ripberge

You could also chalk this up to a global asset bubble. With all of these federal banks trying to keep interest rates down, money needs to be gambled on riskier investments in order to get any return. That's why it's now plausible for a company like this go to public. Have a look at ECOM. Almost the exact same story.

The sad thing is, a lot of pension money will probably be put into these "technology" stocks which are a lot of smoke and mirrors.

I am very familiar with ecommerce and SEO and hearing analysts and investors talk about these types companies is pretty astounding. The people investing tons of money in them have very little understanding of what they actually do.

Amazon can re-target better than Google because they know about some products you browsed on Amazon.com? Google has your entire search history, click through history, ad-interaction history and a ton of other data to target you.

Well Google still has the dominant search traffic and that's where the text ads with real intent behind them get shown and clicked on so this isn't going to do much.

And as far as people doing product searches on Amazon.com, it's not a great source of revenue for advertisers. If you want to get real sales from Amazon customer searches you need to have your products for sale either via Amazon itself or in the Amazon marketplace. They make way more money that way and place the way they place ads on their pages reflect that.

Google will retain total dominance in this area as long as a the vast majority of people use google.com for web searches.

So your software can get disrupted if you don't continually re-invent to it keep up with the times.

Your social network or social app is actually way more fickle and less defensible than he thinks. Think about precursors to Facebook like Friendster and MySpace. Suddenly they became uncool and poof they were gone.

If you look at teen's perceptions, Facebook.com is next up on this sad list of has beens. That's why they're paying through the nose to diversify out of that product. AVC has found no magic bullet with their strategy.

Why is this big news? I haven't had a blue screen of death in like 5 years--which I think is pretty average.

Anyone care to share their experience with Sift Science? How well does it actually work for you?

I have been integrating it for a day or so. The documentation is slightly confusing and they've had a few minor bugs in their UI, but support has been really good thus far.

What a troll you are.

1) What is your system of measuring this? This may be because 99% of what you need to develop a very fully featured app is already in the base .NET frameworks. So there is rarely need for 3rd party libraries unless very specialized. The vast majority of the code we need outside of the framework is very specific to the user's problem we are trying to solve.

2) This is complete and total b.s. Please enumerate an example (or two) of deficiencies of a .NET driver vs a counterpart in each language: Python/Ruby/PHP/Java.

3) Maybe many .NET shops are simply in love with the productivity they get out of their .NET efforts because of the integration between MS stack components from development through deployment.

4) Huh? I guess maybe if you have to install .NET framework on Linux you'd notice it's size. It's not like you have to go installing and deploying it everywhere if you're on Windows. You use what you want and never notice the rest. As for VS, it's actually pretty awesome. I interviewed someone today and watched him use sublime to develop a rails app and marveled at how stone age the process was in some regards (this sounds like a dig at rails and sublime, but I don't mean it to be. Some stuff was done very quickly and easily. Some aspects of Rails and Ruby in particular are really cool).

5) You don't know what you're talking about. I've deployed in 1 click to AWS and to my own dedicated servers with one click. Technet? I've been using .NET for 10 years and have never used Technet once.

"SEO-driven businesses are super fun to work on and run"

Until they're not.

I think this is true when you run one of these as a hobby and you look it as getting something for nothing. If you make your livelihood doing it and Google changes something your whole life can change for the worse in a heartbeat. Then you're totally helpless. It's the exact opposite of fun.

This comment is all wrong actually.

This is very cool. As a merchant the idea of accepting a bunch of bitcoin and then seeing it's price plummet is a pretty scary. Not to mention the idea of managing all my bitcoin securely is also scary.

If I can accept Bitcoin and it's automatically exchanged back to dollars for me, that's a pretty significant.

What does this have to do with MMA? The great thing about MMA is that you don't need a bunch of protective gear and tech to get an "objective measure of who would have won in a real combat situation". Very often the loser gets submitted or knocked out. That's the only truly definitive answer to who won the fight.

You're giving Google's algorithms way too much credit. The exact strategy you described still does work--and that's really the sad part.

That's why Google has to have these scare tactics to stop people from doing them. If they didn't work then Google and you and everyone else who's up in arms over this would just ignore these links.

I can guarantee you that if you do a backlink analysis of everyone ranking ahead of rapgenius for these search terms they will have thousands of these types of backlinks.

You can report them using Google Webmaster tools. I have done this for several sites, but the link buying & ranking within Google continues. The system is broken.

You are very misinformed if you think these strategies do not work. They are a necessity for a startup in very high competition niches.

Take a look at the source of the very reputable: www.usatoday.com/sports/ and search for "NFL Tickets". Blatant link buying by vivid seats. SeatGeek does this all over the place as well. When you have really strong competitors buying links like this and getting away with it--it's the only way to compete.

In my experience Google has never penalized a competitor for doing this in my niche, therefore to compete I have to do it as well.

