Hacker News Reader

blauwbilgorgelon Hit by a Google -50 penalty

There are both architectural errors with this website and original content issues.

I see no brazen violation of the Webmaster Guidelines demanding a penalty. As far as I know, manual penalties (and their cause) get communicated through Google Webmaster Tools.

What I do see is architectural issues.

http://www.explore.to/usa/ks/alma/

Is an empty page, that is linked to from the homepage. For listing websites: Don't put up pages for which you have no content.

The search result pages are indexable too. Even though the post claims they have blocked these pages in robots.txt, they aren't:

hxxp://www.explore.to/listing/usa/ks/alma/see/arts-entertainment-events/arcades-amusements/

(Won't link as to not pollute your index).

These pages wreak havoc on your crawl budget.

Then on to the issue of original content:

http://www.explore.to/listing/2/the-vagabond-miami.html

This isn't content that will ever perform well in search engines. I'd even go so far as to say these results pollute the search results. They are an address and hopefully a tiny copied description. What added value does this have for a visitor? What added value does this have for a search engine to present high up in the results?

Look at how Yelp or LinkedIn got people to enter content on their listing pages. Or even Yahoo, look at all the widgets added to listings, to increase the content size and relevancy.

You even use Facebook comments (which are not crawled all that well by Googlebot, seeing they are javascript and reside on the Facebook server, not yours). Any user generated content to make pages more unique, you freely donate to Facebook, instead of adding it to your pages in plain text.

Conclusion: No (manual) penalty, but bad non-engaging duplicate content listings combined with a poor site architecture that allows zillions of page combinations with meager to no content on them. The issue is confounded by not making sure your site is canonical:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...

Site architecture and SEO is massively important for the success or failure of these kinds of websites, and both seem quite poorly thought out at a glance.

If the site is young, the initial boost in rankings (honeymoon period), will decay overtime and settle together with your page authority, content quality etc. If you see a decrease in visitors, you could attribute it to this initial popularity, instead of a penalty. Current visitor numbers might reflect your content / site quality a lot better.

Look at how SEOmoz helped Yelp produce a solid strategy: http://www.quora.com/How-do-StackOverflow-and-Yelp-achieve-s...

blauwbilgorgelon Chrome Privacy

When I had this happen, or when I heard this happen, there was always a reason that was far less sinister than initially thought.

* Public referrer logs created a backlink

* Somebody (else) published the URL

* Somebody (else) shared the URL

* You pinged the URL to search engines or other services.

* The URL appeared in your RSS feed

* The URL appeared in your sitemap

* Your pages URL ranges are easily guessable (/item.php?id=1007, /item.php?id=1008) and traversed by a search engine.

And more recently, something less innocuous: You simply added a Google +1 button to your pages.

  When you add the +1 button to a page, Google assumes that
  you want that page to be publicly available and visible 
  in Google Search results. As a result, we may fetch and 
  show that page even if it is disallowed in robots.txt.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

blauwbilgorgelon Post Web site loads too slowly - The Washington Post

I was amazed too. Also at this public sneer from an editor: Won't developers feel responsible for this?

They again, they include javascript files with a copyright from 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/sites/twpweb/js/wp_omniture...). They source javascript files of 5 lines of length. They forget alt attributes on navigation images. And they wrap their stories in this soup:

  #wrapperMainCenter, #wrapperInternalCenter, #container, #pagebody, #pagebody-inner, #article, .blog_entry, #c-main-content, #center, .content, .hnews hentry item

That can't be result of a single developer, or even of a single project.

There currently is nothing to fix when - to keep advertising and tracking going - you are faced with over 100.000 bytes of third party javascript code (I stopped counting).

Next to a complete redesign, a mentality change would be needed. Sure, you can asynchronously load a single compressed and combined core javascript resource just before <body> close. But would the advertisement department of The Washing Post be happy if all advertisements showed up 5 seconds after the content has loaded?

I wouldn't even know where to start bothering with this massive site. There must be 10+ projects with different developers all working over the years to build things like the Sports Section, the classifieds section etc. All using their own javascripts and style sheets... Perhaps a good CDN to patch this oil tanker.

blauwbilgorgelon Crossing the chasm between design and code

I think time plays a large part, yes. I also think it is a left-right brain divide between maths and creativity.

