Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 140 posts.

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2008
45

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

You’re an SEO. You’ve mastered Moz’s starter guide to Search Engine Optimization . You deal with botched site migrations, messy title tags across thousands of pages, earth-shaking Google algorithm changes, and more on the daily. Who would have thought that one of the toughest parts of your job would be getting your…

51

Python + Hadoop = Dumbo

As a research intern here at Last.fm, dealing with huge datasets has become my daily bread. Having a herd of yellow elephants at my disposal makes this a lot easier, but the conventional way of writing Hadoop programs can be rather cumbersome. It generally involves lots of typing, compiling, building, and moving files…

52

Optimize for now!

One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. Th…

54

The Untold Millions

The media is biased towards stories that want to be told. This is especially true about the media covering the web world. It’s much easier to write a story about Facebook, Google, Youtube, or any of the other limelight stories where much of the juicy details are willingly shared. We have s…