thisisnotatest

I don't think there's any direct connection. I highly doubt that those who decided to put this rainbow on google.com for pride month were thinking about that issue. But certainly those of us working in search quality weren't happy to learn about our algorithm synonymizing "gayest" to "worst". It's a tricky problem to solve algorithmically, though, if you think about it. It seems harder to identify such cases than, say, Googlebombs, which were addressed in 2007: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/01/quick-wor...

Sometimes I work noon-10pm at Google. Because I feel like it. What's the problem? :-)

IANAL, but, so what? If you build a stapler using your own internal mechanisms for stapling, and I design my own stapler with my own internal mechanisms, I'm infringing on your ideas just if they both look like staplers from 10 feet away? Or if Firestone patents a certain type of tire, I can never invent my own tire because, from a distance, they both look like tires?

Also, patent claims are, as far as I can tell, nearly indecipherable. I worked on an application for an invention with really helpful, smart, technically literate lawyers, but after it was all put in the form of claims and figures and embodiments and specifications that could be (but are not necessarily?) implemented in digital electronic circuitry, I could barely it -- and it was my own work! Pity the patent examiners who have to make heads or tails of these things!

Indie game Kingdom of Loathing is entirely supported by optional item purchases (a new unique, powerful, funny item every month).

You're not misreading his posts. They make me sad, too.

I think you vastly overestimate the effectiveness of earplugs. You might not hear a cat's scampering on the floor, but you are not going to miss anything like someone speaking at a normal volume in the room, much less a fire alarm. As one data point, I have never missed my smartphone alarm clock in five years of sleeping with earplugs.

You didn't address my point. Where do you draw the line? At one point does one's choice of how one allocates one's money go from "free speech" to "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors"?

The author says he chose to start his company in Canada because, "In the Bay Area, investors, friends, and early adopters are so embracing and supportive of new ideas," and this can actually have bad consequences. It's an interesting notion. I have no startup experience, so maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't the solution just, "Take what investors, friends, and early adopters say with a grain of salt"?

Bribery is free speech too. Yet bribery is illegal. So where do we draw the line? Consider the special interest groups today that take this approach: "I'm not coordinating with the Senator, but I did start spending millions of dollars of attack ads on her opponent as soon as she voted against Cap and Trade on carbon emissions, and after she left Congress I hired her as a 'consultant' paying her a multi-million dollar salary." Currently that's on one side of the line. I think it needs to be on the other side of the line.

Seems like you're less likely to have an accident if your GPS directions are right there in your field of vision than if you have to look away from the road at a device on your dashboard or in your hand.

I got a kick of reading about how this hack was one of the things that enabled StarCraft to be released. As an eager 12-year-old, it seemed like I couldn't get it soon enough. But as a software engineer now, I can't stop cringing at this story.

So much of the discussion here is focusing on SC and SC2. What about the software development aspect of this story?

What's the moral of Patrick Wyatt's tale? I mean, it's hard to argue that there's some parallel universe where Blizzard did things differently and StarCraft was an even BIGGER success. What would that even look like -- it became the national pastime of several countries, instead of just one? Yet I can't help but think how expensive it must have been for them to have made these poor decisions in design, implementation, and planning, each one compounding on top of all the previous ones, constantly delaying their launch.

So is the moral of the story, "here's why you shouldn't code for 'two months from launch' mode"? Or is it, "when the chips are down, you can take or leave all your fancy MVCs and UMLs, they don't make the difference between a mega-blockbuster and a dud or vaporware"?

+1. The gradient just makes the page look confusing, and my eyes gained none of the imagined advantage of "you were just looking at red, so look for red... look for red... there's the next line!"

I might actually like it better if it just colored one line red, the next line blue, and so on. Absolute positioning instead of all this clever gradient stuff.

I'm glad that you took my post good-naturedly, Michael. I let out a sigh of relief that this didn't immediately escalate. It sounds like you are dedicated to bettering yourself as you have more experiences and gain more perspective, which is an admirable trait. It's not my place to tell you what to do, but if you're open to input, I would timidly suggest the following: if you play the tape backwards and notice that, every few years, you find yourself distancing yourself from some of your extreme behaviors or stances from a few years earlier, then you could try to get ahead of that trend going forward.

