thisisnotatest

FWIW, I adjust my F.lux setting all the time! When the sun sets at 5pm but I'm still working in a brightly-lit office, I hit "disable for an hour." When I'm in a completely dark room, I switch it all the way to the dimmest "candle" setting.

hackula1 means this: If one child is born to the family of a billionaire, and another child is born to a poor unwed teen mother, then in what meaningful way can it be said that those two children have "equal opportunity"? Even if the billionare's child is a lazy fuckup, he/she still stands to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and so will never have to want for anything. Even if the teenager's child works hard, without access to nurturing child care, education, books, etc., the odds are stacked against that child leading a happy and successful life, much less becoming a millionaire.

The only way to make it truly be the case that those two children succeed or fail in life due to their own qualities and choices -- "equal opportunity" -- would be to take the billionaire's money and spend it equally on nurturing and educating the two children. (In the US, the "estate tax" is a tax on inheritance, that is, it's our society deciding how good or bad it is if a child can inherit all or some of a parent's fortune.)

> they're just selling it now (most likely to the highest bidder).

[citation needed]

If you can find any.

> was most likely born I take it you just posted this comment for fun and didn't RTFA? That was the whole point; the author answered the question of how the tradition was born, down to the person and year.

Um, that sort of happened in 2010. A pilot flew his personal plane into an IRS building in Texas. Not related to TSA screening on commercial flights, but still. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack

How about a karma/bittorrent system for researchers to encourage replication? In such a system, the "application fee" for submitting your experiment to a journal would be that you must also replicate someone else's experiment that was also submitted to the journal. This system could scale arbitrarily.

Google doesn't spy for the NSA. The NSA might be spying on Google, but that's not the same thing.

Google software engineer here. These gripes are legitimate. We want our users be able to depend on our features and services, and if you can't do that, we're letting you down.

But I would beg for a bit more patience and understanding on this one point: it's not like we have one server that all our users connect to. When new features roll out, it's inevitable that some users will see the new features before others do. Also, there are often complex legal issues affecting how products are released in different countries. Okay, that's two points. :-)

FYI, you can quickly and easily toggle between "private"/"personalized" results and "global" results, right on the search page, by clicking the toggle button with the person and the globe to the top-right of the search results:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2410479?hl=en

I work on Synonyms at Google. We're constantly tweaking our algorithms. It's possible that at one point one tweak made us more aggressive with replacing "verse" with "vs", but then later another tweak made it less aggressive. :-)

I had the idea of limited-transfer items. For example, an item can be bound to three characters; once the third character picks it up, it's non-transferable. This would let me give my friend the bow I don't need, or even sell something once, but items wouldn't be infinitely fungible any more.

Great move. I remember the first time I stopped by the auction house and bought some powerful gems for my level 20 character. I'd been collecting crappy gems planning to upgrade them, but then for a pittance of gold I had suddenly (almost accidentally) twinked my character with gems with huge stat bonuses and no level requirements. I tried to swear off the auction house after that, but the psychological damage was done, and I never played Diablo 3 after the first time I beat normal difficulty. (To be fair, I might just have been in a different stage of my life than when I was a Diablo 2 addict in high school.)

I'm sure this will become a seminal case study for online game design in the future.

I don't see what you get from asking people what they think they'd do in certain situations, when you could instead use the actual outcome of the hand as your training labels.

Feedback: I clicked on the suggestion "Boston to Providence via McDonalds." Then I decided to try entering the information I wished I'd had on my Labor Day road trip: where was the most convenient place to stop at In'N'Out? But after I typed my California zip code as the origin, before I could start typing my destination, the page went completely unresponsive for 10+ seconds. Apparently it was too eager and immediately started trying to find all the closest McDonalds on the route between my California town and Providence, Rhode Island.

Yes, we deal with those sorts of trade-offs every day.

I can't discuss our internal metrics, sorry.

That's a great example for the search quality team. What's interesting is the synonym "insect"="bug". Note that the result you like is whatsthatBUG.com, which actually contains no instances of the original query term "insect" and only two isolated side navigation instances of "insects".

Yet it seems like the synonym "bug" on Google, plus the other terms like "junk" and "attached", leads to complaints about software.

In a way, you were lucky that the whatsthatbug.com result actually had the word "junk" and "attached". The letter-writer was using the word "junk" in the same meaning you were, but they were using "attached" in the phrase "see attached pics", whereas you were referring to the debris attached to the insect's back.

