From her bio on Blogger: "My name is Tali Garsiel. I worked for many years as a web application developer in various projects and technologies. Both on the client and server sides. I live in Israel with my husband, 3 daughters and my cat. Yes, I'm actually a woman with a technical blog!" -- http://www.blogger.com/profile/00737791624070565735
You made a benign claim about the article that was incorrect, and in the interest of not confusing other HNers your comment was downvoted, why are you taking this personally?
HN has elitism problems: it's excessively worried about quality (something it can't really control as the site grows) to the extent that its group action violently downvotes certain posts--such as your rather innocent question.
I guess everyone thinks you should have googled it, but we didn't have the decency to politely request that you google such information in the future?
It's an irrelevant question and if a discussion were to spawn from it, it would detract from the actual content. This is a perfectly valid comment downvote.
It's a question about the author. It's a stupid question about the author that could easily be answered with five seconds on Google, but that doesn't make it irrelevant, except in the eyes of an indifferent, exclusionary mindset that prizes signal-to-noise-ratio above simple politeness. I ain't asking for people to _upvote_ it, just to ease off on the downvotes and maybe provide a courteous explanation.
The question was a sexist double whammy (given both the assumption that "the author of a technical document can't possibly be a woman" and that "the author's gender is at all germane to this piece") that has no place anywhere, let alone HN. If anything should be downvoted, that is the perfect example of one such thing.
Or maybe the speaker is from a culture that doesn't know that Tali is a Hebrew name for both boys and girls, or from a culture where Tali is only a dude's name, or... the hypothetical exceptions to your interpretation go on and on. [Ninja-edit] Your ninja-editted assumptions as to what the person meant by his question are an over-reaction: you don't _know_ that's what he meant, you're only seeing hints of it.[end ninja-edit]
It could _well_ be an innocent question, and there's no sense in generating righteous indignation over two sentences.
Given that female pronouns were used several times in the opening paragraph, even if one didn't scroll down to the bio at the bottom, to assume that she must be a he, even on the basis of something such as a name (cf. George Eliot) is entirely unwarranted without further reason to back it up. But, you're right, it could have been a case of bad assumptions and only single-whammy sexism (the author's gender is still not germane to the article in any way). And it's still a downvote-worthy comment.
It always astounds me how people can completely blend out one major thing: consciousness
Is it possible that machines develop consciousness like ours? THAT is the question that needs to be answered and which is far more interesting than "from a technological point of view only"
To me that's not a question at all. The answer is a ringing: yes, of course. I'm squarely in the 'consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of certain configurations of matter', so to me it is only a question of the technology to create those configurations.
There is matter and only matter. Humans are a configurations of matter and those specific configurations have the property we hold so dear and call 'consciousness'. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose you couldn't synthetically arrive at a configuration of matter that displays the same emergent behavior. This is the basic thesis of the famous book 'Godel, Escher, Bach' by Hofstadter. I am a strange loop. Any similar strange loop will display the same properties.
Any question to this regard probably makes you a closet Cartesian dualist. When you drill down, most people turn out to be that. (Some intermediate philosophical positions are possible, but they are subtle and rarely held consistently by someone that hasn't spent a course studying the matter in detail).
What I'm guessing in my previous post is that it may turn out that you can most easily achieve a configuration that displays consciousness by using biological materials. In that case, any future conscious machine would probably have a core of material similar to our brain. Which more poignantly raises the ethical questions related to creating such machines.
(BTW, note we are conflating 'any consciousness' and 'intelligent consciousness' by focusing on humans)
- When you change a function b so that it depends on the number of times a has been called, then this is a pretty deep change; but yes, it should be simple to do in situations like logging etc.
- Single-assignment really has NOTHING to do with purely functional programming; see my article "Purely Functional Structured Programming" or my (purely functional) programming language Babel-17 (www.babel-17.com)
- Random is an interesting operation; it is not purely-functional, but can be considered side-effect free; so it is not really imperative, either (although implementations via seed are)
I wonder how this constraint approach fits together with classic design principles. For example, an often used design principle is that of grid systems. Does the constraint approach somehow naturally include the grid systems approach?
I think this falls into the category "As simple as possible, but not simpler". Doing abstraction right is a very hard thing indeed and requires the right training and education. None of the creators of the current frameworks have had those, and therefore their creations may be brilliant, but flawed. When an abstraction is done right, you won't feel any pressing need to go beyond it. When it is not done right, you are happy that at least it is "leaky", but calling this leakiness a feature just misses the point in the first place.
I am a non-native speaker, too, I got 10800. I guess when reading books, I should quit my habit I developed lately of skipping over those words I don't know :-)
Oh Jesus. I did my 2 years of C++ development over 10 years ago, but I don't even mention it in my CV, because I am not going to use the mess that is C++ ever again. If I need something low-level, I will use Objective-C.
As the writer of the story, I guess I should answer this.
I think the acronym "SEO" feels a bit outdated. The problems and strategies involved in SEO are far more involved than it often gets credit for. There are a number of people who do the name a disservice and do bad SEO.
But the type of work I do at Distilled is working on incredibly creative projects.
It might include projects like managing domain consolidation across 3 domains comprising of pages in the millions without allowing for a massive drop in traffic. To solving speed optimization issues, to account for crawl budgets that limit indexation. Or determining IA on large scale sites. Or helping optimize a site running on a 16 year old CMS that won’t switch.
And in the same day, I may switch gears to brainstorm some of the most popular viral content on the internet. Then I'll work with a client on their customer service center problems, because it's leading to reputation issues online.
Then later that week, I'll be on the phone with the CEO of a cool startup talking through strategic business ideas.
