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misterbeeon The Go Programming Language, or: Why all C-like languages except one suck.

I would posit that if you choose to use C it is because you want to micromanage performance (kernel, strict hardware constraints, etc) and therefore do not want GC, and if your environment is compatible with GC, you may as well go further to C# or Java or another high-level language that gives you even more goodies.

misterbeeon How to send and reply to email

That doesn't fool very many people, and makes an especially sour impression on the people who know you are faking.

misterbeeon What I Learned From Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard

Electric screwdriver?

misterbeeon Maybe NYC could start with a simple URL

http://www.nyc.gov/html/housinginfo works. http://www.nyc.gov/housinginfo redirects to http://www.nyc.gov/html/housinginfoinfo which gives a 404 error, that's probably a typo bug.

http://www.nyc.gov/dob 404s, but http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob works, so that ought to be fixed.

http://www.nyc.gov/planyc2030 works.

misterbeeon Maybe NYC could start with a simple URL

Something like http://www.nyc.gov/simplicity, maybe?

Oh, that works.

Let's try to be constructive here.

misterbeeon Google search and search engine spam

One specific and ubiquitous example of webspam has been driving me nuts this week: An enterprising spammer has won huge on Amazon Web Services (AWS)-related keywords.

For example: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aws+s3+emr+p...

Result #4 at the moment is "AWS Developer Forums: Interactions between S3, EMR and HDFS ..." on http://www.hackzq8search.appspot.com/developer...com/...

What's sublime about this example is that:

1. hackzq8search is clone of AWS's websites amazonwebservices.com, aws.typepad.com, etc

2. hackzq8search is hosted on appspot.com, Google's App Engine domain

3. hackzq8search is over quota, so the site doesn't show any content anyway.

Yet this site was the top search result, beating out the site it was cloning, time and time again on my AWS/EMR-related searches this week.

The one mitigating aspect as that hackzq8search's URL naming scheme is easily decodable -- the hackzq8search URL includes the full URL of the cloned URL, so I can write a Greasemonkey script to extract the proper original URL.

I found a glimmer of optimism in that the site has been slowly fading in SEO-success this week: I complained about https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aws+s3+security+sox+pc... on Thursday, but on Friday the hackzq8search Search Result was gone from the first search result page.

It's still not hard to slam some AWS-related keywords into Google and get these bogus results, though.