FilterJoe
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
829
Submissions
157
Member since
Apr 18
Recent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
While the HN crowd mostly gets this right when framed as a math puzzle, my guess is that confirmation bias is alive and well in high tech just like in any other field. One example:
Young 20s entrepreneur vs. early 50s entrepreneur. Without knowing anything about either person, which startup is more likely to succeed? Even if you have the business plans for both, and you meet both - which one are you going to be more skeptical about as you evaluate which one of them gets funding?
Comment · 11 years ago
Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:
heartbleed bug what you need to know
Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.
I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.
I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.
So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.
Comment · 11 years ago
With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia:
"Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators."
Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and...
EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.
Comment · 11 years ago
I'm one of those people who has approached content creation strictly "as a service to your users, not as an exploit of your users." All of my blog posts are very carefully researched, in-depth guides, sometimes literally taking over 100 hours of research and writing for a single post.
I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.
Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.
Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.
Comment · 11 years ago
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip A. Fisher is the best book I've read about the process of getting to intimately know one specific company. It was written long before the phrase "focus investing" was coined. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger frequently recommend this book.
Comment · 11 years ago
"not helpful" and "looks fake" are not the same. A review can be not helpful for many reasons, including:
* one or more incorrect facts
* goes on and on about one minor point while ignoring major stuff
* too brief
* reveals spoiler without a warning
Etc.
Comment · 11 years ago
I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week.
Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:
Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?
I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.
Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833
All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.
I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8
However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.
Comment · 11 years ago
The Great Suspender: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
Combined with Session Buddy: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...
Those who routinely keep 10+ tabs open may be motivated to switch to Firefox or Opera due to slow browser start. The above 2 extensions solve the issue. I explain in more detail here:
http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...
Comment · 11 years ago
Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.
www.filterjoe.com (find what you need, work without distraction)