Can anyone get the information of Xecuter SX Pro? - <AUTHOR> I found a official reseller form here: http://sky-3ds.com/home/35-xecuter-sx-pro-and-os.html. they promise wiill ship to me the first time after the official delivery. So, I pre-order form the site.Hope that the official can ship as soon as possible? <comment><USER2> [http://www.3ds-linker.com/86-linker-nintendo-switch- xecuter-...](http://www.3ds-linker.com/86-linker-nintendo-switch-xecuter-sx- pro-.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://sky-3ds.com/home/35-xecuter-sx-pro-and- os.html](http://sky-3ds.com/home/35-xecuter-sx-pro-and-os.html)</comment>


WebDAV (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://webdav.org/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago I buit a personal file storage server [0] that was interoperable with OwnCloud and sync based on WebDAV. Over a decade ago I worked on a site builder that used WebDAV under the hood. What I found was that WebDAV is mostly fine if you control both client and server, but then there's less point in using WebDAV. But the allure has always been there: let your users mount your app as a filesystem and update your app's content locally using their own tools, with syncing for free.

In practice, the syncing was never reliable enough for most users, and different clients implement the standard differently. My hope was that it would eventually converge on something interoperable like CSS did, but I don't think there's enough usage for that to happen. And things are moving away from filesystem paradigms anyway (iOS, etc) so WebDAV is slowly becoming even less relevant.

0\. [https://github.com/mnutt/davros](https://github.com/mnutt/davros)

<comment><USER3> _In practice, the syncing was never reliable enough for most users_

I wonder if that's why iDisk went away. Wasn't it based on WebDAV?

<comment><USER4> Yes iDisk was WebDAV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh WebDAV, the protocol I loved and hated the last 20 or so years...

\- There were proprietary implementations NetDrive and rebranded as WebDrive for winNT which set up a WebDAV mount as a drive letter. Worked nicely for code editing in a CMS but completely corrupt files once in a while. Unless you had a SMP machine, then it would regularly blue screen

\- WinXp had the first native 'NET USE' support I think. It was built on top of the HTTP support in the OS but didn't persist state properly, so if you didn't know to disable automatic proxy detection in your internet options, every WebDAV action would take 2 seconds to do a proxy detect, ruining the experience.

\- Actually getting WebDAV to work was hit or miss. It helped to specify the password on the command line to NET USE for some reason

\- office supported WebDAV too, and depending on its mood would either treat a WebDAV drive letter as just a drive, or speak WebDAV natively

\- I'm pretty sure the initial Vista release completely broke WebDAV. Never got it to work properly. Sad given that MS was supposed to be invested in this standard

\- Getting it to work safely on OSX was another challenge, as OSX heavily caches content client side and if the server side content changed, either remount to see the changes or write a tool to send a poorly defined control command to WebDAV to flush the cache. At one point we automated the server to inform a local tool on the macs to do this flushing

\- oh, and automating mount_webdav to log you in requires speaking some property protocol over a fd to the application. Which broke at around OS X 10.10. Got to learn my way around the WebDAV implementation in Darwin back then to figure out both this and the cache flushing. Thank apple for at least publishing the source to this

Well, fortunately I don't need WebDAV as much anymore as I have in the past.

<comment><USER6> \- office supported WebDAV too, and depending on its mood would either treat a WebDAV drive letter as just a drive, or speak WebDAV natively

It's kind of funny that Office still sometimes shows this behavior with OneDrive for Business. If both are reasonably up-to-date (2016+ on both sides) it appears to use the modern new (Microsoft Graph) API that isn't WebDAV at all, but every now and then it sometimes gets confused and seems to fallback to WebDAV or just normal folder operations.

It's probably the Office team's devotion to backward compatibility and supporting the weird number of configurations that enterprises sometimes have between Office client applications and SharePoint server backends. But yeah, it's still easiest to describe as "moody".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not all that related, but we found an exploit in Blackboard (the "virtual learning platform") by smuggling null bytes (0x00) via. their WebDAV protocol.

This made it possible to hijack other accounts, including our professors'. So we hacked our own grades and then reported it.

