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miningon The man who killed Google Search?

I searched on mobile, so no ad blocker. There were no ads for that query, and all of the content up to maybe the 5th result was an acceptable answer to the query (i.e. on a site that wasn't plastered with ads)

If I search "plumber" the first 3 results are ads.

I'm in Australia.

miningon The man who killed Google Search?

Searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" on Google turned up the page from "This Old House" immediately (top 3 results, top 2 were wikiHow and a YouTube video that seemed OK at a glance).

I'm not sure why my personal results are often so much better than posts like this one whenever I do the experiment - maybe it's based on location?

miningon The true cost of linked lists

I would probably argue that either the first algorithm is incorrect (because searched can be larger than INT_MAX) or the complexity of the second algorithm is bound both by O(searched) (or sqrt(searched), if implemented with more vigour) and O(1) (because the value of 'searched' is bound by a constant).

miningon Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

> I doubt they decided independently on a back to office date in the same ~1 month timeframe

Given the reason for office closures was covid, I'd guess that companies in the same geographical area would make similar decisions about when it was appropriate to return to office work. It would be more surprising to me if large companies with similar decision-making throughout the pandemic, in the same geographical area, had drastically different timelines.

miningon Neural network AI is simple. So… Stop pretending you are a genius

Almost all of that blog post was complete bullshit. Recursive neural net? I don't understand why that post was written.

miningon It can all go to zero

Saying 99/100 doctors think something medical is true isn't an appeal to authority... Doctors /are/ an authority on medical matters. Programmers aren't an authority on economic matters.

miningon Which lines of longitude and latitude pass through the most countries?

There are infinitely many infinitely thin lines that fit in that band and cover the countries.

miningon Go, don't collect my garbage

I don't know. That seemed like a fairly simple exploration of the problem and an easy library function to solve it. Would it be much simpler in any other language?

miningon Uber London loses licence to operate

If that 95% assumes that people undergo background checks, my assumption is that number might decrease.

miningon Fuchsia: Google's modular, capability-based, non-Unix operating system

> I'm guessing pretty junior with this kind of hubris

If you check their profile their site suggests that have ~15 years of experience.

miningon “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

Depends how you look at it. Dev time is a finite resource, and spending it on supporting a weird combo of user agent and browser seems likely to lead to less user utility.

miningon I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

> Is rampant systemic sexism the reason why 95% of child care teachers are women?

Yes, absolutely. Men are generally treated very poorly if they choose to voluntarily work with small children.

miningon Larry Page Deposition in Uber vs. Waymo

You're usually on-call for a fairly humane shift, not 24h a day.

miningon How to use BeyondCorp to ditch VPN, improve security and go to the cloud

It's plausible that they changed jobs ;).

miningon [dead]

I'm always amused that "know" seems to instantly associate with "memorise" as opposed to "be aware of performance and associated tradeoffs"

miningon Google Will Help Publishers Prepare for a Chrome Ad Blocker Coming Next Year

I think there's a clear difference between an ad that plays sound as part of watching a video with sound, and as part of browsing a website that doesn't have sound / where the ad plays sound over the actual content.

miningon Accused of underpaying women, Google says it's too expensive to get wage data

> Indeed, if women were systematically underpaid despite equivalent performance, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be hired by the boatload. This might be explained by (1) a lack of women relative to men in the developer workforce and (2) a systematic bias in competence.

Or (3) because a huge proportion of perceived performance is subjective. I can't find a study right now, but e.g. http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias... make a decent argument towards women receiving qualitatively different performance feedback to men.

miningon How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering

They're not comparable disciplines. One (in theory) involves trivially replicable experiments (just rerun the binary) and the other does not.

miningon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

It's absolutely good manners for Firebase to tell you "If you fix this thing, your costs will go down."

miningon Ted Seides Concedes Bet with Warren Buffett

It's probably saying that they invest as though recessions that didn't happen were going to happen.

miningon Google: My interview experience

This is good if you assume that there's a desire to improve the quality bar over time.

miningon 220,000 cores and counting: largest ever public cloud job

I'd say no, since the purpose of the GPU there is to make the matmul really fast.

miningon A Competitive Programmer's Handbook

This is relative to other people who had been hired at Google - there's probably still a positive correlation between those two variables amongst the general population.

miningon Software Engineering at Google

http://www.gwtproject.org/

Slightly tongue in cheek (since Google obviously uses javascript), but Java :)

miningon The web sucks if you have a slow connection

I don't think your claim that it doesn't affect the vast majority of users is correct. There's well over a billion people in India alone. You might argue that you were only making claims about US users, but a lot of sites have no reason not to be global.

miningon Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents (2014) [pdf]

I experimented with gensim's implementation of doc2vec this year; despite not being able to achieve similar results in sentiment analysis (because unshuffled datasets in the original paper) it's still really impressive. I analysed some document relations in wikipedia, and it finds some really unusual / neat relationships, e.g. Autism - Cat + Dog ~= ADHD.

miningon Let’s Stop Bashing C

> But it doesn't give one when the cast is in a loop condition. That is weird.

I believe that the justification for that is that you'll often want to do e.g.

    while (node) {
      node.val += 3;
      node = node->next;
    }

Implicit conversion of a type into a bool is pretty useful here, or for e.g.

    while (std::cin >> x >> y) { ... }

miningon My Google Internship

I /think/ (with only anecdata) that this only comes up when you try to convert.

miningon Let’s Stop Bashing C

This is completely false, it compiles in C++ fine. Are you thinking of Java?