Emphasis on "long". One year is not "long".

Ha, okay. I suppose we'd just have to take this to longbets.org.

Good news, everyone! Michael Church is commenting on a HN thread about Google so he can talk about how his ideas about Google+ Games were unjustly ignored!

I, like some other Googlers I know, regularly resist replying to his posts here. But he still hasn't let it go, so I'm going to give it a shot. Feedback from other HNers welcome.

THESE ARE MY OWN WORDS AND PERSONAL OPINIONS AND DO NOT REPRESENT ANYONE ELSE'S.

I'm a random Google engineer and a fan of Euro board games. When michaelochurch wrote his Real Games manifesto here, I thought he made some good points. He's obviously a smart guy, and his writing is long-winded but articulate. Then I watched in horror and fascination as he wrote one jaw-dropping mass email after another. I used to think he was a troll, but I now believe he's completely earnest, which ironically makes him the perfect troll. Since his short time at Google, he has continued to write screeds against Google's internal processes on one Hacker News story after another, where his passion and self-assurance makes him appear credible, when he appears to be suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

I have hesitated to get involved in these threads, figuring that it's not worth the effort, and knowing that it is asymmetrical, in three respects:

1. It's very difficult to effectively rebut Michael Church's extensive allegations with vague aspersions, but I can't cite specifics from internal discussion lists because they are confidential.

2. Michael Church is indefatigable. We saw what happened when Googler after Googler tried to engage in dialog with him, to reach out to him, to help him. I'm exhausted at the mere thought of trying to describe all the flame wars and all the dirt, much less voluntarily engaging with him now.

3. Personal attacks are distasteful, they're not "Googley," and even if true, they can end up reflecting badly on the attacker.

As the saying goes, "Never mudwrestle with a pig -- you both get dirty, but the pig likes it."

The last time I almost replied to michaelochurch and resisted, it was this post -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715734 -- where he wrote:

> The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave.

This is a quintessential example of his delusion. I say this, not for spite, but for truth: the notion that Michael Church is now "seen as right" inside Google, much less "lionized," is laughable. It literally provoked laughter.

Today, here, michaelochurch wrote:

> I do know a strategy that would have made it succeed because, when I was at Google, I proposed it.

Another quintessential example of his infinite confidence in his own ideas. Simply stunning. Imagine if someone said something like, "I do know a strategy that would have made the Ford Focus succeed because, not long after I was hired at Ford, I proposed it." You would rightly be skeptical, no matter how many thousands of passionate words he wrote on the subject over the following months and years.

I could give some more examples of things written on the web under the name Michael O. Church, but that risks entering the realm of "personal attacks" that I balk at for the reasons described above.

Instead, I'm gonna get back to work now. Thanks for reading. Like many before me, I wish Michael Church the best of luck, I harbor no ill will, and I hope he finds whatever makes him happy.

Stanford only changed the font of the wordmark, not the S or the S-and-tree or the seal. I, for one, welcome our new wordmark. It's a pretty inoffensive change, compared to the lolfest that is the "perpetually loading" new UC logo.

Craigslist, anyone?

Good news, everyone! Android (as of 4.1 Jelly Bean) lets you disable notifications on a per-app basis. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this on this thread yet. You'll miss the "it's your turn to Draw Something!" notifications, but, c'mon, will you really miss them?

Settings -> Apps -> Draw Something -> uncheck "Show notifications"

Screenshot: http://www.cultofandroid.com/16833/jelly-bean-tip-disable-an...

No.

I work on Search Quality at Google. We have a firewall between Search Quality and Ads. We don't answer to Ads. Revenue is just not my team's problem. We come into work every day and look at our search results and try to get the most relevant answers ranked as #1, #2, etc. I never think about the impact of my ranking improvements on ads. I've been personally involved in dozens of changes, and I've never once heard anyone argue for or against releasing a change because of ads.

I can understand why someone might be mistrustful because of the apparent incentive to sandbag the algorithmic results. But Google has the long-term view: if we can keep satisfying our users' needs, the revenue will follow.

I've worked on the query parsing code for google.com, and, I promise you, + and "" were equivalent. (Barring unusual edge cases with ambiguous combinations of punctuation.)