blauwbilgorgel

Looks very polished for a MVP, well done!

I do not have a Facebook profile, so the potential employers that run an "internet background check" will not trust me much.

Does that mean that I am not trustworthy? What I am getting at is that there are multiple levels of real and artificial trust. Being socially engaged on Facebook shows just that: you are are socially engaged and have lots of friends: you are probably a real person. Scammers can be very sociable people too, yet only their closest friends can hope to trust them, for the rest it's a facade: keeping up appearances. Buying followers to increase their Klout score.

Let's say this gets big. Do you expect attacks on your system and algo's to inflate the trust ranking? Would people leave fake reviews for themselves? Would people link up fake or stolen craigslist profiles?

If you happen to get the snowball rolling and the demand gets very high, do you think companies will form to cater to that demand? Scammers could create profiles that score well, and sell them priced according to their Trust Score. A luxury problem to have, but what is your view on this?

Finally how do you deal with people sending you e-mail or letters complaining their score is too low, or that your algo's are unfair, or that they didn't create that public profile, or want to remove a negative review? There seems quite a lot of (legal) hassle involved in the user problems that arise with such an application.

The links between aluminium cookware and Alzheimer's are inconclusive. From your article:

It can migrate to food from cookware and packaging materials such as foil and cartons. One study found that around 20 per cent of aluminium in the diet came from the use of aluminium cookware and foil, according to the Food Standards Agency. Tomatoes, rhubarb, cabbage and many soft fruits should not be cooked in aluminium pans, it says.

Older studies into the relation between aluminium and Alzheimer's have shown that aluminium has neurotoxic effects. A direct link between aluminium exposure and contracting Alzheimer's was only found recently:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/272573.php

Overall, these results suggest very strongly that occupational exposure to aluminium contributed significantly to the untimely death of this individual with Alzheimer's disease.

Now inhaling aluminium dust through a dust mask is a lot different from cooking in aluminium pans, but I won't say the link is weak at best.

This remains very difficult to study, due to the long-term effects, and unfortunately also due to little funding and pushbacks from the aluminium industry itself.

I thought I was going crazy. This is such a non-story.

People searching for "gary danko yelp" got the first result focused on Gary Danko, and the following results were Yelp pages. There was no link to Google+, there are Google+ reviews that are listed under the official linked website as meta-information. How the results looked:

http://vni.s3.amazonaws.com/140710080638104.jpg

Garydanko.com with their terrible flash site should be glad they even outrank the Yelp pages.

Just because Yelp is known to filter results (pay them for positive reviews on top, do not pay them for negative reviews on top), does not mean that Google is. Maybe Google should respond like they responded to that class-action lawsuit by Belgian newspapers: Do not want to be in our news index? Do not be in our entire index and suffer the consequences. The presentation linked in the article talks about a "barnacle" not a SERP position.

> Google appears to be intentionally serving up search results that contradict the users

Barnacles are NOT search results. The search result that outranked Yelp was the official site! Yelp of course wants to outrank official sites if you mention "yelp" anywhere in your search term.

"yelp" is even mentioned ON the official site (or heavily linked to these pages with the 'yelp' keyword), so it was not like Google was ignoring it. (they then strike-through the term that was not found and report it 'missing') https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agarydanko.com+yelp&pw...

Also the order of your search results obviously starts to matter then. A search for "yelp gary danko" may favor yelp sites more.

Does anyone know what the codenames are like? If they are easy enough to remember, then they may be easy enough to brute-force?

I think this is a great concept, yet perhaps too little, too late (Journalists should know PGP and drop boxes like these should have been common already). I also worry a bit because of Washington Post's track record with leaks, of the top of my head:

- Washington Post was Snowden's first choice, but they put up enough demands for Snowden to move to The Guardian. [1]

- Washington Post, according to Assange, had access to the "Collateral Murder" video a whole year before WikiLeaks published their edited video. [2]

- Washington Post employs op-ed columnists that call for assassination of "criminally dangerous" leakers like Assange [3]

[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nsa-leaker-shop... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2010/s3040234.htm [3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...

