Hacker News Reader

itsprofitbaronon Brexit Is a Lehman Moment for European Banks

"Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and LinkedIn Corporation (NYSE: LNKD) on Monday announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn for $196 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at $26.2 billion, inclusive of LinkedIn’s net cash"

http://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-li...

itsprofitbaronon Lyft gaining on Uber as it spends big on growth

They acquired part of Bing's Mapping Assets alongside ~100 employees - http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-bings... and http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB110643412133885342696045810783...

itsprofitbaronon Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2014

There was an EMD (Exact Match Domain) update in September 2012 to fix this.

itsprofitbaronon Quora in the next YC batch

To remove that & avoid logging in / registering, just add "?share=1" to the end of the URL.

itsprofitbaronon Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

Don't want to be that guy but 4-5 years for enterprise startups "to get to this point" which I'm assuming is either that market cap size or IPO is ambitious - Enterprise startups tend to take a while to get that flywheel spinning. The fact that Salesforce did it in 5 years (Founded: 1999, IPO: 2004) means that they are more the anomalie than the others. For example here's a list of Enterprise companies which have taken 7-13 years to get to IPO:

Eloqua - Founded: 1999, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 13

Qualys - Founded: 1999, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 13

Rally Software - Founded: 2001, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 12

E2open - Founded: 2000, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 12

Exact Target - Founded: 2000, IPO 2012. Years to IPO: 12

Box (Summer IPO) - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2014. Years to IPO: 9

Demandware - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8

Fleetmatics - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8

ServiceNow - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8

Bazaarvoice - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO - 7

Workday - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 7

Marin Software - Founded: 2006, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 7

Marketo - Founded: 2006, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 7

itsprofitbaronon Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

Beyond looking at the implications for Net Neutrality (since we don't really know the implications of this deal going forward in relation to this); for people who are wondering why this has happened, this looks like this is part of Netflix's Open Connect Project[1] which is a single-purpose CDN network - and is essentially a paid-peering deal.

As part of the Open Connect Project, Netflix has deployed servers which are hundreds of terabytes in size in strategic locations all over the work and they contain ~60-90% of the data required for that particular country.

These devices either live in the ISP (which is what Netflix wanted to happen with Comcast) or live in an internet exchange where multiple ISPs can connect to the Open Connect devices.

There are 3 core benefits in doing this:

- Better Streaming due to fewer hops to the client

- Netflix avoids rate limiting (if they're inside the ISP Network)

- Peering is free (usually) and is essentially where two ISPs connect their infastructure and agree to maintain their own sites without bandwidth charges. It's common throughout the industry and content-providers are always looking to peer with ISPs to drive down their overall costs of operations.

[1] http://openconnect.netflix.com

itsprofitbaronon Ask PG: Do you review rejected YC apps to find startups who then made it big?

Based on a question answered by PG on Askolo, YCombinator track them[1]:

Q: Have there been any startups you've later regretted rejecting from YCombinator? A: Sure, several. But I can't name names because it's not for me to disclose that they applied.

Additionally they also mention about contacting them on rejected applications[2]:

"If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes"

Here are some that are known to have been rejected by YC and have gone onto raise funding (which is not a perfect metric by any means since funding ≠ success) or have been acquired:

- SendGrid - http://sendgrid.com/ - Raised $27.4M[3]

- CouchOne - http://www.couchbase.com/ - Raised $56M[4]

- AfterTheDeadline - http://afterthedeadline.com/ - Acquired By Automattic

- LightSail Energy - http://lightsailenergy.com/ - Raised $42.8M[5]

- SignPost - http://www.signpost.com/ - Raised $15M[6]

- Storenvy - http://www.storenvy.com - although they were kicked out of YC[7] Raised $6.5M [8]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120814111130/http://askolo.com...

[2] http://ycuniverse.com/yc-applying-interviewees

[3] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sendgrid

[4] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/couchbase

[5] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/lightsail-energy

[6] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/signpost

[7] http://joncrawford.com/post/20378314843/how-i-got-kicked-out...

[8] http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/storenvy-goes-from-getting-...

itsprofitbaronon All Things Digital shutting down

Yes and No. Essentially Kara/Walt and WSJ/Dow Jones/NewsCorp "divorced".

The "divorce" left Kara/Walt with the writers (as they were employed by them) and WSJ/Dow Jones/NewsCorp the AllThingsD brand, website and conference business. However, it appears the AllThingsD site is being completely shut down and redirected to http://wsj.com/tech - probably because NewsCorp who struck the original deal with Kara/Walt don't want a situation like this to happen again.

