trevin

I’m always fascinated by the fine-tuning of LLM personalities. Might we finally get less of the reflexive “You’re absolutely right” with this one?

Maybe we’re entering the Emo Claude era.

Per the system card: In 250k real conversations, Claude Sonnet 4.5 expressed happiness about half as often as Claude 4, though distress remained steady.

Thinking through where I've lived -- a lot of the original school buildings built in circa 1950 were more in city center. The article touches on the move of schools to the outskirts of town as a cost savings measure but I think the opposite may be true.

As population and (perceived) facilities increased, the schools built new buildings in farmland or other wide open areas on the outskirts of town to have more room for stuff like stadiums, huge auditoriums, bigger playgrounds. The land may be cheaper but the new high schools are almost more like college campuses vs. stately buildings in the middle of town.

There's an appetite for more and we've relocated schools to make more room not save money.

Good, related thread on where the MLB gets most of their infield dirt from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619311

Yes this sort of things fascinates me - the links from the past explain how fundamental things are structured today. A Harvard professor has a few books about this and talks specifically about how railroads stops from way back when are responsible for much of the layout of suburbia today. I'd imagine much of the placement of things is based on railroads from the steam era.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/388804.Outside_Lies_Magi...

Vice seems to have fallen victim to the increased polarization and agenda-ridden stories that have swept up so many media companies. They used to report on unique angles, find edgy topics to talk about...the last few years they regurgitate the same left-leaning talking points that one can find in any number of other media outlets.

They lost their soul and became what they probably used to hate.

They've gotten away from high-quality docs in recent years (as has much of the media) but the Abandoned series from ~2016 was a beautiful portrait of the underbelly of America and the people who live there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDniDNY03JE

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk3Jx1juRR8&t=1s

Edit: https://twitter.com/NYIslanders/status/1589812414966468608 is a good example of ad creative being way too distracting

It's been up for years. If you are super worried, I suggest buying his book which is ~90% of this in printed form. Called The Great CEO Within.

Yes, I miss the days where independent blogs ruled the web. Everything has transitioned to social platforms optimized for instant gratification where there is no room for deeper thoughts. Or lives on a 3rd party like Medium. Most of the blogs I used to read daily have transitioned to being people who tweet a lot and rarely write longer content.

A tangent: Granola Shotgun is one of my favorite blogs and Johnny has a unique viewpoint on many issues like urbanism, homesteads, town planning, etc. A quote from him that summarizes his writing to me: "So this is what America is actually like. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Look out your window. Take a drive down to your local big box store. Walk around your neighborhood. This is reality. Just sayin’."

I have little specific interest in these topics but love his storytelling and detailed posts.

A few of my all-time favorites he has written:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/26/not-for-camera... https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/the-show-hor... https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/levittown/

Yeah this is clearly a thin affiliate site churning out content optimized for "robot mowers" and not somebody with any real expertise on the subject.

I'd argue that it's equally as impossible to set up trigger warning policies.

While some trigger warning like the ones you mentioned are valid, the term has been perverted to include all sorts of things[0] where you could get in trouble for talking in public about insects or needles.

It's an impossible task to list out and educate people on everything that might possible trouble or offend. Once you open that door, there is no finite end to a list of triggers.

[0] http://privilege101.tumblr.com/triggers.html

In a word, yes. Spend some time Googling around and analyzing backlink profiles in high spam areas (designer goods, pharma, etc) and you'll see tons of pages propped up by link spam ranking highly. If you are smart about it some automated link building tactics still work very well. It's not sustainable but most people take a "churn and burn" approach and just move on to a new domain if it gets torched by Google.

Yelp's statement[1]:

"Media-fueled reviews typically violate our content guidelines. One of these deals with relevance. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about a business’s employment practices, political ideologies, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience."

Agree with their decision. Just because he's a heartless poacher doesn't mean he is a horrible dentist. Plus, there are a dozen or so others who work at the practice. If he goes to jail, this type of social media vigilante justice only harms the innocent.

This reminds me somewhat of reddit's DIY investigation into the Boston marathon bombings. The justice system works well but is slow. Social media vigilante justice is fast but not fair.

[1]http://www.marketwatch.com/story/yelp-pulls-reviews-of-lion-...

Original story here with much more detail: http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-...

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972798

This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site).

Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?

I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.

Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.

1: https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800 2: http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die

It's not limited to a small number of Gmail accounts. If you use some additional search parameters you'll see a ton of compose URLs showing up in the SERPs

Searching:

site:mail.google.com gmail inurl:?to=

gave me nearly 25,000 results. Some have subject lines too.

EDIT: Here are the first 100 URLs for the search above: http://pastebin.com/X1yTW7Pr

I'd encourage everybody to actually test this on their site before assuming that no social sharing buttons will jump your conversion rate.

Part of the problem with having them on product pages is a lot of the times people aren't too eager to "Like" or share a product page...especially something like snow blowers or heavy equipment.