I think people want to be good at what they do. The best designers can either "waste time" on becoming novice programmers, or they can perfect their core craft. If they spread too thin, they might soon stop becoming the best.

I guess it also depends on the role you play in a company or start-up. If you can help out other teams and communicate, that is very useful for a start-up or small business, but not something I think is appreciated in some larger companies: You get judged and hired on one core role and are expected to do that very well. If a big company needs design, they likely hire a full-time designer, not ask that DBA with a keen eye.

I am sure there are a few hack-of-all-trades that mastered full webstack programming, data analysis, community management, marketing, SEO, usability, copy-writing, design etc.. But I also feel it is unrealistic to expect one to be able to switch to the other, regardless of their individual talents and expertise.

blauwbilgorgelon Crossing the chasm between design and code

>> The designer doesn’t always know what’s technically possible, what’s simple or what’s a good idea.

Print designers coming to the web, often have problems with this. Using fonts that won't render clearly, justifying columns, tiny gray text on white, a background that stops repeating after 1600px (the size of their monitor). Fixed width designs wider than 1200pixels. Very uneconomic gradients.

For someone who calls herself/himself a web designer these problems should be non-existent. If you don't know the medium for which you design and its limitations, you are making a flyer in Photoshop, not a webdesign.

Beautiful functional web design follows from real content and interacting with the page like a user. A web designer who doesn't venture beyond Photoshop will likely produce very one-dimensional designs.

A front-end developer should know a lot about design. Not as a suggestion, but as a given. To do a design justice, you have to translate it with care. I see the need for overlap more for back-end developers and front-end developers. Back-end needs to understand valid HTML and front-end needs to work with a template engine and do data requests.

For web designers and front end engineers, a full overlap should be a given, and it isn't that rare to find one who can do both. Now back-end vs. web design is a chasm too wide to cross, realistically.

blauwbilgorgelon Google misspellings stats for "britney spears"

I remembered seeing these stats before. They are a few years old, right? Google lists the publishing date for those stats as 1 April 2002. Seems like a subset too.

I really enjoy using Google's spelling correction, but what really would blow my mind, is if I one day can search for:

  ntoymru d[rstd

and get results for "britney spears". It seldomly happens when I calibrate my index fingers over the wrong keys.

blauwbilgorgelon Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

I included it to make the following point: Accessibility is more than catering for the deaf or blind. It also includes color blindness, mental handicaps or going by the standard:

http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/photosensitive-epilepsy/web-...

http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/assistive-technologies-for-p...

Which have the following guidelines (or myths?):

  - allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker

  - allow users to control blinking, avoid causing content to blink

  - allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages

  While people with epilepsy are browsing web sites, they 
  may encounter pages that have blinking texts and 
  animation that may trigger seizures. Sudden loud sounds 
  and repetitive audio in some web pages can also cause 
  epileptic seizures.

I do not know much about epilepsy, so I will believe your experience, but believe me when I say I am not using it as a way to further a point. I believe in above guidelines, regardless if they help for epilepsy, because in this case they help other users with a mental handicap or ADHD and so remain good guidelines. Or do you rather have we don't mention epilepsy all together when making sites accessible and just call them common sense? It is easy to ignore even a common sense guideline when there are so many different ones.

It seems you have an uphill battle to fight if mentioning epilepsy and accessibility in one sentence gets up your nose. Like my quotes show, I am not the fringe 'defend epileptics' spreader of myths here, this is part of the accessibility topic.

blauwbilgorgelon Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

It sure does. Also, if you search hard enough any site will breach some accessibility guideline for a deaf, blind, mentally handicapped or epileptic user.

For example http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Flightgetsin.dreamwidth... shows some possible WebAIM accessibility guidelines breaches.

- non-valid mark-up.

  4.1.1 Significant HTML/XHTML validation/parsing errors are avoided.

- mixing of inline styling with external styling.

  4.1.2 Markup is used in a way that facilitates accessibility. 
  This includes following the HTML/XHTML specifications and 
  using forms, form labels, frame titles, etc. appropriately.

