clintavo

I didn't verify it. I can tell you anecdotally that when I was 39.9 I didn't notice any issues, the change started very soon after 40. Mainly just the typical "my arms are too short" syndrome, I can still see like an eagle further than 2 feet in front of me. However, lately I've noticed in low light I have a harder time than I used to.

"At age 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at age 20."

Well, at least now I know why I'm constantly having to turn the fucking lights on when reading something on paper - that seemed like a new development. I'm 42.

Ditto - we use Godaddy's sister company's (Wild West Domains)API to register domains - nice and simple. Each domain is dirt cheap, takes one api call and we're done, we never even leave our app. Of course since we host a lot of sites for our customers we have to register a lot of domains. Setting up API access may not be worth it otherwise.

Thank you for replying, thank you for clarifying that. My question is since we've followed Google guidelines for 10 years, never intentionally engaged in any practices against Google's recommendations, are already doing the suggestions outlined in the most recent Google blog post on this subject, yet have, for some reason lost all of our rankings completely and are being outranked by known content farms and sites with adsense, what should we do?

I realize you can't guarantee any results, but honestly, we really have absolutely no clue what to do next. Every change we've made to our site in the past 2 years has been to try to do everything we read that Google wants from official Google channels. We truly just don't know what else to do.

Edit to add: we did 3 months ago change from a very long domain name to a short one (faso.com) because it is shorter and we own a federal trademark on the word "FASO" and thought that Google wanted to place more emphasis on brands - our rankings stayed the same and even improved....until Monday.

Google's latest algorithmic changes seem to be either horribly wrong or not fully baked.

Our site went from ranking #8 for our target search "artist websites" to PAGE 440 of the results. Our listing for "how to sell art" just went away. There's been nothing but original content on our site for 10 years, and, among artists, we're considered one of the best sources of art marketing information, given that I owned an art gallery for 20 years and all of our other writers are professional artists. (and yet Google still has ehow ranked for "how to sell art".....yeah, I'm sure ehow knows a whole lot more than we do).

I'm saying this not to vent, but to concur with Aaron and others that there is something wrong. It may not hurt Google's business....the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business. Fortunately I've read HN long enough to know not to build my entire company on top of someone else's platform and, as much as it upsets me, we don't need Google. Bing (and Yahoo) have us at #3 for that same search ("artist websites"). We don't depend on search engines as our only source of marketing leads....nor even our main source.

The most frustrating thing is not even that it happens, but that they do not communicate. There's no way to find out WHAT happened. Nothing in Webmaster Tools. No way to pay for search support. I read the Google blog post with guidelines on how to structure content after Panda and, none of that applied to us, at least not that I could tell.

They say "just focus on users" and that's what we do, but I guess, that's BS.

I, frankly, think Google's gotten to big for their britches and as unlikely as it is to happen, I hope Bing, Blekko and yes, DuckDuckGo take some market share away. Windows is better for having OSX and Linux to compete with. Maybe Google would be a bit less "evil" with more competition too.

Sorry for the bit of the rant, I'm usually only a lurker here, but this article of Aaron's really hit close to home this week. At least there are a couple of relevant points buried in my little rant....I hope ;-)

Not sure I completely agree with this idea. I used to own an art gallery and saw many artists, early in their careers, who actually THOUGHT they were great, but who were actually terrible. Some of those same artists later DID become great and produced masterful works (and were embarrassed by their early works). For some people I think it's possible for taste to improve as they walk along their creative journey.

Another example: I wasn't frustrated with my code when I first started because I didn't even have the taste to know it was bad.

If the people in charge of rankings have not a care one bit about the revenue effects then simply let the user decide - give me flag to simply take all results out from any site containing adsense. The the non-technically inclined can get the results with the "how to make blueberry pie" results and the more technically inclined can skip the content mills.

Something like so:

how to make blueberry pie -adsense

edit: didn't notice that previous commenter had said the same thing and moultano had replied "you want the new york times filtered out of the results?"

No, I want an advanced flag that filters ALL sites with adsense out when I use it, including the New York Times. If I want results from NYT then I won't use the flag when I search. He didn't exactly answer the question of will we ever get a filter-out-adsense flag

That's a difficult one - we can see how hard Yahoo and Bing have tried against Google - it's hard to get mainstream users to change - maybe if DDG could be positioned to drive site search for some more mainstream sites so that when people searched they would see the DDG branding especially with a "web search" option in the site search results. There might be some wiggle room to move into the territory Yahoo BOSS was targeting now that it seems like that project is abandoned after the Bing deal.

I need a way to add a simple white label site search feature for my customers. We run a service that hosts thousands of websites. We would like a service with an api that allows to have a site indexed and add a search box. Sort of like a google custom search engine but all with api access for each site. We looked a Lijit, but they don't allow searches without advertising (our customers don't want that). And with all that my team has their plate we really don't want to try to run our own search (ala Solr) ourselves.

A tad off topic but...Does anyone actually know how to get a FathomDB account? I thought, as a long time Rackspace customer and the promo code "RACK" they promote on their site, it would be relatively simple, I've tried to register three times over the past few months, but I never hear from a peep from FathomDB........

Having this discussion is great. I'm glad there are plans by PG to implement improvements. I have been a reader of HN for years now, but I rarely comment. Not because I don't want to participate, I do want to participate. And I want to participate civilly and without nastiness.

The reason I rarely comment is simply my own reading habits and the way the site works. I read HN on a mobile device via an RSS reader. I flag the threads in my reader I find interesting to look at further on my next work day when I'm sitting in front of my desktop machine.

However, by the time I return to a thread it's usually old and no longer active. At that point, I rarely see any reason to comment, as it likely won't be seen.

