skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the usual FUD we are used to from Microsoft.

First just claim that the allegations are wrong (use 'Period.' and 'Full Stop.'). Don't try to explain!

Than redirect allegations as a personal attack (say it is 'insulting'). Don't try to explain why, either!

Refer to a document that requires paid membership, so only very few people if any can check (don't use a direct link).
Gives you cheap credibility.

Claim that the experiment is fraud, although no one benefits financially. Don't back up the claim with data.

Counterclaim that your competitor is actually copying from you, ignoring the difference between ideas and data.

Now that the reader envisions you as the poor underdog that is insulted, is a fraud victim, and is copied, spread the doubt that Google is doing this because it starts to 'worry' (pose an open question like 'is it a coincidence'?).

End with the pose that your are not affected by this and concentrate on your business.

Never, ever answer the allegations with a simple explanation on why Bing shows bogus results because some Google employees search while the Bing Toolbar was active.

{Overlook that you admitted that your are prone to click fraud.}
Yea, I don't think there are 50 sites out there that could boast those numbers.
For a company that's usually so good about publicity, it really seems like they fucked up here.
We have a lot of Facebook profile info and psychology survey data, going to write some fun, OkCupid-style posts with it. If anyone wants to get involved, let me know at tim [at] mytype.com. We handle a lot of the messy stuff already (data cleaning, etc.)
reddit has a self-serve advertising system that's been in place longer than reddit gold.
> Hopefully they do if they are using user clickstream data. Each domain should have something like a page rank to determine how trustworthy it is.

If there's some algorithmic reason to believe that Google gives more trustworthy results, that's one thing, and the pagerank weight can be empirically determined. If, on the other hand, there's some point where they explicitly treat google clickthrough data any differently (if site=='google.com' weight+=10), then that seems to have crossed a line.

I'm trying and failing not to have this sound like some kind of koan, but if you treat everyone differently in the same way, then that's (arguably) fine. It's only if Google gets some specific attention that it seems more malicious.
They're beautiful, those numbers! Does that come from a single site, or something that embeds across multiple, also how do you power that amount of traffic?
And to be clear (if anyone from Google is reading) you don't just want to do 'Justin Bieber' since I suspect a lot of people with the toolbar actually do that search.

Also do things like 'radix-2 fft', something where there is a lot of additional signals (I suspect), yet something that other toolbar members probably aren't searching for. So the toolbar data MS gets is strongly skewed to your results.
Scientific Self Help:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3nn/scientific_selfhelp_the_state_of...
I've always thought people have their own special style of writing. Now that I've read your comment I realize how naive an idea that is. Would you happen to know the various categories of writing? I'm going to search google, but I am intrigued about what you know. :-D
this has been answered many times already - check the other threads.
Sell your company. If it's between killing it and making a few hundred bucks, why not?
Path-on-ura
There are multiple mechanisms by which Google's rankings will diffuse out to other services.

For example, lots of SEO and normal research studies the top Google results, or keywords revealed from referrer info and other logs, and then mimics those results elsewhere on the web, including outlinking to top results found via Google.

So anything prominent in Google's results will be echoed elsewhere in crawlable form, and probably associated with the same terms by which it was found at Google. Then those once-unique results will 'later appear' in other resources.

You can't be the dominating giant of the industry – the "single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages" (as Blekko's Skrenta calls Google) – and not have this leakage happen. It goes with the territory.
But then their bad results would be outweighed by the hundreds or thousands of other Bing toolbar users doing Bieber searches getting legitimate results fed back to Bing.
Did you store the passwords in cleartext or did you use unsalted hashes? Those are the only ways I can think of to enforce uniqueness, and they're both deprecated practices in themselves.
This is great! It's a great company that really delivers on their promises on both sides. For interns - an easy way to get an internship that's actually inline with their interests and skill development. For employers - a quality intern that can deliver quality work. As someone that's experienced both sides of the internship issue through InternMatch, this is well deserved. Congrats!
2011 is Android's year
Feel like experimenting?
That's a ridiculous metaphor which completely misunderstands advertising.