Recode is a completely new business (site and conference business; WSJ/NewsCorp/Dow Jones still owns the D Conference) albeit with the same writers from AllThingsD.

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

  How is that not fair?

"My personal belief is that, devaluing the site for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius] actually devalues Google's quality. On the other side of the coin, if someone searches for [X rap genius] whilst they are under penalty its fair that they do not rank for that either. However, there are obvious reasons as to why the search quality team have decided to do this."

  If anything, I think google is too soft on people attempting to cheat them.

Google's Search Quality Team are actually pretty strict in terms of reviewing the reconsideration request and if the site has previously had a penalty they pay extra attention to the cleanup.

itsprofitbaronon Dogewallet hacked - 21 Million Dogecoins stolen

If only HN allowed Comic Sans

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

Sponsored Posts are what Google calls advertorials and considered to be a link scheme[1] which means they're against their webmaster guidelines[2].

However, they're acceptable if they do not carry any link equity (aka. use the no follow tag) on the link.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

Reddit tried to resolve it through, a code level setting of the lang within their source code. However, Google ignores all code-level language information including lang attributes and document type definitions (DTD)[1] etc because, some CMSes set this automatically.

However, Google over the years have also worked on their international/localisation identification of sites. As a result they allow webmasters to geotarget them within WMTs[2] which seems to resolve the Reddit issue.

Having said that, there are other methods to fix the issue as well such as using the geotarget option within WMTs to using the rel alternate tag etc.

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working...

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

  Is there any reason a website owner should act and remove the links? Surely it's not my/our problem?

You should only remove links if they do not provide any value to your audience.

A website owner does not need to act and remove the links at all, you have the choice to not respond or refuse to do so. This is why Google allows people to disavow those links via the disavow tool[1] so they are no longer "counted" as providing the site with any link equity.

[1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

  Good in that it will be temporary: specifically 30 days.

Please don't preach about SEO if you know nothing about it or aren't up-to-date with how SEO works because, this is completely wrong. The penalty that Rap Genius have will be applied until their site fall backs into the Google Guidelines[1] and they help webmasters to get their site back in line with those guidelines through informing them what type of penalty[2] their site has.

This may take 90 days as it took JC Penney[3], 11 days as it took Interflora[4] or even 30 days. However, it should be relatively quick and straightforward for Rap Genius to recover from this penalty because, the penalty is based on links they've built themselves through their "tweet-for-links" system meaning that identification and removal of links should be relatively quick and straightforward.

  This is better than a fundamental algorithm change like Panda or Penguin because there's no coming back from those.

Again this is wrong. Essentially Panda looks at content and Penguin looks at links - both of which are within Google's Manual Action penalties[2] - and both of which you can recover a site from.

In order to fix a Google Panda penalty you need to completely overhaul your site to remove any rubbish content as well as, to improve the content. In cases where you cannot improve the content to add unique user value, you should completely remove it from the site.

In order to fix a Penguin issue, you should see my overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963785 although essentially, you just need to identify the links which need cleaning up, try and get those links "cleaned up" yourself, submit a disavow file (if necessary) and then get Google to reconsider the site.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re...

[3] http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe...

[4] http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-...

itsprofitbaronon Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and Google?

The people who are claiming that do not know anything about SEO. They're pulling figures from fresh air. For instance, in the case of JC Penney[1] it took them 90 days to recover from their penalty but it took Interflora[2] 11 days etc.

The penalty is applied until, the site fall backs into the Google Guidelines[3]. Google actually helps Webmasters to get their site back in line with their guidelines through informing them what type of penalty[4] it is. For instance, if it is a link penalty like Rap Genius has, Google shows example links within Webmaster Tools (usually 3 of them) to provide insight, on links which Google considers to be falling outside of those guidelines.

However, the links which are going to be affecting Rap Genius were predominantly because of the "tweet-for-links" system, the identification and removal of links should be relatively quick and straightforward.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe...

[2] http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-...

[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re...

itsprofitbaronon Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and Google?

  "They should care about delivering the best quality search results to their users, and nothing else"

That's why they focus on Bad SEO because it means that they won't be showing the best results to their users. Bad SEO means manipulating the results to rank instead of, showing the best results to users.

  "A fair page ranking system would be entirely transparent, rigidly enforced"

They penalised RapGenius for breaking their Webmaster Guideines[1] which are both transparent and enforced.

  "But the second the infraction is corrected, the penalty should end, and the site should be restored to its proper rank."

That's actually how it works. As I tweeted to Josh on Twitter[2] this actually happens to all sites once they've got themselves out of a penalty and the Google Algorithms trust the site again.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

[2] https://twitter.com/profitbaron/status/415918373575213056

itsprofitbaronon Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and Google?