EDIT: More information on SecureDrop: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop and source here: https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop

>Not even close to true >There's nothing remotely ironic

You seem to have made up your mind on this, but just in case you want to understand my view better:

A book with heavy anti-propaganda themes is used for propaganda purposes. That's irony. It's sick if Orwell knew this and yet agreed to his anti-Communist political writings being disguised in a story and used to destabilize the farms on other states. Because that means that all propaganda is equal, but some propaganda is more equal than others. That's sheer egoism, hypocrisy and political pandering.

A secret organization that uses propaganda and deception to destabilize other states, using black budgets siphoned off from "economic recovery plans" (which in reality was (motivated as) an anti-Communism plan), that's eerily close to a dangerous totalitarian state. Using popular news media and culture to further government propaganda is eerily close to the organized lying that Orwell so despised.

"If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe—a Labour leader—suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first." --Thomas Braden

Orwell regarded propaganda as a feature of all modern governments but especially prominent in totalitarian regimes. His book may have become a Squealer the Pig. Accusing the other party of cheating, then both tabling an ace of spades.

You are free BTW to change the word "irony" to any word you like that makes that sentence more agreeable to you (fate/remarkable/without cause etc.).

In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." He added that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.

This was likely part of Operation Mockingbird [1]: A large scale effort by the CIA to use media outlets and literature for propaganda purposes.

In a sick twist of irony Operation Mockingbird funded and arranged for the Hollywood production of the book "Animal Farm". It is believed they siphoned funds meant for the Marshall Plan.

Russians also struck back with propaganda efforts of their own. Operation INFEKTION [2] was a KGB operation to further the idea that AIDS was a man-made invention first produced in a U.S. laboratory.

Likely this hasn't ended. The U.S. military will provide access to their facilities and equipment, provided they get a cut on the movie script. Propaganda efforts to further the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job still prosper in Middle-eastern countries.

Current groups like "Anonymous" or the "Privacy-conscious" may very well be the target of propaganda attacks. Next time the media vilifies TOR as a network for criminals, it may pay to double-check the source.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION

I'd like to focus on:

Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search.

Again the media makes it sound like there exists a dragnet on (Google) searches. But this time one of the authors is J. Appelbaum.

So which is it? Terrorist Scores based on search engine searches sounds fantastically insane to me. But unencrypted it is possible to intercept. So perhaps it is something in between: All accessible searches are monitored, and search engines do not cooperate with this directly, unless they have to legally comply with the request?

The paper sure is interesting and should add value to the debate and approaches to SEM. To discard it by scoffing at eBay's execution would indeed be your own loss.

My biggest take-away is the saturation of advertisements and the effects it can have on running ad campaigns. Yours seem to focus on the common correlation-causation misinterpretation, and faulty measurement approaches.

I do think there are enough problems with the paper to not grant it the authority to speak for an entire industry (as Slate put it). eBay is just one (and a very big and unique) advertiser in this arena, and every move it makes (even to measure it) changes the entire ad network.

> They also used a geographic split as a control.

Thank you for this correction.

Aside: The problem with eBay's non-profitable advertisements seems to me a beautiful problem: The paper authors subscribe to the benefits of saved costs. I do not think that the marketing department of eBay subscribes to this benefit. For them, and external ad agencies, the more ads your run, the more clicks you get, the more you get rewarded, the better your monthly reports look. People at eBay's online marketing department must be smart enough to realize that many of these ads were worthless to the company, yet it was worth it for them to empty the monthly budget on a list of generic keywords.

It is not ignored, because eBay has some bad adverts. It did attract significant attention more than a year ago (the study was conducted in 2012, and media reported on it in early 2013).

"eBay has no idea if online ads work" would be a better title. Or "eBay can't get their online ads to work".

If you looked at eBay's search advertisements in the last years you probably have seen very ridiculous ones, like:

  Love.

  Buy it cheap on eBay
  Low Prices. New and used.

This is a significant waste of money, and seems endemic at eBay, not a rare occasion. Though it is too easy to point at this and discard the entire study, it is a relevant prior.

As a control they take MSDN/Yahoo vs. Google. The control should be a different advertiser, not a different advertisement network.