- Using    and <br> for visual spacing

  See 4.1.2

- using tables for layout

  See 4.1.2

- not providing a label, description or fieldset for the searchform

  1.1.1 Form inputs have associated text labels or, if 
  labels cannot be used, a descriptive title attribute.

And, not a WebAIM guideline, but still a good accessibility guideline:

- Use a modern doctype (of the strict variant if not HTML5)

- Don't use deprecated tags like <b> for article headings.

- Provide an option to skip large lists.

If you start wielding all these guidelines and specifications like a D&D guide you are sure to bump into hostility here and there. :)

blauwbilgorgelon Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures

I often use a simple (button image) link to twitter.com/share or facebook.com/sharer.php (now http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/). That is one-click without javascript execution or, worse IMO, company custom html tags.

AFAIK Google+1 doesn't, as of yet, have such an URL where you can share. Sharing seems to go through the +1 button. I'd really like a share url for Google+ for technical and privacy reasons and keep everything one-click to share.

I bet you could make a two-click system for the Google+1 button, now asynchronous javaScript loading is enabled, but I don't know if that is within TOS. Again I would love a simple share link (like Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter) and be done with it.

I know that sharing on Facebook is different from liking, but I feel sharing is more valuable from a marketing POV.

blauwbilgorgelon A Tweet is Worth (at Least) 140 Words With this Compression Algorithm

Great hacking. If you like this topic, this should be relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-enco... (Compressing images in tweets)

blauwbilgorgelon DigiNotar root CA trust removal follow-up

Their certs are also baked into hardware and a large part of the Dutch e-Government. Diginotar has more than 10 employees. They do other things than merely signing certs.

Size of the company doesn't really matter too. If it matters we would have a single CA.

Apparently even my new passport is signed by the Diginotar PKI. I'm wondering when this will be big news in Holland.

blauwbilgorgelon Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate

Update on Dutch news site nu.nl (without references or sources, so I can't confirm where they got this information from).

http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u=http%3A%2F...

Fraudulent certificates were given out for:

().mozilla.org (backdoored software?)

().wordpress.com

().torproject.org

().yahoo.com

And Baladin (an Iranian social network)

blauwbilgorgelon Diginotar confirms security breach

http://www.diginotar.nl/Actueel/tabid/264/articleType/Articl...

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...

Incompetence doesn't begin to describe this statement. They say: Your browser might throw some warnings when communicating with government services. In 99.9% of the cases this is a false alarm and you can safely ignore it.

By own accord 1 in a 1000 (of 9 million users) can get MitM'ed and yet you teach people that it is safe to ignore it... They appear to use the same audit company from last time.

The Consumentbond already tells people to expect warnings and ignore them, for they have not been hacked, but merely experience a temporary "browser issue". Reports of DigiD helpdesk telling people to ignore warnings, lower security settings or place the site in "trusted sites".

blauwbilgorgelon An update on attempted man-in-the-middle attacks

DigiNotar's mother company Vasco finally released a press statement.

http://www.vasco.com/company/press_room/news_archive/2011/ne...

Just incredible: They were hacked and they knew it, then forgot to clean up a certificate the hackers generated.

  On July 19th 2011, DigiNotar detected an intrusion into 
  its Certificate Authority (CA) infrastructure, which 
  resulted in the fraudulent issuance of public key 
  certificate requests for a number of domains, including 
  Google.com.

  Once it detected the intrusion, DigiNotar has acted in 
  accordance with all relevant rules and procedures.
  
  At that time, an external security audit concluded that 
  all fraudulently issued certificates were revoked. 
  
  Recently, it was discovered that at least one fraudulent 
  certificate had not been revoked at the time.  After 
  being notified by Dutch government organization Govcert, 
  DigiNotar took immediate action and revoked the 
  fraudulent certificate.

  The attack was targeted solely at DigiNotar's Certificate 
  Authority infrastructure for issuing SSL and EVSSL 
  certificates. No other certificate types were issued or 
  compromised. DigiNotar stresses the fact that the vast 
  majority of its business, including his Dutch government 
  business (PKIOverheid) was completely unaffected by the 
  attack.

Maybe directly, certainly not indirectly.

blauwbilgorgelon Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate

http://www.diginotar.nl/Aanvragen/Lopendeprojecten/DigiDMach... They have this listed as an active project, so they are definitely involved. Could still be on a different CA though. And of course _if_ they were hacked.

blauwbilgorgelon Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate

Scary indeed. Also responsible for authentication of DigiD, online taxes, pension funds, Chamber of Commerce, Ministry of Security and Justice, local governments, etc.

blauwbilgorgelon How Would You Teach Left from Right to an Alien Civilization?