What Rapgenius is doing is very innocent compared to a lot of what is going on out there.

I feel for Rap Genius. They have a far superior user experience than any other lyrics site out there--but unless they use these tricks they'll never get significant organic Google traffic.

The problem is Google's algorithms heavily favor older sites that have been accumulating massive amounts of backlinks with targeted anchor text for years & years. An upstart like Rapgenius doesn't stand a chance.

Another problem is that Google seems to only selectively enforce "violations" of their terms of service like this. Some sites get away with these violations forever, so you'll never be able to catch them in traffic unless you play dirty too.

I should know: I have a niche e-commerce site with a blatantly obvious better shopping experience than most competitors, but unless I use similar tricks I'm nowhere to be found in Google's results. And "natural" link building doesn't really work for us, there's not enough people writing about my niche and quite frankly its not really that interesting--so it's not really possible to get "natural" links without coercing people.

Google, your system is totally broken.

Disagree with almost everything this guy wrote.

99% of startups and in house business apps will never need to scale at a level that an RDBMS can't support. We should all be so lucky to have the success that brings these horizontal scalability problems.

Also, I hope he lets us know what kind of incredible data he end up mining from his mouse movement logs. Surely every website and app on planet Earth has completely exhausted basic solutions like A/B testing and usability testing to make their apps better. The only solution now is to embark on a data mining expedition so that artificial intelligence will tell us how to make better software.

The author's premise is not off because it's a continuation of an existing patent. My company does the same thing because its much easier to get a continuation through the patent office than a whole new patent (which will take several years). Shockingly the continuation doesn't even have to be that closely related to the original patent in my experience. So if we have an idea even remotely related we just do a continuation.

I have never figured out why iOS converts at a much higher rate than android. Is it just a more affluent customer base?

So I'd have to POST an object that represents a process? It seems like you end up cluttering your code with objects to represent every process? Which in OO programming would just be a method call...

How do you guys deal with "actions" in your API's that are not CRUD? Something like reserving an airline seat where you just want to pass in an id of a seat and a user id. I guess that's what PATCH would be for? I was unaware of this verb until today.

What I'm struggling with is that REST does not seem to fit with how we use the web today. These HTTP verbs were designed for a document centric era of the web, not for the complex processes we're modeling today. I'm not really seeing REST being easier to design or consume than RPC style web api's--isn't that the whole point?

I mean if you were designing an API to be consumed internally in Ruby/JAVA/C# etc, would you design it like REST? I wouldn't. Why have we all become convinced we need to do this for a web api?

Yikes. I'm generally in favor of web privacy, but with unemployment numbers like theirs, that seems like the last thing Spain needs right now.

So 123 of you (at this moment) just "build something" without reading anything? Like you just open a text editor and the code flows out of your fingertips due to your vast computer science knowledge? Typical HN b.s.

This is a really incredible product. I don't have a kinect, but I have looked at a lot of the API code examples. The API is really powerful and capable of doing a lot of heavy lifting for application developers.

As a Venice local, I wish you guys the best of luck. Here's my observations:

a) Those testimonials are obviously fake b) There's an empty blue bar near the top d) Would I get to preview or choose who the dry cleaner is? That's not obvious and I don't trust some dry cleaners. e) Curious about how it works. Is it you coming to my house or the dry cleaner? f) Are the ninjas hot chicks? That might persuade me to use the service.

I use this tool everyday and it has always made me laugh. The security of the CEO portal is actually legit though. In order to do anything you must login with: company name, username & password. Once inside in order to do anything important you must use your pin number + a random number from a security dongle like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token

Then someone else from within your company must repeat a similar process to approve your action. So you always need at least two people within your company to perform any action.

Typically the CEO portal is used for wire transfers where security is pretty damn important--once the money is gone--its really, really gone.

LoL. What a great 1.6 to 1.7 oz burger analogy he makes. I'm convinced this man is an expert in .NET and it's pro's and con's in relation to other platforms.

"That middle-American dad programmer using .NET, how do we respect and engage with that community"?

I live in Silicon Beach in LA. I've architected two very successful startups in .NET. I have written .NET for sites making 100's of millions like Hulu, Ticketmaster, Fandango.

I wake up in the morning thinking about software and fall asleep thinking about software. I take my craft very seriously. I am not some aberration in the .NET world, as I've worked with hundreds of guys like myself.

Sounds like you don't have a whole lot of respect for the .NET community. I've just lost a little bit more respect for Heroku.

Update: A little clarification. I got to this page by clicking on a Google Adwords ad for Helpsmith. The crazy thing is--when using Chrome I was not even prompted about whether or not I wanted to download--it just started saving to disk. When using IE or Firefox I was prompted and was able to decline.

I'm sure this file is indeed innocuous. However, it seems like a pretty slimeball move on their part.