In the paper they mention removing the term "eBay Shoes" from their keywords, because they rank organically for that. They should have never added it, because it is a bad keyword for them. They should advertise on the brand name shoes they are selling. This ties back to the bad adverts by eBay: Fixing your mistakes and seeing change, is different from performing a controlled experiments on a healthy advertiser.

They muse about "the types of consumer that may already be informed about the advertiser’s product". This adds a few problems: those customers may have been informed through the very advertisements they now claim don't work. Suddenly shutting down advertisements does not negate the effects of running advertisements years before that. The paper does not investigate the effect that ads have on brand recognition and brand trust. Usability tests show people clicking on advertisements first, because then they expect quality and a simple commercially interesting proposition.

I do think the problem they are describing "some customers may be so aware of a brand, that advertising to them becomes worthless" is valid. Maybe ad networks could help here and implement a form of "demarketing" next to their "remarketing" options: Once a user has enough knowledge of the brand, stop advertising. But a better (and currently available) method could be to apply remarketing and give these power users tailored advertisements. An example could be a buyer's program, promoting a new product from a well-purchased brand, or a referral bonus. To continue offering them advertisements like "eBay shoes" does not make much sense.

I found your post interesting, because I think there is always a way for a group to make smarter decisions than any of its individuals. Let's say a middle-ground compromise is chosen on immigration reform: Deport new illegals, offer stricter official ways to become an American. Naturalize people who have worked or studied in the US for a certain time period.

Even if the individuals all agree the collective made a bad decision, that is not to say that the group decision itself was bad: It may have very well been the perfect lesser of all evils. A system can converge to an optimal solution, while individual participants do not realize this. Likewise, a participant may spot a problem in need of a solution, where in reality there is no such problem or manageable solution.

I do agree that, next to making more optimal decisions, a committee can make poor collective decisions that any individual members would never make. If the crowd is too frantically opposed, not willing to give in, then that crowd or system itself may be broken and dysfunctional, and will always produce inferior solutions. It has a bigger problem than a single circumstance.

Agreed. Once a network becomes too homogeneous, its collective problem solving abilities go way down. Effective networks can adapt to and benefit from a large number of different fluid participants. It is a cheap way to get complexity/variety from simple individual nodes, and to be more robust, safe-guarded against variance and overfit.

The author aims to converge upon a group with a good morality (even though its members may have been in the minority). But what is to say that all-good morality is good for a group's decision making as a whole? Would it be sustainable from an energy viewpoint? Or collapse and destroy everything? Won't we need a supply of villains for our moral heros [1]? That to converge on an optimal answer as a network we need wildly opposing views? That to be stable an ecosystem needs variety, decay and destruction?

More philosophically: Is a program like this moral cooperation plan based on pay-it-forward-currency even moral in itself (as it clearly discriminates)?

Attempts at a supermorality have stunned philosophers and logicians for ages. If a rich benefactor would give a 1000 people in a room a 1000$, and if you ask for more you get 1$ more, but 999 people would get 2$ deducted, people would leave that room with some having enough to buy a cup of coffee. 1 million dollars wasted by the greedy individualistic game theory that seems to be in place in animals: I want energy for me and my family first, forget the network. Contests to give a $ amount equal to the lowest unique number send in, would have perfectly rational players roll a dice with the number of contestants, all submit 1 trillion, and the one person who rolls a 1 submits a billion. Instead they receive bids as low as single cents in a manner of days.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311... "The joker effect: Cooperation driven by destructive agents"

I am not saying I am one of those coders. But I know that they are on HackerNews. There is a large chance that the founder and VCs of Yo will see this thread. If you post about a computer language, chances are the authors are reading it.

Yes, there are a lot of coders on here that can code your MVP or a basic mobile app in 48 hours. And I think some of them are still constantly learning new ways to code and getting better.

I made no qualitative statements about these topcoders vs. those coders who can't (or won't) deliver in a weekend.

> ...will suddenly start to wonder what's the point of learning to code if they'll only be good once they can build any app in a weekend.

I think that's more of an issue with self-esteem than it is with the observation that there are hackers on here who can crank out production-ready code in a short amount of time.