Your metaphor would be more correct if you said it's like scrounging for scraps at the table of millions of successful people all at the same time.

But you're not "scrounging for scraps". You're selling exposure, mindshare and traffic to advertisers willing to pay for it.

You obviously haven't been successful with ad-supported.
If so, please link to a definitive statement addressing this from a Googler. I've been looking and haven't found it.
How is that a great response? It does not address the allegations at all, just claims the allegations are insulting.

The only great thing I see is that the blog post actually confirms what Google said. Because otherwise, it would have been easy for Microsoft to put the finger at the point where Google is wrong.
I worked for one, Pointcast
20 Google Engineers Prove Bing’s Privacy Policy
Public groups or events on FB could work but they suffer two things:

- people not invited, not involved, or random people start to get messages about the event and it becomes noise and adds to the clutter. Interactions around specific and esoteric groups, events or interests in a public forum isn't really the best way to spur real conversations.

- be yourself: post, message, comment, heart what you want in the confines of that topic, event, group. Fridge takes permissions and privacy around access to profiles, pictures out of the picture and lets you post and share what you want with exactly the right people

it all comes down to social context and not having a one size fit all hierarchy of relationships.
I address this later (although probably after you started writing this comment). :-)
Almost everyone under 35 I know who has met a long term partner online and used a dating site used OKCupid. I've known some older 40+ people who used match.com.

I'm 29, met my (now) wife on match.com* 6 years ago.

At least here in flyover country, OKCupid didn't really have much of a deep pool in 2004-2005. I gave it a try but found it primarily populated by 19 year old kids. However, today everybody I know who is "in the market" simply defaults to OKCupid and doesn't even contemplate going anywhere else.

* I messaged a woman during a free trial period match.com was offering, we met for dinner, and we were married 3 years later. I mailed her with a coded email address in the message so she didn't need to pay to reply. match.com did not see a red cent from either of us.
How about this one : Faceless. Social sharing of pictures of your possessions and favorite things that are guaranteed by face recognition not to contain people in them. Find and meet new people by interest, taste.
One single website.

17 Webservers (Apache+PHP)
4 Cache servers (Memcache+Redis)
2 Databases Clusters (MySQL+Sphinx): 1 Master + 3 slaves, 1master + 7 slaves.
The post indirectly confirms Google's claims. Otherwise, it would have been easy for Microsoft to point out where Google is wrong and everybody would blame Google for being stupid.

Instead, Microsoft chose to attack Google 'personally' with non-substantiated claims.
The Personal MBA is a great program and his book is just as good (http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-Master-Art-Business/dp/15...). My wife and I are part-way through both and he covers just about everything you could care to know about running a successful business.

I have a BA and MA from a large state school and found the most rewarding things from my tenure in college were the relationships I built--not the classes. I would NEVER go into debt for a Master's or MBA--it's just not worth it. Find someone else to pay (scholarship, assistantship, teaching) or get to work, it's better experience anyway.
One hotspot to get everything: Reliance TimeOut
I bought a ZTE Blade (Orange San Francisco) for 90 euros in Switzerland for that exact purpose.
>"What is the weight on those signals."

Low enough that it took Google nearly three engineers per successfully injected honeypot (7 honeypots per 20 engineers) and Google was only able to achieve a 7% success rate despite their extensive in-house knowledge of SEO.
Google: we found that bing is copying us. To prove it, we ran this experiment.

Bing: doh, of course we use google results, but we told you that before in an obscure academic paper. Didn't you read that? And we are innovative - shiny pictures!
I think Dribbble and Forrst have become defacto versions of that.
"anonymous click stream data"

It can't be only that. The page where the clicks happen must be parsed for the click be linked to the query and reused at their search engine.