Blog post here: [https://bustbyte.no/blog/how-we-hacked-blackboard-and- change...](https://bustbyte.no/blog/how-we-hacked-blackboard-and-changed-our- grades)

<comment><USER8> Less exciting, but I found with some reverse engineering that School Loop (basically the same thing as Blackboard) has a WebDAV interface for their "Locker" (file storage for classes) interface. When I was working with it, I was finding that my queries did not work correctly; apparently their client for it did not work either because implementation was borked (which took a while to figure out!). AFAIK they never did fix it once I reported it to them, but the official client ended up being pulled at some point leaving my implementation the only interface to it that I know of…

<comment><USER9> Student here. We use SchoolLoop at my high school and the locker feature has been a pain. Just wanted to thank you for your work on Break. I recommend it to people all the time (plus, it's open source!)

<comment><USER8> Thanks; it's nice to see that people still find break useful. It's gotten somewhat difficult to work on, as I no longer have a live account to test with nor do I use the app anymore, so there are some bugs that have driven me up the wall for years but I can't figure out how to fix. I'll try to keep it running for as long as I can; maybe someone else will be able to figure it how to fix the issues ;)

<comment><USER9> Since I have a live account, expect a few PRs soon, once I get familiar with the code :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We implemented WebDAV (rust/actix-web) for our product and it's great that you can mount it as a mostly native file system on all major OSes, but there are a lot of issues with Implementation:

* Windows sometimes appends a `/` at the end and sometimes doesn't when looking for folders, so you better make sure you return the same results for either.

* Windows WebClient service is buggy as hell. You have no event logs (that I could find) to find out what's wrong and end up restarting the service continuously. this includes if you get your username/password wrong, if there is an interrupt to the server (i.e, wifi drops), etc.. Wireshark is your friend, but it won't tell you why it's not working.

* Forget about Basic Auth on windows, credentials are not persisted across reboots/logouts, and you need to adjust registry to support non-ssl sites at all. Using Kerberos is really your only option, but if you want to use it on non .local domains, then you need to add in a registry key to allow this, as windows assumes that only .local domains would use SSO.

* Last time I checked, Adobe Lightroom won't even save to a WebDAV drive on OSX as it thinks there is no space.

* Lots and lots of noisy connections on both windows and OSX that aren't really needed, but happen anyway. Don't get me started on the amount of temp files that are saved/used, and don't filter them out either as things start breaking like Photoshop and folder uploads.

* Weird error messages that don't give you an idea of what's going on. Error code 100000041? Oh yeah I know what that one is!

* URL size limitations in Windows, make sure your entire path isn't too long!

All in all I am glad we have WebDAV for native-like access, but it is a massive pain to deal with some of the niggly bits between implementations.

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember playing with WebDAV in the early 2000s. Microsoft Windows and/or Office and/or Sharepoint Client had (two!) implementations which supposedly would be able to present a WebDAV share as something that would look and behave more or less like a mapped drive, which would have been a killer feature for anyone developing an online file/document/collaboration service. (For example, imagine exposing your web CMS media library or even page structure as a mounted drive via HTTP). This was long before FUSE was a thing.

Unfortunately, the amount of crazy bugs combined with the unnatural and surprising behavior of Microsoft's two(!) implementations (which one got used depended on which part of the UI the user came in through) made the whole thing a flaky disappointing flop.

Also, the whole XML protocol feels totally over-engineered and overly verbose.

See for example:

[https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webfolder-client- list....](https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webfolder-client-list.html)

[https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webdav-redirector- list...](https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webdav-redirector-list.html)

<comment><USER12> Almost anything XML is over-engineered. It's sad because WebDAV is cool and useful as a "public http drive", and better than FTP as far as reliability.

<comment><USER13> > Almost anything XML is over-engineered.

I hear this a lot, but I feel that with many XML protocols (including WebDAV), if you reformatted them as JSON, people today would think they were pretty reasonable. XML was just the popular style back in the 90s / early 2000s.

<comment><USER5> And it surely beat the other common alternatives at the time for directory listings: raw /bin/ls like formats for FTP or a HTML dirindex for HTTP

<comment><USER11> Did it though? At least microsoft usually managed to parse ftp and html dirindexes. The bugs they had in their webdav clients (see link in parent post) was something else... incorrect/lacking xml entity handling that almost indicates substr'ing for "&" instead of using a real parser, and converting percent-escaped utf8 to percent-escaped latin1..?! You almost have to try to sabotage on purpose to get bugs like these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never really got webDAV to work properly but I gave it a good go. Today I would never think to use it, I am more of an sshfs type of guy and rsync is my friend.

