`$ ln -s link_from link_to` would imply the reverse behavior. How does a symlink point from the actual file to the thing-that-looks-like-a-file-but-is-really-a-symlink? The file doesn't even know whether there are symlinks pointing to it.
Applying your definitions of "link from" and "link to", this:
creates a link from google.com to the hyperlink on your site.
I find the top reddit comment:
cp existing new
ln -s existing new
much, much more useful. You want to create a new link pointing to an existing file, which has the same ordering as when you use cp to create a new file with the content of an existing file.
The problem with "from" and "to" is - which is the from and which is the to?
Is the "from" the file/dir I want to copy "to" a link?
Or is the "from" the name of a link I want to point "to"?
The dual meaning of some terms that the concept of links and making links creates causes a lot of this confusion, IMHO. Are we using terminology that refers to the act of creating the link or that refers to the direction of the link?
Similarly, I don't think it helps that the usage text and manpage for ln refer to "target"s.
(I know what you mean by your examples but I wanted to share my pet theory as to why this is always so hard to remember)
Exactly! The rule is for that commands of two letters in length (cp, ln, mv) the file on the end is the one that gets created. For commands of three letters in length (tar, zip) the file that gets created is the first one. And then there's the exceptions that prove the rule like scp and ssh.
I used to just cheat. I normally cd-ed to the directory I wanted the link in then just let the name of the link be the name of the file, so I didn't need a destination file name, just ln -s source_file
Exactly. Why the GP's comment is currently at +33 when all it does is restate the main point of the story in a confusing way (by introducing from/to into the mix) is beyond me.
Probably because most of the people upvoting him didn't bother to read the story.
I am often guilty of this myself. At first I used to read all of the stories that were linked to on HN, along with the comments. But I quickly learned that the comments were often much more interesting/useful than the stories themselves.
So now I just look at the comments first, by default. And only in exceptional cases do I actually bother to read the article. There's just not enough time..
HN is an overwhelming firehose of information even without reading every article that seems interesting. But reading the comments can usually quickly give you a good feel for whether the story is worth reading or not. In this particular case, I think not.
Unless you're targeting a specialized market where you're really in demand, I'd have nothing to do with "web freelancing".
A few years ago I worked at a job shop that did web sites for small businesses, and I was talking with my accountant about getting my taxes done and he asked me how much we'd charge for a web site. I told him it would be around $2000... That would include a CMS install, original template, and some SEO. A pretty fair price for the time of the talented people it takes, plus the sales overhead. He was shocked. Although just getting another 10-15 clients a year would have paid for his site quickly, he was hoping he could get one for more like $50.
4 out of 5 small biz clients will let you make a tiny profit, but 1 out of 5 is a client from hell who'll balloon a $10k fixed price project to something that costs you $30k and wipes out the product you made from the other 4.
He will find out eventually that he both needs a website, and that they cost more than $50. He can either go straight to the $2000 solution, or find out the hard way with two or three cheap sites that don't work and end up at the $2000 solution 6-12 months later anyway.
The best clients are those who either understand or who have already burnt through months or years of frustration with the cheap shops.
Use that as part of the pitch, ie. 'Ye you can get somebody offshore for $100, and I will see you in a year, or we can just get it done properly now'
Work with people where your services are going to make them lots of money. I've never met anybody who won't spend $5k for $50k of added value to their business.
Not everybody is meant to be a consultant, and consulting (or running any business, or performing any job) is a lot more work than "just writing code".
I've got a rule that "If it's not impossible, it's not worth doing." If most people think that what you're doing is impossible, you've got less competition.
Domain age counts for something, as does the rich mat of links that a long-existing site has.
On the other hand, the price looks high for a site that gets that much traffic. I can pretty consistently create SEO-oriented sites that get that much traffic & revenue in 1-2 yrs with an investment of my time that's more like $10-15k. (Working pretty intensely for a month, and mostly waiting for the link network to mature)
(Of course, I've gotten tired of that and now I'm trying to break into making sites that are 10-100x bigger than that)
Changing a successful site is always risky. There are two risks. (1) is that you might go from something that works to something that doesn't work, and (2) in theory the ideal way to drive up your traffic would be to make small incremental improvements, watch your results, then make more changes. Google's very happy for you to do that if you're using AdWords, but they don't like you doing that in SEO, so there are things built into the system that can (sometimes) zap your ratings if you try to revamp an old site.
Personally I can think of better things to do if I had $100k sitting around, but if you like this site you should think about trying to negotiate the price down. I think a multiple of 8 times earnings is fair, so something like $25k more like it.