Interesting thought experiment. I see many overlap with existing questions from philosophy (of meaning and language), and I think at its core this question is a philosophical one, not about physics.

  The aliens’ language does include words for "left" and 
  "right" and for "left-handed screw" and "right-handed 
  screw". But in all our communications with them, we were 
  never able to figure out which was which. We need them to 
  explain to us which of their words corresponds to our 
  word "left," and which to our word "right." To do so, 
  they will need to appeal to some common point of 
  reference or phenomenon.

Eerily follows the Twin Earth Thought Experiment and its conclusion:

  Yet, at least according to Putnam, when Oscar says water,
  the term refers to H2O, whereas when Twin Oscar says 
  'water' it refers to XYZ. The result of this is that the 
  contents of a person's brain are not sufficient to 
  determine the reference of terms they use, as one must 
  also examine the causal history that led to this 
  individual acquiring the term. (Oscar, for instance,
  learned the word 'water' in a world filled with H2O, 
  whereas Twin Oscar learned 'water' in a world filled with 
  XYZ.)
  ...
  Meanings' just ain't in the head.

This is at the core of semantic externalism. Relating Putnam's view to the OP question:

What if I don't know the difference between left or right? Maybe a brain lesion caused me to skew the concept so that everything would be "left" to me. When I say "move left to avoid hitting a wall" out of this ignorance, this statement can be true or false. If it is true or false, doesn't depend on my flawed concept of "left" or "right", but on those who hear my statement, and correctly know the difference between "left" and "right" and notice the wall on the left side. The true meaning of "Left" is filled in by the language community.

- This could also mean that our community concept of "Left" is objectively false or obsolete. We deem it to be true and meaningful, the aliens don't.

- Or that "Turn Left" could mean "Turn Right" when some time has passed (a dynamic rigid designator?)

- Or that the researchers that communicate with the aliens have a different concept of "Left" than the language community majority.

- Or that their concept of "Left" is simply incommensurable with our concept of "Left". If here on earth scientists "think differently, speak a different language, live in a different world.", imagine how badly alien thoughts, language and experience would translate, if at all.

- If it is true that the structure of language affects the way speakers conceptualize the world, then that would mean that to learn "Alien Left", one would need to learn (some say experience) the entire alien language.

All these things an alien should take into account when entering our language field.

  So they begin to beam information to us in the form of a 
  3-D technical drawing, encoded as a set of 3-D 
  coordinates in space.

A (probably too) simple solution would be for the aliens to send us a 3-D model along with time data. Observing the resulting simulation already implies a perspective and we could reference the first state of the model.

blauwbilgorgelon Show HN: We made a spam-free lyric search engine

What is your view on copyright?

In 2006 the MPA had a crackdown on tablature and lyrics websites. I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure you can't just publish all lyrics, without infringing here and there.

What is your view on scraping?

It is unlikely you entered all lyrics yourself, but used an existing database. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable scraping or fetching my content from a site that hosts advertisements, and then republish those without advertisements. Did you find access to an opensource database, or is the service here more like a reversed Adblock?

blauwbilgorgelon RealNetworks crushes Dutch webmaster for hyperlink

Some views from an authoritative dutch IT lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet http://blog.iusmentis.com/2011/08/25/realnetworks-wil-smarte...

- Real Player put down a request for an Ex Parte case (court case without a hearing).

- The Ex Parte case assumed that the webmaster was hosting the infringing software.

- When this hosting claim did not held in court, Real Player still decided to push the case for linking.

His view is along the lines of:

- lawyers have a responsibility too. If these Ex Parte cases have no merit, this should have consequences for the lawyer guiding his client into an Ex Parte case.

- Ex Parte cases are expensive and lawyers earn a lot, owing to the 150k+ legal costs (really high for Dutch standards). Frivolous Ex Parte cases could border on abuse of the legal system for monetary gain.

For me, a cursory glance on the internet _does_ show servers with the name of the suspect being referred to as mirrors for the Real Alternative software. Also shortly after the newest releases, suggesting a relation between the suspect and the unknown creator(s) of the software Real Alternative.

