making a mistake by reading it as a critique of immutability in general. Rather, I think the author is criticizing an overly-simplisitic approach to using immutability.

When he describes traditional databases:

"What’s happening in such a database is a combination of short-term immutability, read and write optimizations to save and/or coalesce redundant work, and continuous “compaction” and reuse of disk space to stabilize disk usage and avoid infinite growth."

He's saying that's what people arrive at after working out the issues with immutability. When you say: "Increasingly these implementation constraints will disappear as people attack them." the author would probably respond: "Yes, and people will attack them with a lot of the same strategies that SQL databases are already using today".
What joke? Can someone confirm this already or what's the deal?
It's hit-and-miss, as with any other Linux-based mass-market device.

For example, the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook used a Mali graphics chip that only had a binary blob graphics driver (maybe an Android one?) that had a ugly nonfree license on it.

IIRC, custom code for each device can be found in the main chromium tree somewhere; extracting those bits and using them with a standard Linux distro is painful at best; e.g. locking you to specific kernel revisions for binary driver compatibility. It reminds me of the win/softmodem shenigans we saw in the late 90s.

Virtually every Chromebook has a hardware or software developer mode that lets you boot an unsigned operating system. Developer mode is rather intrusive (sad face; full screen message; beeps if you don't dismiss it early enough so that you can't do it to install malware on a lay user's laptop without them noticing) but usually can be quickly dismissed with Ctrl-D on each boot-up.

There exists some very nice hardware that is built from standard components and/or will run well on standard drivers. As a starting point, prefer x86_64-based Chromebooks over ARM based ones if you're going to run a Linux distro on them.
And those councils are aggressively lobbied (and possibly bribed) by those taxi drivers.

The most depressing thing about public corruption is how cheap it is.
Thanks. I find some ambient sounds (especially birds & waves) help me focus on work. (Instead of rain I use pink noise from another site)
I think you will see rather bigger falls than that with Bitcoin, once the early investors sell out.
Megacoin: A new global currency
That's something I don't really understand about all these offerings. They're all crazily expensive. There's small differences, but not much. Rackspace is a tiny bit cheaper, with significant disadvantages, google and aws are roughly the same (I get the impression google is more expensive, but better for cpu workloads).

Compare it to any "standard" vps offering and they're insanely expensive. Compared to the vast majority of dedicated hosters they're insanely expensive. Plus you're the only one on your cpu/memory/disk.

Anybody with a monthly AWS spend of $100 or more could have 2 dedicated servers, one in .eu, one in the US, for 20-30% less dollars, 5-10x more cpu, 32 Gig of dedicated memory or more, 100x more bandwitdth (and no surprise overuse charges, finding hosters that just "limit" you to 10 mbit is easy), everything non-shared and good support. Hetzner ES40 is EUR 40/month, 32Gig ram, 2Tb disk, unlimited bandwidth, similar offerings are available in the US (e.g. www.ovh.com.ca ).

Total spend for effectively ~ m3.2xlarge instance, one in US, one in EU : $120.

AWS spend for a comparable config :
1 month of m3.2xlarge : $650
5/10 Tb of internet facing traffic: $600/$1200

I think this is being generous to AWS, because an m3/2xlarge does not match the specifications of the dedicated server offerings.

Granted, these services are not as flexible as AWS. At the prices they offer though, is there anyone who really argues AWS is better for anything but their free tier ? As for the "extras" amazon offers : since they're all proprietary businesses, every amazon extra you use (e.g. S3) is something you're betting the business on.

And since none of the aws/google/... offerings are anywhere near what I want (just set this .jar in my homedirectory live, ditto for go binaries, or move-tag-and-push git publishing), I have to script stuff to make that happen anyway (I love docker).

Why does AWS have customers at all ?
Because that "someone else's property" is often shared water/air resources, and when you cause $30 million in damages by causing 10 cents in damage each to 300 million people, there's no way to turn that into a lawsuit, even when tons of other people are doing the same thing and adding up to thousands of dollars of damage per person.
Rather earlier than 1997, though full dependency resolution and such came around then (I actually thought it was earlier). APT in particular saw its first release in 1998. It was built as a front-end to the earlier dpkg (anyone else remember dselect?), released in 1994.

Ian Murdoch's observation on package management advances driven by Linux, and Debian in particular, are on mark (from the Wikipedia article).
Google did research that shows having organic rankings and paid ads, boosts your click rate significantly. So, it would be a mistake to stop advertising if you rank well organically. http://www.google.com/think/infographics/organic-impact-on-p...

This is nothing compared to what RapGenius did. This is a low quality, but legit link building tactic.