However, what does disappoint me is how things like DropBox and WeTransfer took over with some marketing that just had instant appeal to people. I prefer to have my own 'sovereign' server space and if anyone wants to send me stuff then I want it on the server, not on my desktop. It doesn't matter who it is, but if I give them a network drive of sorts, they can have webDAV, FTP if they insist, ownCloud if they want it, SFTP and all these methods to put whatever the files are on the server. They can even understand that the files need to be on the server and not on my local computer, but no, I get some email about a weTransfer link.

With ADSL the download is fine but upload is that bit slower. So you have to do the WeTransfer type of thing and wait for that, then upload the file to the server. It is never me that really wants the file on the server in the first place, it is always them.

Anyway, I think webDAV died as a thing not due to the flakiness of the implementation but more to do with why it is that people use website builders like Squarespace, why people prefer cPanel instead of some standard issue OS, why people prefer whatever is marketed to them as 'easy' rather than what takes two minutes of critical thought to learn.

<comment><USER15> As a user of cPanel, there's some assumptions you're making in this statement. I can and do build servers, at work. When I'm at home, I just want to do things with as little work as possible. Sometimes these choices are made because it's easier to not have to support every last bit of an architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I learned something a few days ago that made me both laugh and cry:

LoadLibraryA will happily load a DLL from WebDAV through a UNC path. Something like \\\example.com@80\path\to\payload.dll.

It goes without saying that this has been abused by viruses to surreptitiously fetch their malicious code.

<comment><USER17> Is that much different than a get and load in the end?

<comment><USER16> It's a pretty useful attack vector since you can get an arbitrary program to load your payload under certain circumstances, so you don't even need malicious code running if you can find a vulnerable target. _cough_ SharePoint _cough_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is this submission attempting to express? The main thing I noticed is that the webpage hasn't been updated since 2009 and the WebDAV working group appears to have abandoned it for unspecified reasons. I frequently use WebDAV via a very popular iOS app and never had any issues with it, so I'd be interested to know why it has been abandoned.

<comment><USER19> Because the clients/server quality varied (very fragmented standard compared to it's relative use amount) and for what it did plain HTTP or some pre- existing "proper" file exchange protocol likely met the need better anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> During a week in 2013 I setup [http://sabre.io/](http://sabre.io/) to work with storage backed by S3, I think it was about 40 lines of PHP to add user authentication and the S3 storage plugin. It's so seductive since every file manager on every main GUI OS has some support for WebDAV, and you'd think "what could go wrong?" with just file I/O over HTTP... Some months later I even tried setting something up for my old high school teacher for his CS students to copy files over and receive results back, alas the district network policies got in the way and I'm not sure if it was ever resolved.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was recently working on an nginx lua script to aid with impersonation (setfsuid, setfsgid, setgroups) so I could implement a multi-user webdav server, mostly with the goal of pointing it at some existing file mounts and making sure permissions were checked/honored correctly - especially file ownership. I need to test it a lot more, but in case anyone is interested:

[https://github.com/lsst-dm/davt](https://github.com/lsst-dm/davt)

</comment><comment> angus-g FastMail gives me 10GB of storage that's accessible via WebDAV. It works perfectly to back my collection of papers and textbooks in Zotero. That way I only sync the metadata to my Zotero account (which is basically just a sqlite database anyway), and can pretty easily get access to my entire reference collection from wherever I am.

</comment><comment><USER22> Mirror [https://archive.is/O0pi9](https://archive.is/O0pi9)

</comment><comment><USER23> I am using WebDAV as a virtual file system for a personal project. It was the easiest way I could find to make a cross platform virtual file system without invoking FUSE which seemed slightly unreliable on Windows.

It works reasonably well though it is a bit slow. It was pretty difficult to find good documentation though.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use a WebDAV server on my Android phone and assign a drive letter to that from my Windows Vista machine so I can use BeyondCompare to copy my pictures off. I also use it to explore my phone files at a level slightly lower than what the standard apps allow. Probably pretty basic cases, but for me WebDAV has been simple and reliable to use.

</comment><comment><USER25> I implemented a personal notes app recently using WebDAV. It's kind of mind blowing how many simple applications you can use WebDAV for and actually end up writing _no_ server-side code whatsoever. Many things where you might think you need a database for, consider using WebDAV instead.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just used the elementaryOS files app to access my Nextcloud server. A while back it used to be terribly slow but it's actually incredibly useable now. It's a shame this protocol has been shunned. I believe Microsoft Exchange used to support WebDAV for email access...

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I've ever seen it anywhere in Exchanges protocol specs. Would seem an odd fit

Perhaps you're confusing it with Sharepoint?