They transformed: "from google.com/q=X, people tend to click on example.com"

Into: "when searching for X, people tend to click on example.com"
I lost over 20lbs in January by lazily following Tim's Slow Carb Diet, as described in the book. I'm currently working on a blog entry about my experiences and observations.

I anticipate losing another 15-20lbs this next month. I'll report back then, the next time a 4HB criticism is posted here.
10 years, and I still don't know what the deal is with the fscking cones...
Of course it's controversial. Someone made a deliberate decision to stir up controversy over this. It's easy to make some controversy if you just use the right words. Words like "Cheating" and "Copying" are great for that.

If you really want examples, just watch Fox News or MSNBC for fifteen minutes. You'll probably see at least one or two examples in there somewhere.
Obvious question --- are there any java web services running at Oracle that take a string input from a form or a URL, and tries to convert said stirng to a floating point variable?
His profile says he works for Manwin Canada... So it's very likely pornhub.com

(Manwin Canada also owns the Brazzers network of sites)
One thing is sure. This episode makes Microsoft look like a cheater, but also Google like a child. I rather Google spend more time on combating search spam and content farms than this concerted "caught-in-the-act" ambush. Instead, Google likes to cheapen themselves with endless argument with everyone (how supporting WebM and Flash is open, how the iPhone world is "draconian", etc).

Just call it "imitation is the most sincere form of flattery" and be done with it, would you, Google? Spend your time improving UI, defend your cash cow against spam, focus on making Android better, be more coherent in your social/location strategies, lead the industry in privacy (not just talk of privacy). All of these will benefit users more.
DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha
NASA in Your Life
That's 380 pages every second consecutively. The reality is probably much grimmer, say, 1000+ page a second during peak usage.

Very, very impressive.
User's Guide to zsh
I'd also add that a sale (probably) looks better, resume and experience-wise, than merely shutting it down.

Saying "I developed a site, made some money on it, then sold it because I no longer had time" is much more impressive than "I developed a site, made some money on it, then shut it down because it wasn't successful enough."
My girlfriend is the assistant director of nursing at a 175 resident long term facility.

She is two months from finishing her MBA online through University of Phoenix and will be taking an $8,500 raise (from $66,500 to $75,000) just for completing the program.

This article discusses what a mistake it is to leave your current job to obtain an MBA while completely ignoring the fact that you don't -have- to leave your job to get your Masters anymore.

"When you look at today’s most evolved business organisms, it is obvious that an MBA is not required for business success."

You could argue that an undergrad degree isn't even required for business success. That's not the point. There are plenty of career paths that having a Masters is still a HUGE benefit and the health care industry might be one of the biggest.

http://www.va.gov/opa/bios/

Read the executive bios for the VA and count the number of people that don't have a masters degree.
What is the difference between rewriting history and changing history by removing things?
It would be interesting to compare the search results of a million or so keywords between Google and Bing using their APIs. I would like to see some numbers behind the overlap.
The impact of adverse childhood experiences on health problems
By your argument. Google benefits from the doing of Bing, unless of course they don't search on the internet. (the internet meaning Bing, as oposed to your comment, where the internet was meaning Google)
As a result about 15% of Americans live below the UN defined poverty line.

This is blatantly false. The UN defines poverty as follows:

1) Severe Food Deprivation– Body Mass Index of 16 or below (severe underweight).

2) Severe Water Deprivation - access only to surface water (e.g. rivers, ponds) for drinking or
living in households where the nearest source of water was more than 15 minutes away –
30min round trip (e.g. indicators of severe deprivation of water quality or quantity).

3) Severe Deprivation of Sanitation Facilities – no access to a toilet of any kind in the vicinity
of their dwelling, e.g. no private or communal toilets or latrines.