The author claims the articles are poor quality, but they aren't. The only red flag is commercial keywords as anchor text, which Penguin today does a good job of discounting.
http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/10417/explaining-w... does a great job.
Hello,

I dislike 'boxes,' but if I had to characterize myself I would suggest that I could be described as cryptoanarchist and voluntaryist in terms of my thought processes and philosophies which I appreciate helping to put into practice.

On the subject of "crypto-anarchy does not require anonymity," I would certainly state that it does not, but systems which emanate from a crypto-anarchistic perspective should preserve the choice or ability for people to make decisions about anonymity and identity generally, regardless of how you personally perceive of or define identity.

This is part of what is discussed in the ABIS protocol.

You can read the whole proposal here:

http://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS

Cheers
That's precisely the tragedy of the commons - there is no "someone else" when it comes to things like water and air pollution, so without government regulation, there is no incentive to protect the commons, only use it in a manner to maximally improve one's own economic self interest, in a manner that harms all in an aggregate manner more than the community has been benefited.

It's a net-loss without some form of government regulation.
It certainly can be. Lots of laws are built to favor small groups who benefit less than the total cost imposed on the rest of the country.

My point is simply that regulation can be overall good and that you can't detect this by having them compete, because even good regulation can't compete.
These links and posts could just as easily be traffic generation strategies, not SEO strategies.

Are these not essentially the same thing? I understand that in the SEO business this has all been carefully nuanced, but in the general world the idea behind pagerank was that it made the web a democracy of sorts[1], where authentic, honest links organically demonstrate resources that users find most useful. That is the antithesis of "whoever can pay the most to have the most pages full of rote text created with paid links tops".

[1] - I should mention that organic linking is virtually dead, so perhaps it really doesn't matter. Blogs are, by and large, dead (and the few that persist engage in a circle-link pattern that is intended to essentially keep it in the family), and they (and personal websites) accounted for the overwhelming majority of legitimately organic links. Outside of that source of links, sites like Reddit and even probably HN are overwhelmingly gamed and manipulated, because the majority of users simply don't "vote" at all, leaving the manipulators an easy course to ply.

The web has been bought and paid for for several years now.
This is really interesting, especially from my perspective. I'm a senior in High School, planning on traveling after graduation. These tech hubs are clear attractions to young technologists, but posts like this cause me to reconsider.

Now, not knowing much about The Valley's history (other than the obvious), I'm wondering if these problems you speak of were caused by an influx of techies who feel entitled in the area. The glory of movies like "The Social Network" encourage ambitious young hackers like myself to move westward because of Hollywood-crafted fantasies, rather than necessity or convenience. Consequently, meritocracy is diluted.

Thoughts? These ideas are more from my intuition than anywhere else; I've lived in Boston from birth.
Do you have any numbers or stories showing that extra drivers begin working when surge pricing comes into effect at uber?
It's actually possible to file a patent along with a secrecy order. This is done to protect the government in case someone else ever tries to patent the same idea at a later date. And before someone freaks out, this is not new. It was imposed during WW I, WW II, and then codified in the Invention Secrecy Act of 1952.
Well, I disagree. He spelled out why he thinks Bitcoin is evil, he thinks it was cooked up in a lab by cyber-Libertarians to destroy the power of the State to tax, an activity which he thinks is a good and necessary thing. His only consolation is that he thinks it won't work, but that doesn't change the black, black intentions of Satoshi Nakamoto and his Crypto-anarchist crew. I'm serious that he's serious: he thinks Bitcoin is evil, in much the same way that some politicians think Tor is evil because child pornographers can use it.
This is a topic that interests me, since I have not typically fallen in line with many of the "nerd/geek" lifestyle stereotypes (I don't game, watch animated movies, collect figurines or collect comic books... that sort of stuff. Instead I like going to sports bars, weightlifting, and reading sci-fi (...whoops, I guess I do conform there)).

Nevertheless, in a way I still find myself subscribing to the idea that people in tech tend to fit these stereotypes. If I imagine a hypothetical group of [company name here] devs, I imagine them as all anime-watching gamer bros. On the other hand, when I actually encounter any particular developer, it would surprise me more to learn that they are an anime-watching gamer than it would to learn that they are not. I somehow picture groups of people to be members of a cultural group that I consider to be a minority.

I think this apparent contradiction might be caused by a discrepancy with how tech professionals are portrayed in media (as anime-watching gamer bros) with how they actually tend to appear when I meet them in person ('normal' yuppies, often young parents or 'DINKs', with a wide variety of hobbies and interests).
Why should 50:50 be the desired ratio? Are you proposing that every industry which isn't at or near that ratio rife with gender discrimination? Do you also believe there is significant sexual discrimination against men in every industry dominated by women? Have you even considered the possibility that men and women are just interested in different things, simply due to natural proclivities, and not because one gender is actively discouraged? Note that I'm not suggesting that there isn't any discrimination in CS, but simply that there is no reason to believe that 50:50 should be the ideal ratio in this, or any other field, be it currently male or female dominated, unless there's research to support that men and women are both equally interested in that discipline.
This will sound patronizing if you've actually lived here but... you do know that San Francisco is not "the valley", right?