Real Alternative uses DLL's and marks (like logo's and icons) owned by Real Player, so it is hard to make a case for fair play.

There is likely a lot more to this case than a simple hyperlink, even if it is lawyers being lawyers. Linking to infringing software has no relation to Dutch Copyright law (since it is not republishing), and isn't even grounds for an Ex Parte.

blauwbilgorgelon Google to Settle with U.S. Government for $500 Million

> [Government] which is now holding websites liable for any illegal advertisements shown on their pages.

This could turn out to be a very dangerous precedent to make, and not good news at all for any listing related startup.

Even if you don't want to host these illegal ads, and you put measures in place to block and remove them, you might still be held liable. I'd hope they go after the main violators (both of the law and Adwords ToS) and not their unwilling messengers.

blauwbilgorgelon Flipping 10 heads in a row - a small probability demonstration

I like the philosophical implications of: if it is possible, with enough trials, it will happen.

I remember using this argument against the proposed creationism view of my religion teacher. If it is possible for life to emerge on a planet, given enough time, it is bound to happen. Likewise: given enough games of Go, one game will end with a perfectly ordered black-white spiral. This then led to the tangent of: Is it possible for God to exist in our world?

The same with the possible worlds model of modal logic. If something is possible, there is a world were such is the case. That could mean that, if time travel or travel between possible worlds is possible, there is a world out there, where they discovered this. They could travel between possible worlds and teach these other worlds how to travel too.

As soon as something that crosses the boundaries between worlds is even remotely possible, in the end it should permeate through all possible worlds.

blauwbilgorgelon Germany vs. Facebook: Like Button Declared Illegal, Sites Threatened With Fine

I thought the same in my previous comment, but after a bit of searching, the Like button is not optional at all.

It is capable of tracking both logged-in Facebook users and even users that don't have a Facebook account. It sets a cookie without you clicking it.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1717563

  Scenario: The web user does not have a Facebook account  
  ...
  after visiting a web site on which Facebook Connect has 
  been implemented, the request for the Like button 
  includes a cookie. This cookie has an expiration date two 
  years from the moment it was issued. However, by browsing 
  across web sites, additional cookies can be placed on the 
  user's computer and these can be added later on in new 
  requests.

blauwbilgorgelon Germany vs. Facebook: Like Button Declared Illegal, Sites Threatened With Fine

How do you see the difference between Opt-in and Opt-out?

For example, I never asked for Google Streetview to photograph my property, so in that sense they might have violated my privacy.

But clicking a Like! button is like giving implicit approval to send some relevant data to Facebook.

If you were a German Facebook fan, would this law make it impossible to place a Like! button on your own site, when you and your visitors clearly want it?

Is it possible to voluntarily wave away the right to privacy or is it really an all-or-nothing deal?

Edit: It seems that you get logged without ever clicking the button, or lack a Facebook account...

The paper "Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This!" mentions 3 valid privacy violations by Facebook.

  informational self-determination: the individual should 
  be able to decide which data are disclosed to whom and 
  for what purpose.

  contextual integrity: data has to be treated according to
  the norms applicable to the context in which 
  the data was disclosed.

  data transfer without consent: data should not be 
  transferred to another context without the individual's
  consent

Abstract:

  [the Like button] is also used to place cookies on the 
  user’s computer,  regardless whether a user actually uses 
  the button when visiting a website. As an alternative 
  business model this allows Facebook to track and trace 
  users and to process their data. It appears that 
  non-Facebook members can also be traced via the Like 
  button.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1717563

Ah, well. Back to a custom Facebook Share button for me.

blauwbilgorgelon How To Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack

I care what validators say or imply. The reason I started using UTF-8 in the first place, was because it is a W3C accessibility guideline to use UTF-8 over the more common (in that time) iso-8859-1.

If you want to create accessible websites, one of the first requirements is validated code.

If we ignore validators and the W3C, who is there to officially tell us what we _should_ do?

We are long past the point, sure, so much so, that W3C recommends it too.

And about browser support: If you want to guarantee that most browsers understand and support your code, your best bet is to adhere to the W3C that wrote the standard.

blauwbilgorgelon How To Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack

Thank you very much!