Not going into all the regulation talk (partly because don't believe that Google needs regulation as another search engine is just an address bar/couple of clicks away) but with regards to:

  "One is to force Google to make their rankings more transparent."

Google does not care about SEO; they care about bad SEO. You can see this from their Webmaster Help Videos[1] to saying how they 'serve' the results[2] to explaining how their search engine works[3].

It also becomes more apparent within their Webmaster Guidelines[4] that, they do not like bad SEO.

You can easily use all of that knowledge to figure it out.

  "Google could have offer a kind of appeals process if a manual penalty is applied"

They do. It's called a reconsideration request[5]

  "The EU could put a special tax on the market leader, which would fund a subsidy for promising competitors. (Google's European office is currently registered in a low tax haven in Ireland.)"

That would actually discourage anyone from making a decent product. Why? Well if you make a good one people will use it, you will become market leader and you will receive a special tax.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en#3

[3] https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/howsearchwork...

[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

[5] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en

itsprofitbaronon Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and Google?

"restores at least some of the startup’s search result ranking juice in exchange for it cleaning up its act"

As I tweeted to Josh on Twitter[1] this actually happens to all sites once they've got themselves out of a penalty and the Google Algorithms trust the site again.

[1] https://twitter.com/profitbaron/status/415918373575213056

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

how does TechCrunch have any Google rank then? How do most tech publications, for that matter?

TechCrunch does not post advertorials, they post content for free and they actually posted on their site to reaffirm this fact[1].

Sure there may be some PR firms etc who might get paid to get that content on to TechCrunch or another tech publications but TechCrunch writers are not directly compensated for doing so.

As a result the content they write from a startup launch to a new feature etc is considered "natural" by the search engines as they're choosing to write about it.

Moreover, those publications get the majority of their search engine traffic through being in Google News ala. posting about "Twitter" and getting inserted into the "Twitter" SERPs within the "News" section. Additionally they also leverage internal linking to boost their SERPs potential e.g. whenever they talk about Zulily (they're in #9 for me in Incognito mode although they might be higher/ on Page 2 for you) instead of linking to the site they'll reference the "Tag URL"[2] as well as referencing Crunchbase[3] (although CrunchBase isn't really 'internal' as its an external site). Likewise, Google loves "fresh content" so they will naturally be inserted with little/no links within the top 7ish results for something generic (although this does not always happen) such as "credit card numbers" when they do a post about "credit card numbers" and will naturally lose search engine positioning for that term over time.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/tag/zulily/

[3] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zulily

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

It's not different. As mentioned earlier, paying for links is against one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] and your example specifically falls under the Link Scheme[2] category which is affecting Rap Genius.

Those types of links reviews for a link, are considered advertorials which Interflora were "famously" penalised[3] for and something Google specifically identifies within their Link Scheme examples[2]

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[3] http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-in...

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

Essentially Rap Genius violated one of Google's Webmaster Guidelines[1] by attempting to manipulate the SERPs through getting webmasters to link to several lyrics pages in exchange for a tweet. In doing so, Google considers this as link scheme[2] which is trying to manipulate the results specifically in relation to Buying/Selling Links:

  Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

There are several other ways to "manipulate" the SERPs this way including some of them which you have identified such as - spam comments, doorway pages, forum profiles amongst others - and Google has an algorithm codenamed Penguin which, detects and penalises webmasters who attempt to manipulate the search engines in such way (although it is more complicated than this).

However, Penguin is not the only way which Google identifies people being involved in these practices as they also have a place to report the links[3].

This is one of Google's Manual Actions[4] that webmasters receive, when Google believes you are not providing the user with additional value and/or are trying to manipulate the results.

They cover everything from Thin Content (mainly through Panda) to Hacked Sites to User Generated Spam to the recent Image Mismatch Penalty etc. You can see them all here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2604771?hl=en&re...

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[3] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=e...

[4] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

In that example they should still rank for "lyrics.com" which would be the BRAND term.

Google actually have done an EMD update to devalue sites trying to rank for generics using a generic domain.

As you can see using Google Adword Keyword Planner[1] for all locations in English the average searches are:

Lyrics - 1.2M avg. searches/month

Lyrics.com - 110k avg. searches/month

[1] https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/

itsprofitbaronon Google Destroys Rap Genius’ Search Result Rankings As Punishment For SEO Spam

By working with Google they mean they're going to work with them to identify the links they need to clean up, try and get those links "cleaned up" themselves, submit a disavow file and then get them to reconsider the site as outlined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963785

It happens all the time and no disrespect to RapGenius, to companies much bigger than them.

itsprofitbaronon Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes

Whilst this may be surprising to some people on HN, this happens all of the time to sites who build links in an unnatural way.