I've seen sites that sell products that _do_ earn a lot of social traction on product pages that like increase the conversion rate (the one I'm thinking of sells wall art/decals).

Spent a few minutes looking at the site. Looks to me like it was hit by Google's Penguin 2.0 update [1] that targeted sites that had low quality links pointing in to their domain (in particular inner pages).

Probably not the sisters fault, but the site has done a lot of reciprocal linking in the past which Google really frowns upon nowadays. There's prominent page on her site featuring some of those links: http://www.portraitquilts.com/info/links

She also has some links from pages that are selling or exchange links to spam/escort sites:

http://www.iwr.com/gifts/crafts.html http://www.livebusinessradio.com/trade/recip.cgi

Again, probably not her fault. Google is doing their job but with so much misinformation about SEO and link building out there it is easy for people to accidentally get themselves in trouble.

If anybody is curious, I used ahrefs to pull in the backlinks to the site: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains/subdomains/www.p...

There are some other examples of link spam in there. Penguin would be my guess after a quick check.

[1]http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2279845/Googles-Penguin...

The reason (noun).com domains are desirable is for SEO purposes. A few years ago, it was really easy to rank highly in Google for whatever keywords where in your domain name. For example, if you wanted to rank for [digital cameras] your best bet was to buy digitalcameras.com or some variation of that name.

As SEO has gotten more and more complex, exact match domains (EMDs) don't work quite as well anymore but are still a pretty big ranking signal [1].

For somebody worrying about long term brand appeal, an EMD might not make sense but for somebody launching a new ecommerce store or doing affiliate marketing EMDs are still a great asset to have.

[1] http://mozcast.com/metrics

On top of all these other changes, Google's "Knowledge Graph" and other Google-owned properties are taking up more and more of the search results than ever before. Google Shopping, YouTube, Google+ and Adwords all take up more screen real estate with every Google update and design tweak.

Look at this query for example: https://www.google.com/search?q=telescopes

I see 20 links to ads and Google owned properties and only 2 to actual 3rd party websites. That's insane. (edit: That's above the fold, on page load...more 3rd party listings if you keep scrolling but most users don't)

The data in Webmaster Tools has been historically unreliable[1][2]. If you compare it to data in Google Analytics, the two have often been world's apart. Sadly, this isn't going to come close to replacing accurate keyword data in GA.

[1]http://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/google-webmaster-tools... [2]http://moz.com/blog/comparing-ranktracking-methods-browser-v...

"Don't link to other sites or you'll improve their ranking. Link to mine instead" is pretty much what this site is saying.

This is why Google created rel="nofollow"[1] and if you are really worried about where you pass PageRank to it is a much better alternative than linking to some random 3rd party site while passing value back to them.

[1]https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

The most frustrating part of negative SEO or any link cleanup is that Google doesn't tell which links they think are spammy links. If you are working for/with a site that has been online for a while, they will have thousands of crappy looking links pointing to their site.

Scraper sites pick up content from other websites all the time and cross post with porn and other crap. Directory submissions that were perfectly fine 5 or 10 years ago can now be viewed as "low quality" by Google. Blogs that used to be well-maintained have been bought by spammers and SEOs and are now content farms.

Google's lack of transparency when it comes to links is very troublesome. I understand they can't give out the ins and outs of their algo, but asking your average website owner to go through 10k+ backlinks and identify and remove the links is a pretty tall task when there isn't a clear standard on what is bad and what isn't.

Google's WT index seems to provide a fair amount of the links. There are a few 3rd party tools that do a really good job of indexing nearly all of the backlinks to your site:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.majesticseo.com

Here's a post from Rand Fishkin that provides some more details into the rebrand: http://moz.com/blog/goodbye-seomoz-hello-moz

It's a real problem. I do SEO for a living and work with hundreds of sites at a large agency. I've seen several hit with negative SEO from competitors ordering link gigs on Fiverr or asking some low quality link provider on Digital Point to build 10,000 links in a short period of time.

This has killed rankings for a few sites that I've worked with. It is really easy to get thousands of spam/porn sites to link to a competitor with exact match anchor text for whatever keyword you want. And it's basically impossible to figure out which competitor is doing it to you.

Google used to just 'devalue' all crap links pointing to a site. A link could never hurt you. Now that links can hurt your site, it's totally wide open for this type of thing to happen.

Here's a good case study/experiment done on negative SEO if anybody is interested in further reading: http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-...

While the markup doesn't do anything for SEO, Easter eggs like this are often created to help generate links back to the particular page from sites like HN...which can boost SEO.

The original submission title was probably tongue-in-cheek, but I'd bet the creator of the page had SEO in mind. Getting a ton of pg lovers who probably also link programming to link to a programming page on the site would be killer for SEO.

This is similar to creating a unique 404 error page that can generate tons of backlinks.

Google has it cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0BKpgOg...