What I, personally, would love is a way to subscribe to a thread's comments in some way, perhaps via rss. That would help me to track the follow-up comments made on the few posts I do comment on. But, if there are others like me, perhaps having a way for people to more easily follow threads would bring more people into the discussion and bring more of the prolific commenters back to the discussion.

When I implemented an email notification system for commenters on my blog which notifies each commenter when a new comment is posted, community engagement skyrocketed. I used to get 4-5 comments a post and it's now regularly up in the 40,50,60 comment range. I also found that eliminating anyone who starts getting "trollish" from getting those email updates tends to make them naturally drop out of the thread because they think no further comments are being made.

Anyway, just my two cents. I may be way off-base on this idea, and if so, PG is obviously free to ignore it and I will continue to love HN all the same.

Look forward to the changes.

You are EXACTLY right - we display our jobs email address this way. We figure if someone can't figure out an email address that is presented this way, then we don't want to hire them.

I've had that surreal experience myself. My tech support people are so great and they sometimes explain to me how they did something to "hack" our software to work a certain way for a customer and I think, "how did I not think of that?"

But that would be an improvement....which would cause them to lose the right to claim being the world's worst website...

I've spoken with Rackspace's people about the ability of cloud sites to scale. It is true that the sites will auto-scale but the mysql database will not auto scale - they have the same database scaling issues as everyone else.

Wouldn't be co-founder since my company is 8 years old but it would be real development, not data entry BS.

I agree with you yan. That's what I meant to not turn the news.yc into jobs a sister board would be great.

That sounds great, I was wondering if YC had an open jobs page....only problem is I've been operating since 2001 and profitable since 2005....am I still a "startup?" I'm the slowest startup in history.....

I guess I'm one of those bad programmers who does "weird things" , I often create a string with my entire page and then output it. I thought it made more sense since I now have a string that I can run regexes on or find/replace if necessary. Also it makes it easy if I decide I want to cache the page somewhere, I think I must be "dumb and gets things done."

Thanks, fnazeeri, this study actually is helpful and does provide some useful data, I think it will be very helpful to have a professionally done compensation study if necessary to show the tax man.

Thanks for all the feedback. OK further clarification: I am incorporating as an S-Corp. Income taxes on S-corps flow through to the tax returns of the owners. No taxes are paid at the corporate level.

The IRS doesn't care about the $1 salaries of public CEOs (yes I know apostrophe S isn't plural, it was a typo) because those are C-Corps. C Corps DO pay taxes at the corporate level so the IRS doesn't care what your compensation is on a C-Corp - they've already collected taxes.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear in my first post, I was NOT thinking of a $1 salary or anything like that to avoid taxes. I'm thinking in the $75K - $150K range but that's just a gut feeling that I'm looking to confirm with some kind of data source in case I have to justify it to IRS. My CPA is helpful, but he can't give me a total answer because he's not in the internet/web business...I am, hence the reason I posed the question on Hacker News.

I do however want to minimize my salary to a REASONABLE level as I don't want to overpay FICA (which caps out at 102K, but several CPAs I've spoken with feel Obama will eliminate that cap), plus I don't want to pay Medicare (3.9%) on ALL of the income the corporation generates - only on the portion reasonably attributable to my salary.

I was hoping some of the early stage YC companies or other CEOS/Developers who frequent Hacker News would have some guidance and/or a source for some general ranges of salaries for CEOs of web companies.

Thanks again for all your help.

I too have had multiple problems since taking my web company full time about three years ago. I've had the tingling, muscle knots and I've also had prostate pain and frequent urination. I'm not sure if the prostate thing is related but my doctors have not found any other underlying cause.

I've recently found a couple of things that help:

1. A book called "Pain Free at Your PC" http://www.amazon.com/Pain-Free-at-Your-PC/dp/0553380524

It has special stretches, some yoga inspired, to counteract the problems developed from sitting for long-periods.

2. A got a think called a "butt-cushion". I was skeptical when my friend suggested it, but felt some relief almost immediately.

Hope these ideas help someone.

I've been using a homegrown solution for years. I've learned more than I ever wanted to about spam filters, having IPs greylisted, throttling delivery speeds etc. I've decided it's not worth our time anymore to keep up with all the latest requirements at hotmail,yahoo,gmail,comcast etc. So we're in the final stages of switching to http://cakemail.com as our "back end." Their api has worked flawlessly and lets us control everything. So far we're happy with them. Another good solution (but expensive unless you get to really high volumes) is strongmail.

I thought the whole point of mod_python was performance. Since it runs inside the apache process it doesn't have to spawn a new python interpreter for every page request. Am I mistaken? Does fastcgi and/or mod_wsgi solve the same issue?

UPDATE: After wrangling with them for two days they finally discovered a server that had failed in their cluster that was causing intermittent problems.

Good to know. Do you use their socket based api or the web services SOAP interface?

I keep myself honest by only reading my rss feeds after hours on a mobile device...makes it hard to type a decent comment though.

At the risk of stating the obvious . . . .

Don't build your app and then look for your first customer.

Find your customer first, find a need, and then build an app that fills that need.

Listen carefully to things people you know say, if you're paying attention, you will hear tons of needs waiting to be filled.

Taking time off from something usually entails losing a bit of your "chops" to frame it as a musical metaphor. But losing your chops isn't the main issue with programming. The main skill needed is good, logical thinking.

Since so much of programming is "good thinking", taking time off can let your mind ponder the bigger picture and let you solve problems more elegantly.

How many of us have sat at our terminals trying to force a solution to a problem by brute force coding....and then finally walked away, only to solve the problem in our mind while taking a shower?

The best overview is PG's essay: "The Word 'Hacker'"

You can read it at: http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

As far as finding one....you're in the right place. However, there is a theory that only an accomplished Hacker can truly recognize another Hacker. So unless YOUR a Hacker...how will you know?