If I understand correctly, you are saying to drop the entity names and start using the numeric entity codes. This shouldn't be much of a problem.

I really did bump into problems with an RSS feed and entity names, so another great point. I solved that by wrapping it in <![CDATA[ ]] and using the numeric entity codes (ë becomes ë), so now I am wondering why I am even mixing entity names and numeric entity codes in the first place.

blauwbilgorgelon How To Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack

I do use UTF-8 for my entire web stacks, but I encode characters in their special characters:

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

Becomes:

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

When outputted to the browser.

Can anyone tell me if that is correct and sane?

Translating characters like & and € to & and € saves me a lot of hassle with validation: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2...

  Line 265, Column 190:
  non SGML character number 157
  <code>â€œIÃ±tÃ«rnÃ¢tiÃ´nÃ lizÃ¦tiÃ¸nâ€</code>

  You have used an illegal character in your text. HTML 
  uses the standard UNICODE Consortium character 
  repertoire, and it leaves undefined (among others) 65 
  character codes (0 to 31 inclusive and 127 to 159 
  inclusive) that are sometimes used for typographical 
  quote marks and similar in proprietary character sets. 
  The validator has found one of these undefined characters 
  in your document. The character may appear on your 
  browser as a curly quote, or a trademark symbol, or some 
  other fancy glyph; on a different computer, however, it 
  will likely appear as a completely different character, 
  or nothing at all.

  Your best bet is to replace the character with the 
  nearest equivalent ASCII character, or to use an 
  appropriate character entity. For more information on 
  Character Encoding on the web, see Alan Flavell's 
  excellent HTML Character Set Issues reference.

  This error can also be triggered by formatting characters 
  embedded in documents by some word processors. If you use 
  a word processor to edit your HTML documents, be sure to 
  use the "Save as ASCII" or similar command to save the 
  document without formatting information.


  Line 344, Column 79: 
  cannot generate system identifier for general entity "src"
  An entity reference was found in the document, but there 
  is no reference by that name defined. Often this is 
  caused by misspelling the reference name, unencoded 
  ampersands, or by leaving off the trailing semicolon (;). 
  The most common cause of this error is unencoded 
  ampersands in URLs as described by the WDG in "Ampersands 
  in URLs".

blauwbilgorgelon Twitter Bootstrap

The two main designers that started the grid-craze were Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh. Some resources from them:

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...

http://www.subtraction.com/2004/12/31/grid-computi

How to use grids? It is usually as simple as adding some css, divs and classes. At its most basic, you can use a gridpaper background or this javascript gridder: http://gridder.andreehansson.se/ that works well with the http://960.gs grid framework.

Why I use grids?

- maintainability and cooperation

- visual consistency across browsers

- less development time spent with display bugs

Why I don't use grids?

- Can become a bit boring/holding you back

- Not all designs work with even columns (for example those based on the golden ratio)

- Code bloat (you are using divs like columns and rows, in almost the same way one would layout a page with tables, also devs sometimes forget to remove the unused classes from the production CSS)

blauwbilgorgelon IBM produces first working chips modeled on the human brain

I was alluding to a popular notion of AI that: It isn't AI if it doesn't feel like a human to us. I agree there is valuable knowledge to be gained in brain simulation and DNA computing.

AI press coverage has a tendency to "humanize" all AI research. (So your neural network is on par with a rat brain? Can we add such chips to our brain and create androids?)

I understand why this happens -- to make it more accessible, get more PR and to get more research grants -- but I do think it is silly. It makes people ask "When will we have AI?" when AI is already here, but they don't accept it, because it lacks human emotions. By taking it "too far", some make human intelligence a prerequisite for AI, when true AI could be just as well alien. Some AI researchers have no qualms in playing along with this notion.

blauwbilgorgelon IBM produces first working chips modeled on the human brain

While IBM might have produced their first working chips, these chips have been around for a decade now. I remember in 2009 when this project started that IBM created quite the buzz by claiming they made a cat-brain computer chip feasible and had simulated a cat brain. Great to see these claims realized.

In 2006 we had the snail neuron chips and around 2000 Hugo de Garis was all the rage with his brain-building chips.

To me: The hunt for simulating human intelligence is more of a marketing game, than a real scientific pursuit. AI already exists, to make it seem human seems like a silly endeavor.