For instance, this has happened in the past to well known brands such as J.C Penney through NYTimes expose[1], Interflora[2] more recently and a lots of others.

An apology which RapGenius offered [3] doesn't fix this either.

Is it fair? Yes and No.

The only reason it isn't fair is that the site disappears from Google for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius]. My personal belief is that, devaluing the site for the BRAND term e.g. [rap genius] actually devalues Google's quality. On the other side of the coin, if someone searches for [X rap genius] whilst they are under penalty its fair that they do not rank for that either. However, there are obvious reasons as to why the search quality team have decided to do this.

How RapGenius can fix it / How you can too if your site gets a penalty:

First of all, RapGenius if they are doing any link building now they should pause it immediately until they’re out of penalty.

Secondly, in their apology [3] said:

  "With limited tools (Open Site Explorer), we found some suspicious backlinks to some of our competitors"

They don't actually need to use any other tool to get out of penalty beyond Google Webmaster Tools although, ideally they should clean up all the links beyond the ones Google has found (trust me, Google doesn’t find them all within WMTs). Once you get out of a Google manual penalty and get hit by one again the search quality team takes a much closer look – you don’t want that!

Anyway, they should download all the links in WMTs, OSE, Majestic etc (although it looks like they only have OSE[3] so they should just download them from WMTs and OSE) and then remove the duplicates.

Once they’ve done this, they should flag every single link which, they believe is causing the penalty.

After identifying all the links which are causing the penalty, they should create a Gmail to outreach to all of the sites to remove the links. They should outreach to all these sites and documents all the sites they’ve contacted, status – still live/nofollow/removed/requested payment/no response etc.

Having got some links removed/nofollowed etc, they should then disavow all the other sites that have requested payment or not given them response to the removal. Personally, the disavow(s) that are done by myself are usually done at the domain level although, there are reasons to do this at the URL level as well (Rap Genius needs to make the decision which one to disavow).

After submitting the disavow they, should submit a reconsideration request which outlines, the work they have done – from the spreadsheet – and also offer Google’s Search Quality Team the login to the Gmail to show they’ve tried to get the links removed and that some people have asked for payment etc.

The Google Search Quality team will review the site then, they’ll either flag more links to be removed or they’ll get out of penalty – after which Rap Genius will start appearing for the BRAND term again and other results once the Google Algorithms trust the site again.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=...

[2] http://searchengineland.com/google-says-no-comment-on-why-in...

[3] http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-founders-open-letter-to...

itsprofitbaronon Paypal acquires Stackmob

They have all the power of a bank, but none of the accountability.

They're actually a bank in Europe.

itsprofitbaronon Ask HN: Are my saved passwords safe in Google chrome?

If that malicious addon/website can compromise your local machine then, yes the information can be accessed. Similarly, when you aren't using https the password is sent in plain text and could also be accessed then as well.

itsprofitbaronon Ask HN: Are my saved passwords safe in Google chrome?

When you save your password in Chrome, they are stored on your local machine and are decrypted once your OS user is logged in. This is why you can view the passwords in plain text although, the main reason is because in order to use auto-fill, Chrome needs to enter the plain text password into the HTML form.

The passwords themselves however are encrypted, and the only way to get them back to plain text is through the decryption key – which is your Google password/secondary key. When you sign into Chrome (and sync to the Google servers) your encrypted password is transmitted along with the settings, bookmarks etc. As a result, Google only has the information stored in an encrypted state and do not have the key to decrypt it.

The only way your passwords are not safe is if, your machine becomes compromised.

itsprofitbaronon Snapchat is Intrinsically Worthless

$4bn for an easily replaceable service that is little more than Microsoft Paint duct taped to a disposable camera?

Oh please!

Sure you can recreate the app pretty easily which, you can also do for most services (this does not mean scaling to the users they serve) but that is not the value of the service.

It's also why 'hackers' typically don't make great investors see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

itsprofitbaronon Ask HN: How do you stylize jQuery Mobile?

The best way to stylize jQuery Mobile is to create a new theme through modifying an existing one - I'd recommend modifying an existing one because of the cross browser testing/developments they have already done to the CSS.

itsprofitbaronon Why 99.997% Of Entrepreneurs May Want To Postpone Or Avoid VC

Successfully raising capital is pretty much always seen as a win

This is the wrong mindset, people often think that raising capital from investors is win, it's not; raising capital does not mean a company will be successful. Raising Capital is one of the steps a company can use to help them win - by using that capital to build a profitable business and/or a successful exit & only then can it be considered a win.