I get to help work on strategies that fall well outside the acronym of "SEO" that help lead to the success of some great brands.
As an ex engineering, math, and science fanatic - I love the problems that force me to just sit in front of a whiteboard for 2 days straight until I come out with a solution I think will work best for a client.
I love the complexity of the problems. However, in the industry, I'm more known for "building links" which is the aspect that allows me to be creative. Also, my "hustle" has made me successful at getting my clients coverage. But in link building, you get to work on projects like data mining and analysis on client data to create interesting content. Then I get to take that same content and pitch it to publications. It's such a dynamic process for one content piece to cover everything from brainstorming concepts, to data analysis, to outreach.
I'm one of the founders of Distilled (mentioned in the story) and I also come from a technical background (maths mainly). The thing I love about SEO is that we get to work on harder problems in more fun ways than any other industry I've come across. You can make it whatever you want - Justin is a great example of this.
And, yeah, he rocks - but you all worked that out already.
In some ways, I'd like to keep SEO's awesomeness a secret from the HN and startup community.
As a developer (I'm not a engineer or computer scientist), I love to build stuff and see people use it. If you build things that are usable by Googlebot (as in, easy to crawl, easy to perceive the content's quality, easy to categorize and associate with keywords) and worthy of citations (links), then your reward can be astronomical...
My last site was a SEO-driven UGC site and I sold it for $10M before I turned 32. I never paid a dollar for marketing, I was the only owner, and I never had more than 5 employees. And with my help, it doubled in revenue after I sold it. It was a fantastic business. Now I'm pretty much free to work on what I like.
It's like that with a lot of things I suppose - you make it what you want. For a while I scoffed at "SEO" but my cofounder dragged me into starting a company and before I knew it I had more interesting engineering problems to solve (still do) than I could shake a stick at and I'm having fun.
Really good to get this type of perspective on modern "SEO", so thanks, Justin.
I was wondering if you can point me towards any resources (books, articles, tutorials, etc.) that embody more of the interesting and worthwhile side of internet marketing and less of the "sleazy" side of SEO?
Obviously there's nothing better than putting things in practice (and that's in the pipeline), but would appreciate any pointers from someone who knows what they're talking about :)
I hope this doesn't seem self serving, but seomoz.org has some of the highest quality information you can find on SEO. In addition to that, I'd suggest articles on http://searchengineland.com/ - they offer high quality content and news in the industry. Anything written by Vanessa Fox on SEL is usually great.
SEOmoz has webinars and a PRO Q&A. Distilled.net also offers videos of our conferences.
As for books, the best I've read are Art of SEO, which is co-written by Rand, and SEO Secrets by Danny Dover (formerly of SEOmoz, now at AT&T) which talks more about the consulting side. The problem with books is that stuff can go out of date quickly. If you're reading a book that talks about PageRank sculpting, for example, it's dated.
So since SEO has such a bad rep, and you're not just updating meta tags and H1s – why call it SEO? Just wondering. Is it because the common business owner knows he needs "SEO"?
There is still the point that my work is done through the lens of improving organic search traffic. Google has just changed to include so many factors, it's much closer to just building a great inbound or web strategy. There are also details that are search specific, that it helps having someone on top of those details, because they can have major impacts. So, at least for now, SEO still works as a title, especially when that's the service people know they need.
I find it equally frustrating that there are people out there pitching meta tag optimization as "SEO" and reducing the perceived value of what I do for a living.
And it's still possible to manipulate the search engines, and lots of companies do it, but that's not actual marketing.
Thank you for your answer (I wasn't really expecting any). I suspected that there must be more to SEO than meets the (ignorant) eye if it does indeed instill such love :-)
I've loved SEO with every fiber of my being for close to a decade. It's an absolutely phenomenal field filled with complexity, challenges, rewards for creativity, attention to metrics and execution. It's hard to find or imagine a business endeavor that produces such remarkable return, nor one that has so many interesting elements (the detective work of uncovering why a site's rankings went up/down, the excitement of a content marketing play, the variety of tactics that can be used to approach a challenge).
How can anyone NOT love SEO? That's the more salient question.
As an engineer building an SEO company, I can think of plenty of reasons NOT to love SEO. Every coin has two sides (which is, effectively, what I said in the other comment) :)
Generally speaking, I agree with you. I down voted though because it's a silly statement to make when you really think about it in a more dynamic way:
* Perspective is subjective
* SEO isn't everything you think it is
I'm an engineer and I'm actually building an SEO company; "SEO" (I really hate that acronym) is many different things. For some people it's a slimy practice, for other people it is marketing but on the internet ("Internet Marketing" and "SEO" pretty much go hand in hand these days).
You might even be interested to know that YC funded an SEO startup (http://www.ginzametrics.com) - they are an SEO tools company (my competitor).
So, can you love SEO? Sure you can, as an engineer, building useful SEO tools is rife with fun and interesting problems. Just gotta change your perspective a bit.
BUT I agree with you in that on a big philosophical whole, SEO is not something I will be doing my whole life; matter of fact I see it as a stepping stone to interests that matter to my spirit and not just my intellect (interesting engineering problems) and my ego (money and stuff).
It has visible short to medium turn returns? I don't do SEO, but it seems like it's a case where you can do some analysis, engineering and tuning, then fairly immediately see some results.
Beats the pants of slower cycle stuff where you need to work for months on the assumption that all your planning and resourcing will actually produce something that is sustainable.
I have the same impression about SEO and also about a lot of other things. While I was in college, I thought web development was easy and for people who couldn't program in C/C++. I was dumb. Now i know otherwise. It can be the same with SEO. And that's beside the point, the story is about determination and hard work. What he chose to do is a sidenote.