In 2009 the IBM project got very harsh critique from the http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/ bluebrain project leader Henry Markram. Extraordinary claims without proof can hurt the field of AI, at least the public perception of it.

I still think part of the 2009 critique still applies, though ego's likely also play a role:

  You told me you would string this guy up by the toes the 
  last time Mohda made his stupid statement about 
  simulating the mouse's brain.

  I thought that having gone through Blue Brain so 
  carefully, journalists would be able to recognize that 
  what IBM reported is a scam - no where near a cat-scale
  brain simulation, but somehow they are totally deceived 
  by these incredible statements.

  I am absolutely shocked at this announcement. Not because 
  it is any kind of technical feat, but because of the mass 
  deception of the public.

  1. These are point neurons (missing 99.999% of the brain; 
  no branches; no detailed ion channels; the simplest 
  possible equation you can imagine to simulate a neuron, 
  totally trivial synapses; and using the STDP learning 
  rule I discovered in this way is also is a joke).

  2. All these kinds of simulations are trivial and have 
  been around for decades - simply called artificial neural 
  network (ANN) simulations. We even stooped to doing these 
  kinds of simulations as bench mark tests 4 years ago with 
  10's of millions of such points before we bought the Blue 
  Gene/L. If we (or anyone else) wanted to we could easily 
  do this for a billion "points", but we would certainly 
  not call it a cat-scale simulation. It is really no big 
  deal to simulate a billion points interacting if you have 
  a big enough computer. The only step here is that they 
  have at their disposal a big computer. For a grown up 
  "researcher" to get excited because one can simulate 
  billions of points interacting is ludicrous.

  3. It is not even an innovation in simulation technology. 
  You don't need any special "C2 simulator", this is just a 
  hoax and a PR stunt. Most neural network simulators for 
  parallel machines can can do this today. Nest, pNeuron, 
  SPIKE, CSIM, etc, etc. all of them can do this! We could 
  do the same simulation immediately, this very second by 
  just loading up some network of points on such a machine, 
  but it would just be a complete waste of time - and 
  again, I would consider it shameful and unethical to call 
  it a cat simulation.

  4. This is light years away from a cat brain, not even 
  close to an ants brain in complexity. It is highly 
  unethical of Mohda to mislead the public in making people 
  believe they have actually simulated a cat's brain. 
  Absolutely shocking.

  5. There is no qualified neuroscientist on the planet 
  that would agree that this is even close to a cat's 
  brain. I see he did not stop making such stupid 
  statements after they claimed they simulated a mouse's 
  brain.

  6. You should also ask Mohda where he got the notion of 
  "reverse engineering" from, when he does not even know 
  what it means - look the the models - this has nothing to 
  do with reverse engineering. And mouse, rat, cat, 
  primate, human - ask him where he took that from? Simply 
  a PR stunt here to ride on Blue Brain.

  That IBM and DARPA would support such deceptive 
  announcements is even more shocking.

  That the Bell prize would be awarded for such nonsense is 
  beyond belief. I never realized that such trivial and 
  unethical behavior would actually be rewarded. I would 
  have expected an ethics committee to string this guy up 
  by the toes.

  I suppose it is up to me to let the "cat out of the bag" 
  about this outright deception of the public.

  Competition is great, but this is a disgrace and 
  extremely harmful to the field. Obviously Mohda would 
  like to claim he simulated the Human brain next - I 
  really hope someone does some scientific and ethical 
  checking up on this guy.

blauwbilgorgelon Groupon has no viable business model

Even if Youtube is not profitable, Google has gained a lot of power over the online video format (see also Webm), justifying the buy.

Google aims to organize all the information in the world. Video is a large part of that and that should only grow.

The same take I have on the $6B offer. Controlling a large space of the growing local/group buying market is valuable to Google.

And just imagine Groupon coupled with Google Adwords (Adwords could upsell their clientele a Groupon offer) or Google Adsense (temporary offers could show on the entire content network). Or Groupon coupled with Google Base/Google Merchant Center. Or Groupon coupled with Google Maps. The true power would come from the collaborations and the future growth where Google would have secured a place.

No matter the hard business model, social buying/local offer sites are clearly here to stay.