<comment><USER27> WebDAV wasn't a native Exchange protocol. But it was officially supported for Exchange server 2003/2007, and used heavily by Mac Entourage 2004/2008 to connect to Exchange servers as a supposedly "native" client.

In my experience, Mac Entourage clients connecting to suitable Exchange servers worked, but only for very few clients.

Vaguely remember that the Exchange servers would often get overloaded with the quantity of sync requests from the Mac clients.

This doc mentions that WebDAV was a previously-supported protocol for Mac Entourage: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2009/01/20/ento...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2009/01/20/entourage- meet-exchange-web-services-entourage-for-exchange-web-services-is-live/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What does this do that fish://<ssh connection> doesn't?

<comment><USER29> It has native client support in Windows and macOS, which is kind of a big deal in some scenarios.

<comment><USER28> Fair, but typing fish://192.168.0.108 at home works out of the box for me in Linux (KDE).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We built a Ms word version control system with webav to s3 for our saas product. We couldnt find a better solution for check in / check out. Is there something better?

</comment><comment><USER31> anyone used [https://dokan-dev.github.io/](https://dokan-dev.github.io/) to mount Linux drives on windows?

</comment><comment><USER32> For those that weren't around, WebDAV is one of those historical horror stories, like SOAP and CORBA. "Great in theory..."

<comment><USER33> Yes, WebDAV, XML, SOAP, CalDAV, etc. are from an era in computing where interoperability and common standards were important and demanded by customers. What have XML bashers to show for exchange and long-term archival of documents?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best CMS/Platform/Tool for this Project - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to build a (non-mobile) website that resembles a crowd-sourced blog.  Requirements are thus: (1) users can create accounts, (2) users submit posts (text w/ optional images) (3) users can vote on posts (4) front page shows highest rated posts. (5) users have a (public) page showing all of their submissions.
I'm capable of building something like this, but my gut feeling is that there is a CMS or platform that takes care of most of this out of the box.  My first thought was Wordpress, but I'm not sure it is robust enough to handle all of these features.
I'm a python developer so if I built it I would probably use something like Django, but maybe there is something better?  In my research people have recommended Joomla and especially Drupal for tasks like this, but I don't know php and they both seem to have a steep learning curve. <comment><USER2> I am a python developer and use flask extensively and after having come across it few months back, I can say that there's nothing Flask can't do. I have started making a blogging platform similar to yours though it is not complete and lack commenting feature and voting feature, here's the code: [https://github.com/scottydelta/miniblog](https://github.com/scottydelta/miniblog)

PS: you need to create required db and have data to see it working in case you plan on forking. Fortunately I am using sqlalchemy so models.py has the db schema.</comment>


How Go Daddy got its name, its logo (and what they mean) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bobparsons.me/9/how-godaddy-got-name-logo-mean.html

<comment><USER2> Since I can't downvote this Go Daddy story, I'll just put this here:

<https://www.gandi.net/>

(I don't work for them)</comment>


It seems that Google is forgetting the old web - barry-cotter http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-is-forgetting-the-old-web/ <comment><AUTHOR> While it's become impossible to browse the wider Web with Google, it's getting a bit easier elsewhere.

A few helpful search engines:

* [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

* [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

* [https://pinboard.in/search/](https://pinboard.in/search/)

A recent movement to build personal Yahoo!-style directories:

* [https://href.cool/](https://href.cool/) (my own project)

* [https://indieseek.xyz/](https://indieseek.xyz/)

* [https://districts.neocities.org/](https://districts.neocities.org/)

* [https://the.dailywebthing.com/](https://the.dailywebthing.com/)

The above resources are focused on general blogging and personal websites - for software and startups, I would refer to the appropriate 'awesome' directories. ([https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome) or [https://awesomelists.top](https://awesomelists.top))

If you know of any more, please list them - a small group of us are collecting these and trying to encourage new projects.

<comment><USER2> There's also Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb, a curated directory of (hard or impossible-to-find) avant-garde art, music, writing, video. Launched in 1996.

[http://ubu.com](http://ubu.com)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb)

<comment> Funes- This one's great. I've lost count of how many films I've watched that I would have never found otherwise.

Here's another big art repository:

[https://monoskop.org/Monoskop](https://monoskop.org/Monoskop)

And a very well-documented collection (a "wiki") of paintings, also non- profit:

[https://wikiart.org](https://wikiart.org)

<comment><USER2> +1, I forgot about Monoskop, a truly fascinating resource.