4) Severe Health Deprivation – Women who did not receive treatment for a recent serious
illness or who did not receive any antenatal care or who did not receive any assistance with
birth or who did not receive a tetanus inoculation during her pregnancy.
Men who did not receive treatment for a recent serious illness.

5) Severe Shelter Deprivation – living in dwellings with 4 or more people per room (severe
overcrowding) or in a house with no flooring (e.g. a mud floor).

6) Severe Education Deprivation – youth who never attended school and who are also
illiterate

7) Severe Information Deprivation – no access to newspapers, radio or television or
computers or phones at home (e.g. no information sources).

Absolute Poverty threshold is equal to 2 or more severe deprivations of basic human need

http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unyin/documents/ydiDavidGordon_...

There is virtually no one in America suffering from any of these problems. Most of the poor in America are fat, have clean drinking water, flush toilets, watch plenty of TV, and do not have mud floors.
You've missed the point. Sure, it's 'blowing up like mad' but the important thing is that Roxio have been able to turn the Angry Birds game into a brand: selling movie rights (!) something even EA struggle with, so quickly, getting a deal with FOX for marketing and developing a range of real-world merch to go along.

All on the back of one simple little app that looks and feels like a flash game. (i love it, don't get me wrong, but it is not anything special)

Did Harbor Master or Flight Control do this? No.

It takes a lot to think big and that's where the big players are-- and worth a good chunk of money too.
Summary: Compared to those born between 1900 1931, Americans born between 1962 and 1978 were 3 times more likely to have been grown up in severely abusive homes, 5 time more likely to have attempted suicide, 4.5 times more like to have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, 50% more likely to have suffered depression, and 50% more likely to have experienced alcohol addiction. (The actual disparity in lifetime prevalence would obviously be higher because those in the younger cohort are more likely to experience future negative life outcomes because they have more time ahead of them.)

This is all based on self-reported data collected via anonymous survey.
Bing sees that I searched for a term, 'iwejhoihfe' on google and ended up clicking a link to foobar.com/page there, this gives foobar.com/page a relevance with the term 'iwejhoihfe'. Since the 'iwejhoihfe' doesn't show up anywhere else on the web, that single relevant site gains a lot of weight for that term.

This is how Bing's algorithm may have worked, and I wouldn't call it intentionally copying, flawed maybe and easily manipulated just like Google Bombing in the old days.
I call that a SIP client too :)
My understanding is that you are correct. I believe that BigDecimal.doubleValue() does the conversion by (wait for it…) converting to a string and parsing with Double.parseDouble(). Real quick:

scala> val y
y: java.math.BigDecimal = 2.2250738585072012E-308

scala> y.doubleValue()
Hangs

This is one of those “harder than it looks” problems.
While we have no idea why this result is good, Google seems to think it's fine. If it's good enough for google, it's good enough for us.
Have the Bing team expose their algorithms and criterion to the public so they can settle a spat with Google over 7/100 made up words appearing in a set of search results?

That sounds reasonable.
Smokinn got it right. Stats that doesn't appear, we stream 1.2Billions videos/month (doesn't count embedded content).
>Whether it was a type of attack also known as “click fraud,” or not, it does appear to be an attack.

I disagree with describing this as an attack. Based on the kinds of search terms Google has said they used, they aren't attempting to make the Bing results any worse. There is simply no good search result for "hiybbprqag", so Google pointing to the Wiltern Seating Chart is just as good as pointing to nothing at all from the purposes of what any user who happened to Google hiybbprqag randomly would see.

At best, you could make the argument that by revealing that Bing is susceptible to these kinds of attacks, they are making it easier for others to attack Bing. It's certainly illegal to rob a bank, but what about walking down the street yelling, "The bank guards are all gone! The combination to the vault is 1-2-3-4-5!"
News Corp. Has Given Up On MySpace
Rankings analysis always starts with keywords of interest, even though Google can be used to identify keywords by relation. Referrer logs seeding outside sources with gibberish keywords that literally nobody is interested in? That's a stretch.
It's possible, maybe even likely, that the founders talked it over with Kleiner and Index and the VCs allowed them to cash out a bit.
Yes, but only on hapax legomena :)
This is the record:

Searching for "torsorophy" on Google brings up the Wikipedia page for Tarsorrhaphy because of Google's advanced spelling and error correction algorithms.