HN really seemed to like the posts by Jennifer Dewalt (http://jenniferdewalt.com/). It is not unwelcome to starting coders. You may be interested in Norvig's article: http://norvig.com/21-days.html "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" which aligns much more with my true view on this.

Speed is not everything. Often these weekend hacks lack market demand, lack user experience, can't overcome the chicken-and-egg problem.

Correct, yet totally besides the point. Instead of what "could be", do a search and find that it were more than 2 investors, and that Hogeg lead the round and invested 200k (of the 1.2 million).

The CEO of Mobli is not the CEO/founder of Yo.

Also:

> The app has received $1 million in angel funding from a group of investors led by Moshe Hogeg

So there are multiple investors, not a single one.

> What the hell was the money spent on?

Probably relocating from Israel to a new office in San Franscisco, in addition to hiring new staff, and marketing to keep the buzz going (they even turned the funding itself into a PR campaign, which is very well done).

> I'd imagine the developers threw a massive party with kegs and thousands of pizzas...

I'd imagine this shows either some disconnect or envy, or a little bit of both.

> Apps like this shouldn't take funding, they're short-lived hype apps, they're not the next Twitter or Facebook.

Why not? So they can slave for months on some feature set that needlessly bloats their simple product? Buzz around the funding grew them from 50k users to an estimated 250k users in a span of less than a week. Why sit still and not ride the wave to full-on virality or an early exit? If they manage to eat just 1% of WhatsApp's lunch, the investors would have made a fine investment.

> Yo is an MVP product that is not refined nor innovative and could be built by a 14 year old with a Udemy course on Objective-C

The first version of Facebook was not refined or innovative. There are a lot of talented coders on HackerNews who could built any app currently on the market in a weekend. They either do not bother (because they don't think it is innovative enough) or they do bother, but fail to connect with the market. Yes, this product is a victory of smart marketing and user virality, not a victory of using the technology.

If you can build an MVP application that attracts funding, 250k users and a lot of media attention, then I suggest you go start that Udemy course and do so. I won't complain when you get funding to realize the full potential.

> Save the VC funding for startup ideas that actually deserve it.

No. Save the VC funding for those startups that show promising growth and realistic strategies. Save the VC funding for startups that will bring return on your investment. Save the VC funding for the pet rock startups that managed to sell 15 million $ in profit in their first 6 months.

That is why I am conflicted about all this. Two cases where this is iffy: Azhar Ahmed prosecuted for treason on Facebook for the statement: "All soldiers should die and go to hell" [1] and Joe Lipari getting a visit from a SWAT team for quoting Fight Club on Facebook as a joke [2].

On the other hand you have vicious griefer groups which stalk memorial pages like hacker groups do old Joomla installs. These are organized groups who will drive people to suicide by massive cyberbullying campaigns, then gloat about it online, for as much relatives to see. Real unadulterated meanness. They don't seem to get arrested as much as the people who will say stupid stuff under their real names. And complaining to Twitter or Facebook about these groups seems futile. In the case of blatant racism or harassment these forums have a responsibility too: They could remove it, say it is against their TOS and no complex or biased legal system would have to get involved. In my opinion it is a form of malignant spam and is to be treated as such: employ filters, community feedback and manual reviewers to solve it as a spam problem. Spammers, like griefers, will continue.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012... [2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/t...

You are frustrated and you now want to bring some of this frustration over on me, which is, sadly, effective. Since this discussion has been between us for a while now, and it became so "heated" as to lead to frustration, I think it is time we took a step back and reflect. In the meantime I'll read the paper again. I'll throw in a bone, because I only meant to point to the omission as an interesting curiosity, not to defend it to the bitter end with quoted errors: DanBC you are right (or less wrong). Or maybe, as luck would have it, we are both right (yet wrong for this long discussion), and Turing himself was wrong or confused when he wrote the paper: "The Turing Test: The Elusive Standard of Artificial Intelligence" speaks about two Turing tests: http://www.library.wisc.edu/selectedtocs/be076.pdf

Perverse interpretation? That made me laugh a bit.

The facts: Turing did not state in his paper that the human interrogator is to be made aware of the replacement.