Of course, his operating costs are low, so like your average domainer, he can probably sit around a long time to find the guy who'll pay too much.
i know what you mean about making cash in other ways faster than inheriting a 100k site - i did some affiliate marketing and was able to generate that kind of cash pretty quick.
the thing that still makes this site worth looking into is the fact that they were able to even generate 3k without really knowing how to monetize the site. it seems like they just went on with the site, skimping over alot of things.
i think they could have done alot more with adding more social features, more frequent content (since they rank so well on google), sending out newsletters with occasional related cpa offers, etc etc.
most ppl here are probably capable of building a site very quick and testing the market. id say im technically capable also, but this site already has the traffic going for it and could be scaled alot more.
i also noticed, when you hear about any acquisition of a site, its either the big startups (in the multiple millions), or tiny ones that you can find on flippa, etc.
i dont hear alot about people turning around sites in the 6 figure range as often.
nonetheless, 100k does some like a pretty big evaluation for it
I agree with you, it very expensive for small startups not taken off yet. For example Cloudkicks charges $99/month for their entry level offering. May be their target customers are startups/companies which are taken off (profitable, VC funded).
Also as suggested by other commenter (troels) , monitoring may be not essential for all startups at the early stage.
I've often been unhappy with off-the-shelf monitoring systems, because every major site I've worked on has had some unique kind of problem.
For instance, there was one site where user abuse was the real problem... Bad enough that I built something that detected possible abusive behavior and would beep my pager.
For another project we had about 20 geographically distributed mirror sites, and we had to monitor network connections to all of them and make sure they were all alive and staying synchronized.
Right now I've got a site where the caching system screws up periodically and then I start getting 500 errors. Sooner or later I'm going to really fix the problem, in the short term what I really need is something that gets in my face whenever the 500 error rate spikes.
Halos around your text are quite important if you're trying to draw titles on television, particularly the old NTSC television. You see them all the time in video games too.
Bag-of-words models perform pretty well at classification and search, and the main thing you need to improve search is to boost scores when words are close together.
You might think you could improve performance by using semantically better defined features, but even 92% accuracy adds enough noise to foil your plans.
It's a big problem in A.I. systems that have multiple stages. You might have 5 steps in a chain which are each 90% accurate, but put them together and you've got a system that sucks. Ultimately there's a need for a holistic approach that can use higher-level information to fix mistakes and ambiguities at the lower levels.
92% in general would actually be really good for word sense disambiguation, but..."Apple" is a really easy choice. I'd like to see how he does with a trickier word like "right" (as in civil, vs. not wrong, vs. not left).
Yes, it is good, but not good enough for many applications. You're also left with the issue that one kind of "apple" is more common than the other kind of "apple" so the baseline accuracy of something that always assumes it's one kind of apple might be surprisingly good.
That said, text-to-speech is a system where it's important to do disambiguation of a particular set of words. For instead,
"I read the news today, oh boy", "read" sounds like "red"
"I read the news every day", "read" sounds like "reed"
You need to be able to disambiguate the word sense to be able to correctly read the world "read". There are maybe 20 or so very common words that are like this, so a modest amount of work in this area would be part of a good TTS system.
Perhaps 92% is poor in a lot of scenarios, but for this type of approach it's a good accuracy (within some 1-delta confidence). The unfortunate part is that it really was just a simple naive bayes bag-of-words, and it's not surprising that it did so well on one test case (apple). Extending that to help general NLP in any way would be much more difficult.
Sure, but the fact is that nobody actually needs a "word-sense disambiguator", they need a search system with better accuracy, or a classifier with better accuracy or an information extraction system that turns text into facts.
Many areas in NLP are like this. You can get 92% accuracy in a few hours of work, and then you can get 93% after a week or work, and then you can write a whole PhD thesis about how you got 94% accuracy.
To a certain extent, there are approaches, such as the Support Vector Machine that are "unreasonably effective" but once you get past that, you often have to confront issues that everybody wants to sweep under the rug to make a real breakthrough.
For instance, there was that NELL paper that came out a few months ago; NELL extracted facts from text but it had no idea that "Barack Obama is the President of the United States" was true in 2010, and that "Richard Nixon is the President of the United States" was true in 1972. If you can't handle the fact that different people believe different things and that statements have expiration dates, no wonder you can only get 70% accuracy in IX
Heck, I'd like to see Facebook credits be more flexible than they are now. In particular, I'd like to be able to use FB credits to pay people for work... I've got a suspicion that this would undercut mechanical Turk.
I guess the main reason they won't let webmasters pay out FB credits is that the first app people would build with it would be a gambling app... Too bad.