Searching for "torsorophy" on Bing will (or used to) bring up the Wikipedia page for Tarsorrhaphy because of Google's advanced spelling and error correction algorithms, because Bing watches how people use Google.

Two different kinds of innovation at play, one much more legitimate and impressive than the other. But it's not like Microsoft is in unfamiliar territory here.
How much would you pay for a MiFi style device + plan on that network? I read about one US citizen who was going to have to spend so much, he got a Galaxy Tab for the same price which could perform the same function, plus much more.
The phrasing of "bing is using clicks on google search" implies that google search is a single case (I could likewise claim "bing is using clicks on duckduckgo") that does not extend to others.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "bing is using click data"? The fact that google.com is in a lot of that click data is a questionable decision and the root cause of all this drama.
An open letter to conference organizers
I agree, the real deal is the plan. Otherwise you could get an iPhone 3GS for $49 with AT&T and it would be a much better device than that.
It would be a straw man attack if the author had proceeded to logically refute his own satire and claim it was a refutation of Tim's methods.

Note: the above would have to be done without breaking a smile.
"Install the most recent Flash Plugin to view this site."

I'm getting tired of this.
> "the technique cannot be of the form 'if on google, do x' ... Rather, it is likely they look at what users search and what results they get"

How do they look at what a user searches and what result they get? Ok, the "click stream" can see what pages a user visits.

But to get the search term, they are parsing something, and unless they implemented a universal search recognizer that will rank up results from any old site's search (allowing 20 SEO guys to push private SERPs to the top), it seems more than probable the parser indeed would start with "if on google, do x".
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound partizan. I have nothing against advertising, I was just trying to counter a point you had made. And you're correct - it's stupid to rule out any source of money.
It was published on Direction on Microsoft[1], which is supposed to be an "Independant Analysis of Microsoft Technology & Strategy".

The yearly subscription is $1500.

If [2] can be transposed, non-subscribers can also get the report for a whopping $750.

I couldn't find that report in their archive,though. The only article published on june 15 2009 is [3], which is unrelated.

[1] https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/04/21/idUS223966+21-Apr-... :

[3] http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/update/50-june-2009/678...
Brand New Buffer
The most I can deduce from the experiment is that Bing look at what people click on Google and that plays some role in their search ranking. If you synthesize a term that doesn't exist in nature I can see how a search algorithm can weigh the only datapoint it has, data coming from the toolbar, heavily. This may not the best approach, but a far cry from copying, which is what Bing are being accused of.
I don't think anything about this is clear-cut. I can imagine a very simple algorithm, as follows:

* When query Q gets made more than N times at bing.com,

* Mine clickstream data for the next M urls requested after searches for Q

* Any url that appears more than T times (possibly spread across some number of users) is presumed to have been found relevant to Q, and derived either from later searches (corrected spelling) or curated sites or other search engines. Add to mapping of valid responses to Q.

It's not a very good algorithm, of course, and if you have any other source of information about Q you're probably better off using that instead. But it or something like it could explain the torsorophy example and every other part of Google's narrative, and it's not particularly suspicious or questionable, and it certainly doesn't involve targeting Google.
> The chapter on revising is a seven-line excerpt of an interview with Ernest Hemingway

The underlying advice of that chapter is: rewrite 'till you've got the words right. The advice lying under the underlying advice is: don't ruin a simple message with a long water-filled chapter.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.
I can log in now, but it won't show my phone (it says I don't have one). Weird.
Thank you for saving me from a little more noise in my life. You wrote out exactly what I was thinking and now I don't have to. :)