The interpretations: Some more perverse than others :)

You don't need to mangle the meaning of normal every day English words, though philosophers like to. It's remarkable that modern Turing tests are not carried out exactly as described in the paper, yet people lay claim to their interpretations and versions as being better somehow.

See http://crl.ucsd.edu/~saygin/papers/saygin-jop.pdf for two views that support my point:

- For communication to be meaningful, communicators should act rational. Be relevant, avoid obscurity, needless repetition, social faux pas and ambiguity. Following Paul Grice's principles you get more normal and effective communication. This is significantly different from trying to trick a machine using obtuse, ambiguous, repetitious, weird communication. Remember: the original test was for player A and B to trick player C. Kurzweil's test is for player C to trick player A into revealing it is a bot.

- They created an entire chapter on bias (prior knowledge that the person was possibly talking to a machine). This shows that it is not a marginal view, but actually a view that makes a difference and has (philosophical) consequences. Subjects do not report thoughts that "this may be a computer", but they think: Person A is mentally ill or handicapped, on drugs, a child or very confused.

To conclude this discussion from my part: I think the modern Turing Tests as inspired by Loebner are fine. However they are not true to the paper in multiple ways, and they assume rules/criteria which Turing omitted. As for validity and philosophical importance of adding this criteria, the onus is on those that add it to prove its worth. If this is a pragmatic criteria to test machine intelligence, then just admit to it. Don't take the original paper and say that Turing omitted something, and that you should interpret and fill in the blanks in a certain way, else you are being perverse. As an aside: I muse about the inspiration for the test. I think it may have come from Turing playing 2-ply chess on a computer terminal. If unbeknownst to Turing a Grand Master would start relaying the moves mid-game, would Turing have noticed, and would Turing have noticed it in the near future? Though computers beat GM's nowadays, GM's still have correct suspicions when playing against an opponent using computer aid: The lines are too perfect, alien or far-fetched. It's interesting that even though artificial intelligence is already better at natural language processing and games of chess, it still does not suffice as human enough for some of us.

The quotes you gave were certainly relevant, but still: Turing doesn't state in his paper that the interrogator is to be made aware (all I said). The rest is our modern interpretation of the test. It's a fine interpretation that I don't have a problem with, but it is an interpretation, not a criteria lifted from the paper.

In the article Kurzweil even says as much: Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules for his test, and significant literature has been devoted to the subtleties of establishing the exact procedures for determining how to assess when the Turing test has been passed.

It is not made clear in the paper that the intention is for the human interrogator to be made aware of possible replacement. I myself know this is not the most popular interpretation, but it still makes sense as a Test, you just check if player C is wrong as often as before. Some research has shown that unaware people change their attitude and questions, while other research has shown that for some judges this doesn't matter. Early Turing bots were tested under the interpretation that judges can be unaware. For sourcing on this see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Should_the_interrog...

I think one of the problems with the Test is that it was written by a mathematician and logician, while it touches on fundamental philosophical problems of consciousness and other minds. It may be valid in these pure domains of information theory, while it may be problematic in philosophy of mind. It is not sure where one ends and the other begins. Philosophers hone in on the ambiguities and omissions. They ask: "Why would Turing omit this rule, while carefully stating other rules? Is this ommission significant? Does the outcome of the test change when we make people unaware?" That is not bizarre, as much as it petty.

Another problem I see with the Test, and this may be controversial, but: Turing creates a test for intelligence and as the basis he takes the distinction between male and female. Then he replaces the male with a machine and asks us: if we lose our gender guessing game as often as before then machines can think. This assumes that Turing thought that he could distinguish males from females by questioning their intellect (as for small-talk both players could easily lie about that). Which at the time of the paper may have been realistic, but in modern times is not the case: If you have an adversarial male and a female who try to trick you, I don't think I could make a distinction at all: My guess would be as good as random.

Absolutely! This sword cuts both ways. Our bots are stuck in Searle's Chinese room, performing silly input-output matching tricks without understanding language on a deep human level.

An intelligent bot would indeed recognize unproductive lines of inquiry and should act accordingly. It would be more realistic if a bot answered that it has gotten tired of answering stupid questions.

