geargrinder

Higher education has figured out how to mortgage the future earnings of their students through the federally-subsidized student loan program. All while greatly increasing the number of administrators and squeezing real professors.

The next interesting chapter of the Schwinn story is about how it was bought out of bankruptcy by the same investor group that owned the Scott brand. They moved the headquarters to Boulder, Colorado and became a true quality manufacturer, at the same level as Trek and GT. They built most of their bikes overseas but also launched a US-built line called Schwinn Homegrown that competed well on quality. They also offered more downmarket lines. In the late 90's they were sold to another investor group, one that was more interested in the high-volume, low quality market and had also purchased the Huffy and Mongoose brands. So now all that most people know are the crap Schwinn bikes sold today. But there was a time in the 90's that the Schwinn Homegrown was a great bike to have (I still have mine). The fitness line has gone through some additional gyrations. So much of this is about buying a recognizable brand and squeezing value out without putting anything back into it.

In my experience, over-50 employees are easy to work with, knowledgeable, experienced and flexible. They bring a lot less personal drama because they have things pretty much figured out in their personal lives. They are often anxious to learn and have lots of time still left to contribute. Obviously these are some generalizations, but I have found them to be true for many I work with. It is sad they are being left out of the workforce when they can provide so much of the leadership and stability companies are looking for.

Now if we could only apply the same technology to Hacker News comments.

That running automatically results in hip and knee injuries used to be commonly believed in the medical community. Then this study (and others since) have changed that thinking. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23377837

From my own personal experience, I know that running too much, too soon, before my body had adapted, resulted in various muscle strains and sore knees. But as I got smarter about my efforts, I discovered that all I had to do was allow time for my body to adapt to the workload. I also run mostly on softer trails and buy new shoes periodically and that helps too.

For me, there is nothing that can compare to running outside on a trail through the woods, especially if there are friends alongside.

For anyone looking to monetize a project like this, and avoid all the crass and imposing advertisements the OP rightfully complains about, I highly recommend reading The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer.

Yeah I was also surprised Catherine Wheel didn't make this article. I consider their album Adam & Eve to be the pinnacle of shoegaze. Ferment and Chrome are also prime examples of the movement. Maybe they weren't included because they were a bit harder to interview? From what Rob has said recently, I would be surprised if they have a reunion tour. They seem to have mostly moved on to other things.

Long articles are fine and there is good content in this one. Just help me navigate it better by using a familiar hierarchy more common to informational essays.

If the author had just summarized his points in a thesis paragraph I wouldn't have had to wade through so many words just to try and figure out what he was ultimately trying to say. Ironically, he spent much of the post complaining about how much there is to read.

Google once again takes information from your web page and puts it on their search results page. How will this affect click-throughs? I can see how it might help with traffic sent from SERPS as your site might seem more authoritative.

The reason Ritchey, Fisher, and the rest of their group are known as the "founders of mountain biking" is because they were the first to make bikes for others to also enjoy off-road riding.

Lots of people rode off-road, down mountains and on trails before them. But they were the first to turn it into a successful business.

Red Bull F1 may be "profitable" but only if you separate it from the 100's of millions invested by the Red Bull parent company. It is simply a marketing venture whose real profit is measured in brand awareness and sales of little cans of caffeinated soda.

I was a technical writer in the late 80's and early 90's, and had the opportunity to extensively use most of the popular word processors.

One thing I remember about WordPerfect was how much they bragged about having a large customer service center to answer user questions. They often showed pictures and advertised how many reps they had and how many calls they took.

WordPerfect was difficult to use even for professionals like me.

When Word for Windows came out, with a more intuitive interface (not that much different from some Mac word processors that had been launched years before), lots of people jumped to the easier UI, and stopped calling WordPerfect.

A lesson here is that if you have to staff up to handle customer calls, there is probably somebody out there who is going to disrupt your business if you don't fix the problem.

Integrity could also earn money. Most people would rather buy from a truthful and transparent organization than a shady one. The market often punishes liars over the long term.

A lot of similarity of websites has to do with usability. If I go to a website that is similar to others I frequent, it is easier to figure out what to do. This is proven out in user testing. Those sites that are familiar will do better in converting and win those A/B tests.

How many times have you been to a site with a different design and have to spend a few minutes trying to figure out the navigation? If you are trying to get your users to do something, familiarity is what wins.

Maybe our common definition of creativity is wrong. Good design isn't always "new and cool." Often the best design simply achieves a goal within given parameters.

When municipalities offer cable they roll out with a competitive package but often fall behind in technology over time because they are slow to upgrade and have no leverage with content providers. I imagine it would be the same for internet.

Working countless hours on your startup project can also have devastating effects on your loved ones. They may be terribly upset. Your selfishness may be altering their future, and not for the better. (Using "you" in a generic sense here).

There are several of these around, on different themes, like http://fattweet.com

This is harder than it sounds.

There is nothing wrong with it. I just prefer the technological competition that is so much a part of F1.

When you say "foil design" are you referring to airfoils? Under the current F1 rules, almost all innovation is occurring in the aerodynamic area and teams are constantly testing and improving. The envelope is pretty small, but there is a lot of variation from team-to-team in this area.

NASCAR and F1 take opposite approaches to regulating technology. F1 defines an envelope and you can do anything within that envelope. NASCAR defines specs and anything on either side of that spec is treated as a violation.

I much prefer F1's approach because it challenges engineers to innovate within parameters, just like the real world. NASCAR is trying to make everything even on the technology side and the result is that innovation is often called "cheating."

It is also blocked by the "Low" setting of the OpenDNS content filter, a fairly popular service and setting.

escrow.com specializes in domain transfers. I have used it several times and found the process easy, transparent and secure.

If the government gave money to buyers of Porsches like they do for buyers of Teslas these number might be different.

Or better yet, stop taking my tax dollars and giving them to rich people to buy a luxury electric vehicle.

Quote from 20 years in the future: "Many people were very successful in the '10s... It was way too easy, not necessarily an indication of talent or strong leadership."

May have been more dangerous for him than for you. An unscrupulous person could have just deposited the check and not transferred the domain.

Using escrow.com avoids these trust issues for both the buyer and seller. I have had a good experience using them for several domain transactions.

Yes, I have seen the main keyword get boosted in the SERPs when other h* tags are removed. I have seen this on multiple sites. This is not a rare technique and other SEOs do it too.

No doubt your page also can get ranked using the normal h- hierarchy.

The point of this technique is to put as much value on the main keyword as possible. Make it really obvious to the search engines what your page is about. Your page may have other requirements, so use accordingly.

h1 is an indicator to the search engine that you consider that blurb/content to be the most important on the page. So the h1 should be optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank for. Also, if you have a bunch of h1 tags on a single page, it can actually dilute the weight of your most important heading. I recommend using just one h1 tag on a page to keep Google from having to guess what is most important. I also recommend not using any other h tags on the page for the same reason. Don't try to rank for a bunch of keywords on one page. Instead, concentrate on one or related keywords per page and use h tags to signal to the search engine what you think is most important.

Search engines are dumb. Make everything really obvious to them.

This is an often-heard argument: "Amazon (or other large company) are doing it and it works just fine for them."

But you are not Amazon. Your listings may be competing against Amazon's listings, without the brand recognition, trust and backlinks they have built up.

So you have to do everything better, like building friendly urls, just to have a chance of getting clicks that Amazon can take for granted.

(Amazon does a pretty good job at urls, as others have pointed out, but most larger, established companies are still pretty poor at this, leaving the door open for upstarts to do it better).