EricBurnett

>PG: A couple weeks ago I added a recency threshold for the leaderboard. It's currently 100 days.

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048468

Given that fallentimes' last action was 108 days ago, it would seem that he isn't a candidate for inclusion anymore.

Doesn't Cisco provide the specialized hardware for the great firewall? If so, then their response is a bit disingenuous.

>PS for some reason "dbench" holds mythical power over many folks I have met. They just believe it's the most trusted and standard benchmark for file systems. In my experience it often acts as a random number generator. It has found some bugs in our code as it exercises the VFS layer very well.

I wouldn't really call this "bashing" dbench. He is simply saying that it is a good tool, especially with regard to exercising the VFS layer, but is not complete enough to do everything they could ask for (like emulating their customer workloads). I read it more as a warning to see what it actually does for you and not get caught up in the hype.

I thought that was going to be a link to the Star Wars Holiday Special (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCNGjKnTzaQ) as a testament against George Lucas. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

Hmm, I see. Thanks for pointing that out - I'm still working on getting my intent across properly for this kind of thing.

Since it is too late to edit it and add a disclaimer, I guess this thread will do.

Yes? My point was simply that where he struggled with frustration, I struggled with my ego. Considering he is probably a better programmer than me, I thought this was an interesting contrast to bring up. What is the problem?

My first experiences with programming must have been very different than his, with respect to the first section in particular. I always knew that programming was supposed to be hard - I grew up knowing no programmers, teaching myself the esoteric art of C++ from a copy of "Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ 6 in 21 Days". So when I understood it reasonably well, I felt I must be above average. Indeed, I've never felt the feelings of "frustration and discomfort" he references. Instead, I have always had to battle with my hubris in thinking that I'm that much better than the programmers around me.

It is interesting to look at the monetary values of Google and Baidu in the two days since this was announced. It seems that after an initial ~2% dip, Google has returned to its pre-announcement value, while the value of Baidu has risen almost 20%. While one would expect the change in Baidu to be comparatively higher due to the relative difference in market caps (187B vs 16B), it still seems that on the stock market, this is currently being viewed as a net win for everyone. Interesting.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

While this article is about the value of the word 'Google', it is interesting to look at the monetary value as well. Comparing Google and Baidu, it seems that after an initial ~2% dip, Google has returned to its pre-announcement value, while the value of Baidu has risen almost 20%. While one would expect the change in Baidu to be comparatively higher due to the relative difference in market caps (187B vs 16B), it still seems that on the stock market, this is currently being viewed as a net win for everyone. Interesting.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

Indeed you can. Try \\live.sysinternals.com in a Windows Explorer window for an example of it (presumably mounting it in linux would work as well, although I haven't tried).

A pen always worked for me.

This is a good overview of the issues so far. The inclusion of a link to a Chinese newspaper's reporting of the issue (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/13/content_1280408...) was especially welcome, as it was something I hadn't seen before.

I get nothing on that link. Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil ?

Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800 for the discussions about this when the news was broken on Google's blog.

If this person believes in the value of the Chinese government, it is their right to defend that opinion, just as it is your right to argue against it. Of course, the fact that they have a dissenting opinion by arguing that China should be allowed to suppress dissenting opinions is certainly ironic (from the linked post).

We definitely need more granular flags. People shouldn't need to be downvoted for expressing a dissenting opinion, but I agree that in the current HN climate it was inevitable.

FYI, here and in your other post above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049046), I believe the word you are looking for is 'wary' not 'weary'. But good point nevertheless.

It says a lot when Google isn't even willing to store any source code in China. Hard to argue with that decision at this point, though.

If you need 100% guarantees, then yes, do things in a purely functional way. However, I think the point is that in any sane program you can easily and safely make the assumption that + does not depend on pi in this situation.

Yes, anything _can_ depend on any and all globals, but with proper practices, documentation, code reviews and what have you, one can make simplifying assumptions on what _will_ happen.

I can't comment on what definition of blue moon they use, but Google calculator says that ~0.37 occur every year:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1+year+*+once+in+a+...

Up-voting breaks after you sign in in a different page.

The situation is this: sometimes I open a number of pages in tabs when I am not signed in, then read and vote on them all. The first time I vote I get the login page and everything works nicely, but if I later try to vote again on a different tab that doesn't know I was logged in, I get redirected to a dead page instead.

Repro: 1. When signed out, open a couple pages in tabs. 2. Sign in on one of them. 3. Try to use an up arrow in the other tab.

You should end up on a blank white page.

Ping times will be high for some sites, but I doubt Google will be one of those. As soon as this Lunar Net goes up Google will have a server on the moon faster than you can say 'light-speed delay', so all your favourite Google services and YouTube videos will be available locally with nice low ping times. It's the rest of the internet you'll have to wait for.

I found it surprising how good a job this does with topics you wouldn't normally associate with images. For example, c++: http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/html?query=c%2B%2B . Considering that I had no idea what images to expect for this kind of query, I think the selection presented (book covers, IDEs, console windows, flowcharts, and job market graphs) are quite suitable.

I'm sorry, but 7 petabytes for the largest search index in the world? I'm hoping the reporter misquoted the developers here. If we conservatively assume servers with half a terabyte of hard disk space, that's 14,000 servers for the web index. Google was estimated to have 450,000 servers in 2006, and presumably has many more than that now. So less than 5% of their server stack would be required to store that size of web index. Considering that web search is still Google's core product, this seams easy to believe. And much more if you include image caching, maps, videos....

That was a good explanation to calculating the index of a point on the Hilbert curve - I had been wondering how that was done myself. I'm going to have to sit down and implement one of these someday.

Other than the quadtree, the Hilbert curve can be used to optimize the r-tree as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_R-tree .