The "valley" is Santa Clara Valley, which is a full 45 miles away and a very diverse set of neighborhoods.

"There are no slums. There are no marginal areas." <-- have you seen some parts of east San Jose, or east Palo Alto? Or since "the valley" apparantly includes more than the actual geographic valley, what about Richmond or Stockton near the docks? I wouldn't suggest stopping at red lights at night.

I've lived in "the valley" my whole damn life. My family has ties going back to the gold rush days. I have no idea where it is that you lived, as it sure as hell doesn't resemble anything I recognize.

I'm sorry you had such a shitty experience.
Regarding Bitcoin mining's carbon footprint:

Since miners will eventually only be able to compete based cost of their electricity mining will be driven to places with extremely cheap electricity. I don't know if that will always correlate with "clean" energy, but it seems like it would. For example, the recently announced Bitcoin mining operation in Iceland, where cheap geothermal and hydroelectric electricity and plenty of cold air for cooling is available: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/morning-agenda-the-bi...

If the heat from mining can be reclaimed for other purposes (heating homes, etc), then the effective carbon footprint is reduced even further.
No comments? My impression is: "Ouch".

Good (if brief) article. I've always thought that Chomsky was a bit of a kook. But he makes some very good points! The "ouch" is because he makes sense, which contradicts my previous impression of him.

The headline seems a bit alarmist or dramatic. However, let's consider recent events. Given the sequester, government shutdown, "nuclear option" in the Senate, and many similar things, it appears to me that we're less of a "functioning democracy" than at anytime in at least the previous 50 or so years. (The article uses much different events to come to this conclusion).
This is and always has been the nature of Business. Long before search engines or the internet came into being. People will do whatever they can to get exposure, publicity, and a competitive edge.

All marketing is a Ploy if you really think about it, and businesses for intents and purposes is just an investment vehicle and marketing is how your turn over that investment.

Heck news media a ploy for corporations.

Someone has to Pay the Bills and Keep The Lights On
> Are these not essentially the same thing?

Not quite. SEO is about optimizing PageRank, which is a false proxy for a website's popularity. "Traffic generation" means actually increasing the site's popularity, for real users.
Excellent service doesn't go out of style.
BosonSampling Lecture Notes from Rio
Okay, sure. In your (imho wildly implausible) scenario, the transaction costs of doing business in dollars would rise and consumers would pay an increasingly steep premium for using them. Don't really have an argument with that logic.
First, privilege is not a bogus concept. If you really believe that — about anything, not just privilege — you'll have a hard time learning it or amending your understanding of it because of things like confirmation bias.

Second, your probability is bad. You're confusing P(A|B) and P(B|A). This is understandable — lots of people do this all the time without realizing it, myself included.

Third, your understanding of privilege is confused. As a successful, white male who has started living in Silicon Valley, I acknowledge my privilege but do not feel guilty about it. That you've bound up the idea of shame in privilege might explain why you find it hard to understand — not because it makes the idea harder to understand but because your "body" is going to have a hard time swallowing an idea that tells you you're a bad person.

Here's one way to think of privilege. Privilege is the sum total of all the things big and small that you don't have to think about on a day to day basis but other people do.

For example, as an innocent white person being approached by a police officer, I never have to wonder whether this police officer is coming to help me or harass me. Indeed, I might even presume something like, "Oh, the officer must be coming to tell me something useful."

As a male, I never have to worry about getting raped while walking down a city street at night, or plan your evening so that I won't be in that situation.

As someone with means, I never have to think about whether you have enough money to buy food to last a week, or what it feels like to have to made a trade off between food or gas this week. Or the terror of being sick without insurance.

Now, you might know these things. I don't know and I'm not presuming. I don't even know whether you're white, male, or anything else. I'm just trying to paint a picture.

If you want reading, I recommend these two essays by John Scalzi: Being Poor (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/) and Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).
The Worst Product Flops of 2013
Aqueous was speaking about BTC right now, in this growth period. But BTC is currently inflationary.
This is a rant from one person who had a particularly bad experience. I would avoid trying to generalize it.
It has always seemed strange to me that some people find hostile weather sounds calming - Wind, heavy rain, thunder... those can all potentially damage the building you are in. Fire too (I like the sound of a fire only if I can see it.) Leaves would be a good addition though. So would a waterfall (there is a significant difference between a waterfall and rain.)