Yet: If the Turing Test was made to avoid discrimination based on appearance, then applying the Turing Test while starting out with a tricky biased (unfair, unnatural, unproductive) line of questioning in the hopes of tripping up the machine... this doesn't seem in the spirit of the Test. The chatbots are at least polite enough to try to answer. Who not extend them the same courtesy as you would other humans, at least till you "figure" out that it may be a bot?

Again: It doesn't say in the paper that the interrogator is to be made aware that player A is now a machine. The interrogator will continue its line of questioning trying to distinguish between male and female. This line of questioning should be far saner, and easier for bots to interpret and play along with. By starting out like Kurzweil he places the Test on the shoulders of the bot: The bot has to find out if it is talking to a sane human or someone spouting gibberish. Kurzweil becomes Eugene's Turing Test.

The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper.

From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation, but it isn't written down, leading to this ambiguity.

>the interrogator has to decide which is human and which isn't.

The interrogator has to decide which is female and which is male. Replace the female or male with a computer, not making the interrogator aware of this and see if the interrogator is wrong as often as before.

Kurzweil questions this bot, as if it was a bot. He is aware that he is talking to a bot, and doesn't even have to choose between A or B.

Kurzweil's line of questioning is not fair or normal or productive communication even if it was between two humans. A 13- year-old boy would have told Kurzweil to bugger off when tasked to answer 2+2 or wouldn't have responded at all.

Repeat questions like that in a random chatroom and people will think that you are the chatbot.

The chatbot Eugene Goostman did not pass Ray Kurzweil's version of the Turing Test. It passed the Turing Test as set up by the organizers.

Turing never even mentioned the criteria that participants should be aware that they are possibly talking to a computer. This single criteria should not matter for intelligence IMO, because the whole point of the test was to abstract away the appearance. The other way around: a chatbot doesn't pass the test if a participant mistakes a human for a machine.

People fail the Turing Test all the time when unaware of chat scripts. Even some upvoted Hackernews comments may have been artificially generated without being detected as such.

The best way for me to detect if something is up, is to ask the chatbot about Alan Turing, 42 and the Turing Test. Then to curse at it. Most chatbot makers can't resist adding lines specifically for these questions, or they show feigned annoyance that is easy to pick up on. I got Goostman to admit that he was a Turing Test and then we talked about bots some more. Eugene ended with:

I call all these chatter-bots "chatter-nuts" due to their extremely high intelligence. I hope you recognize irony.

Full conversation here: http://pastebin.com/Wf4uiCRf

In the documentary they show a Pieter de Hooch and a Vermeer side by side:

"Het Melkmeisje" by Vermeer: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Johannes_...

And "Die Goldwägerin" by de Hooch: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Pieter_de...

Though these painters were heavily influenced by one another, the difference is remarkable. See also: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Gerard_te... for a difference between Vermeer's walls and other painters of the time period.

But then I saw: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Pieter_de... and that closet nearly renders as real to me, it almost has one of those 60s cut-and-paste photoshop feel to it.

Really like the documentary too. Rekindled some of my awe with art and the process it takes. One thing I didn't spot in the documentary, but can see in detail in Tim's Vermeer: http://www.vanityfair.com/dam/2013/11/vermeer-the-music-less... I think Tim painted his own feet in the mirror.

There is some relevant precedent in Dutch courts over this. If you have a fine clause for spamming, and you provide the terms of conditions in a proper manner, both can be enforced by a judge.

In one case ("zaaknummer 676425") a community website got awarded 5000Euro in penalties (500Euro for every private spam message, up to maximum of 5000Euro). The website had put a penalty clause for spamming in their terms of conditions, and continued use of the service meant agreeing to their conditions.

With law it is about intent too. If you try tricks like a proof-reading service, a judge may frown on that or find it silly. But if you send back your terms of service stating: "I charge a freelance administrative fee of 50Euro for reading, evaluating, and storing commercial communication that is send to this e-mail address without explicit opt-in permission. Unsolicited e-mail can be send to this alternative address." and yet they continue, it could stand up in Dutch court (and may earn them a bigger fine for breaking Telecom laws).