We're working hard on improving these kinds of challenging queries. I'm going to be remembering the insect with junk attached to its back for a while!

Personally I would be a fan of giving users more "knobs" to turn in their search results. For example, we have the toggle switch to include personal results and personalized ranking, vs. showing un-personalized search results. However, it's a complicated product design problem whenever you want to add complexity to something used by a billion people.

Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was the plain search box.

1) No, I mean, if you search for [nutrition information gm corn] and click on the "right result" for you, you might not even notice that the "right result" didn't have the exact words "nutrition" "information" "gm" but instead had the words "nutritional" "facts" "genetically modified".

2) Do you mean putting a search term in "quotes"? The + operator was retired a while ago. And putting the term in quotes should do what you want, except maybe for high confidence spelling corrections or extremely long tail cases where there are just about no search result to show.

Guilty as charged. :-)

I could see how vb6/"visual basic" would cause some irrelevant results to come up. It's probably good sometimes, but also really bad sometimes. I've recorded it in our list of motivational examples that we use to try to come up with improvements to our algorithm. Thanks, and sorry for your wasted productivity.

We're working on the scraped sites. Also, advertising revenue has nothing to do with it. We don't even talk about revenue in our search quality meetings, just the utility and speed of our search results page.

Putting an "word" in "quotes" is the inline way of exactly matching an individual word. It's conceptually similar to putting a phrase in "quotation marks," so personally I think it makes sense that we have one operator for literal searches.

> A + could apply to a single word or to a single phrase

I don't think a + could apply to a phrase. That was one problem with the + operator; it was not clear to users how it actually worked. In fact, though there were many searches whose results were helped by their use of + (many of whom made by users who are commenting here on HN), there were many searches whose results were largely made worse by their use of +, whether it was inadvertent or overzealously applied.

This is great feedback. Thanks.

I think the only time that Google changes a word in quotes is if the spelling algorithm is very confident. For example, if you searched for [barack obama "autobiolgraphy"], you are going to get results for "autobiography" with the option to really search for "autobiolgraphy".

Other than that, I'm pretty sure that a word in "quotes" must appear in the result to be retrieved, without any alternatives. If you have a counter-example, I would love to see it! (I work on that code.)

For what it's worth, I assure you that putting a "query" "term" in "quotes" is identical to the retired +plus +sign +operator.

I would be very curious, if you set up Verbatim search as your default search engine in your browser, how often you have to "fix" it, and if you ever find it easier to see what Google makes of your non-verbatim query. I'd especially be interested in how often the thing you're searching for doesn't really exist on the web, and so Google is replacing "no results" with "off-topic results."

Google engineer here.

We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements.

We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each" "query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query words.

Oh, and, unfortunately, he has a known history for creating sockpuppet accounts, which unfortunately makes me unrecoverably skeptical of anyone who cites or endorses his ideas.

Oh boy, michaelochurch. His experience was extremely atypical. He had a legitimately awful time at Google. I don't know what happened between him and his manager and team so I can't say who or what was to blame. But I think he was put on a performance improvement plan (whether fairly or unfairly). And I think it would make sense to most people that an employee on a performance improvement plan would be strongly discouraged from expanding into a 20% project until their performance improves.

FYI, when it comes to reading any Michael Church claim, especially one about working at Google, I'd put more weight on the "outspoken" than the "ex-Googler." He admitted himself on HN that he engaged in what he called "white hat trolling" while at Google, a pattern he seems to have repeated throughout his life.

He's very articulate, but he has an EXTREMELY strong belief in the quality and accuracy of his own ideas. For illustration, he wrote a few months ago, "societies live or die based on what proportion of the few thousand people like me per generation get their ideas into implementation." When presented with such self-confidence beyond all reasonable proportion and corroborating evidence, I think an appropriate response is skepticism.

(Full disclosure: I'm a Google employee.) Personally I think Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor. However, I consider the leaks to be insufficient evidence for the conclusions you're drawing from them. Here was Google CEO Larry Page's response: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

What makes you believe one report over the other?

Off-topic, but > I never supported the 'Occupy' protests mainly because you can't influence a corporation by yelling at it. Sitting in front of those banks in NYC or wherever didn't actually change shit. You know why? Because businesses are not in the business of making people happy.

I don't think a single Occupy protester on Wall Street believed that they would get one of these too-big-to-fail financial institutions to change voluntarily by them "yelling at it." They were trying to shine the spotlight on what they felt the real problem was, and change the national discourse, probably with the long term political goal of changing the laws to change the incentive structures of those businesses.