I'm glad you put the link there for context.

make sure that all of your indexed pages are of the highest quality possible and that they are fantastic representatives of your website

JohnMu then gave some examples of very thin pages. It is about a site with 99% of such pages and problems with spammy UGC. Not about maximizing search advertising revenue. It is about quality like described in: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...

I'd like if there was a traffic graph (is an algorithmic penalty visible, trends, or are they just down to 10% of 1.5 years ago?). We have to go by word and own research now. Googling "Google Maps Mania" shows a botched domain transfer as a likely culprit for the low rankings/visitors. The redirect is not 301. Old pages do not redirect to content on the new domain ( http://www.mapsmaniac.com/2013/02/beneath-thunderdome.html ). So any links to mapsmaniac before the domain transfer do not contribute to the new blog at googlemapsmania.blogspot.com . Domain authority is zero'd out. Many well-ranking pages now show a "Page not Found" to Google. Then another site pops up on another domain with the same name. How can Google know for sure the two are from the same owner if the redirects are not set up right?

Fix the redirect. Restore the old links and redirect them to the new site. But maybe much of that is already too late for them. For anyone else in the process of moving a site, see: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/

>Web accessibility, as we commonly use the term, pertains to creating a website that disabled users can interact with an navigate. It does not pertain to those who choose to or are forced to disable JavaScript...

Often web accessibility focuses on people with a disability, correct. Accessibility, like I said, really is more than that, though. From the Wiki: Accessibility is the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible. Hence it does pertain to those who choose to or are forced to disable JavaScript. It literally means _as many people as possible_, RMS included. Even the WCAG do not solely focus on assistive technologies, but include "a wide variety of user agents".

The comment "just because your screenreader supports JavaScript does not mean you have no accessibility issues" was in reply to your statistics on JS-support for screenreaders. 98% of screenreaders supporting JavaScript is moot when less than 75% of browsers support pushState. In other words: You leave much more than 2% of users incapable of accessing your content. WebAim Surveys show that people have increasingly more trouble accessing content on JS-heavy social sites and dynamic web applications.

> A plain HTML website can have accessibility issues. So can a JavaScript one.

A JavaScript site can have a problem. If you serve it without a fallback (under the assumption that 98% of your users can access it that way) then it has a problem for sure. I have nothing against JavaScript. I have a problem with JavaScript sites that don't provide a fallback or weren't build according to progressive enhancement principles.

>AFAIK, nothing in WCAG says you must have a non-JavaScript fallback to adhere to their standard.

It said so specifically in WCAG 1. WCAG 2 is more ambiguous. You can have a no-fallback application that requires JavaScript provided: You can not show the content in any other way (a fallback is impossible), and you clearly explain in <noscript> why JavaScript is required.

Where a fallback IS possible, not providing one lowers accessibility. This is the relevant principle:

Principle 4: Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

If you do not provide a fall-back and require JavaScript then your content can not be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents. Not providing a fall-back goes against this principle.

Relevant guideline:

Guideline 4.1 Compatible: Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.

JS-only non-fallback sites do not maximize compatibility, they minimize it, breaking this guideline.

Government 508 guidelines for accessibility:

When possible, the functionality should be available without requiring JavaScript. When this is not possible, the functionality should fail gracefully (i.e., inform the user that JavaScript is required).

Webaccessibility.com best practices:

Ensure elements that use ARIA provide non-ARIA fallback accessible content.

Since you should markup your rich web apps with ARIA, and you should provide a non-ARIA accessible fallback, you should provide an accessible fallback for your rich web app.

I do know that this can be a point of debate, and that is fine. It is up for interpretation what "maximize compatibility" means to you. If you have legal obligations to maximize compatibility (like government organizations in The Netherlands) then this becomes a harder rule.

> The benefit is a development style that is more productive, giving me more time as a developer to focus on solving the problem at hand, be it business logic, SEO, or accessibility.

I really don't understand this way of thinking. If you want to spend time on accessibility, start with a fallback, don't create a website without a fallback and then cheer on the idea that now you have time left to fix the problem you created a few minutes before that...

If you want to solve problems with SEO, don't start out by creating one :D

> but don't imply that single-page apps cannot have SEO on par with HTML sites and good accessibility.

Good accessibility means good SEO. No fallback means poor accessibility. Draw your own conclusions (Socrates is mortal?).

A/A testing (Null testing) or A/A/B testing gives a different effect than A/B testing.

Microsoft Research suggested (http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/2009controlledExperimentsOnTh...) that you continuously run A/A tests alongside your experiments. An A/A test can:

- Collect data and assess its variability for power calculations

- test the experimentation system (the Null hypothesis should be rejected about 5% of the time when a 95% confidence level is used)

- tell if users are split according to the planned percentages

If I wanted to imply that Google will punish your website for being rendered with JavaScript, I probably would have said so. It would likely be false too, as it is less of a punishment, than it is not maximizing your chance to rank (to put your best foot forward as a website).

Accessibility is not a numbers game. In many countries it is a legal requirement. And adhering to the WCAG means providing non-JS fallbacks or progressive enhancement. RMS not being able to access your content is an accessibility issue too, it does not have to involve a disability. It can be technical in nature, like disabling JS or being behind a corporate firewall, or your browser not supporting pushstate.

If you want to look at stats, take a look at the stats and surveys on accessibility of dynamic web applications. Just because your screenreader supports JavaScript does not mean you have no accessibility issues due to JavaScript. Rich internet applications should use WAI-ARIA. I don't think people who create websites without a fallback (avoiding this issue entirely), will worry about creating websites with ARIA-support. And if they do care about such accessibility, they should also provide a non-ARIA non-JS fallback.

Google making this change makes it possible to have your non-fallback JS-only application be indexed. It does not make it more attractive from an SEO or accessibility viewpoint.

>We are expecting to get the same chance of ranking as normal pages.

Then you should probably adjust this expectation. You say in your article:

>While having this sort of HTML fallback was technically possible, it added a lot of extra work to public-facing single page apps, to the point where many developers dropped the idea...

A JS-driven site with an HTML fallback is a normal page. Then you don't need any tricks or force Google to run your application and hopefully make pages out of them. Start with the fall-back and enhance.

This is a serious mistake with consequences. Tor bundle and Firefox shipped with JavaScript support, because disabling JS broke too much of the current web. It causes accessibility issues (remember when Twitter changed to hash-bang URL's?), if not for Googlebot, then for regular users (From the Webmaster Guidelines):

>Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

>Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

>Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

I am still going on the assumption that you created a one-page application without a time-consuming fallback, and you rely on Google to make rankable pages from them. Then you leave some users standing in the cold, so why deserve to rank equal to a user-friendly accessible web page?

> ... single page apps might rank differently or worse than normal pages ...

From the original article, the most current source on this:

> Sometimes things don't go perfectly during rendering, which may negatively impact search results for your site.

> It's always a good idea to have your site degrade gracefully. This will help users enjoy your content even if their browser doesn't have compatible JavaScript implementations. It will also help visitors with JavaScript disabled or off, as well as search engines that can't execute JavaScript yet.

> Sometimes the JavaScript may be too complex or arcane for us to execute, in which case we can’t render the page fully and accurately.

> Some JavaScript removes content from the page rather than adding, which prevents us from indexing the content.

In the SEO community Googlebot's improvements were noted for a while now. See for example: http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/

Single page websites or application-as-content-website's are not popular among SEO's. One reason for this is that it doesn't allow for fine-grained control on keyword targeting, and keeping the site canonical, and it can waste domain authority when you have less targeted pages in the index than you can rank for. Experiment and find out for yourself.

You can try to combat a part of this by installing Ghostery. It will block a lot of these third-party requests. As a website owner you could link to the share page, instead of loading the widgets, or load the widgets only after the user requests them.

As for those server logs, I understand they record my movements, but I don't think it is my right to stop them from doing that. The one who owns the server/web property should be allowed to analyze requests to that server. This can get icky though in the case of major CDN's.

You could choose not to keep server logs as a search engine (forgoing DOS protection), but then what happens when a user clicks on an advertisement? Privacy seems only as strong as the weakest chain.