Another interesting one is Aaaaarg (according to Monoskop's wiki, originally with one less "a", acronym of Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group):

[https://aaaaarg.fail/](https://aaaaarg.fail/)

[https://monoskop.org/Aaaaarg](https://monoskop.org/Aaaaarg)

Basically it's a collaborative environment for reading, annotating and discussing texts. The content is submitted by users and (thus) of high quality.

I think you need an invite to access the community. Also, the domain used to be aaaaarg.org, but I think they faced copyright issues of some kind and had to find an alternative domain. (Not sure about this; excellent new suffix, though!)

EDIT: More precise description:

[https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/aaaaarg- org...](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/aaaaarg-org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This author is in his own little bubble and doesn't understand the vast amount of blog-repost spam that google has to deal with. The way their algorithm most likely deals with this is a mixture of domain rank + tenure... how long has _this_ copy of _this_ article existed on _this_ domain, and can we be sure this is the original copy?

The author says the article was removed in 2006 (" _[...] posts, were not accessible anymore_ ") and then he re-posted the article at a _new_ domain in 2013. That means any copy/crawl/repost of the article from 2006-2012 is now the oldest living, and thus "original", version of the article. His 2013 repost was seen as just another blog-spam copy.

Google is not forgetting the old web unless we see evidence of content disappearing from the index that have been consistently hosted at the same domain & URL since their original posts. Unless you properly 301 your URLs to new locations and consistently host your content, it's a guessing game for the crawler to determine where the original content has moved to.

<comment><USER4> Here is an example:

[http://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/metallica__5.html](http://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/metallica__5.html)

No matter how you search for the content on Google, _nothing_ comes up:

[https://www.google.com/search?q="Metallica+only+played+2+son...](https://www.google.com/search?q="Metallica+only+played+2+songs+from+St.+Anger")

DuckDuckGo has it:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q="Metallica+only+played+2+songs+fro...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q="Metallica+only+played+2+songs+from+St.+Anger")

I checked the wayback machine and the content has constantly been on that url for over 10 years.

This is the first example of an old forum page I tried after reading the article. So I tend to think it's true. Google is discarding the "classic" web.

<comment><USER5> Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months? They've had to have been utilizing ML to 'improve' searches for some time now, but the quality of the results has decreased suddenly and inexplicably (for me).

<comment><USER6> > Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in > the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months

Yes. Not just over the past 2-4 months, but over the past five years or so.

It's become so bad that Google is no longer the most useful search engine for me.

<comment><USER7> It all started going downhill since Google's "Hummingbird" switch to be honest. Interviewing for Google, I actually brought this up with an engineer in the search team during the lunch.

He said they haven't noticed any regressions. I said I figured that would be the case but I can definitely feel the difference as a daily user.

<comment><USER8> This is indicative of a larger issue - testing is probably as difficult as solving the halting problem i.e. code could be generated from proper tests, yet teams tend to trust their tests completely. I see high profile websites having severe usability issues or being outright broken in ways that would be immediately caught by "interns randomly click here and there" usability tests. But these version got deployed probably because testing did not show any regressions.

I tend to believe that if user complaints about new problems or regressions increase over statistical noise - there is a problem.

<comment><USER6> > yet teams tend to trust their tests completely.

Well said. This is a big problem. We see a similar problem with the use of telemetry data as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have noticed that searching for exact quotes seems to have been broken on Google for a few years. But only _minimally_ broken. And I've had no idea how to reason with it. This article completely corresponds with problems I've encountered with searching for results on StackOverflow or software documentation sites; it's especially perplexing that "site:..." combined with exact quotes _does not work_ for many cases.

Google certainly doesn't seem to value feedback at all. It's practically impossible to get in touch with a human to ask for help and Google's feedback forms have _always_ felt like a black hole.

<comment><USER10> I too noticed that for some queries, Google is becoming really, really unwieldy.

I can't recall the exact search term, but I kept looking for some site I visited some time ago, and no combination of words could get it to actually find the actual site. I finally just gave up and found it in my browser history.

<comment><USER11> I've "lost" a few sites that way. Forgot the address, can craft several searches that years ago _definitely_ would have brought up the exact site I want. But... nothing. Or it's buried so far in the search results I'll never find it. I need a _good_ search on top of Google search, these days.

To be fair DDG rarely works for me in that way, either. I think that kind of old-school, precise search engine's just dead now. It seems like everyone's indices are a lot "fuzzier" and full of holes, like they're discarding large parts of pages from the index if those parts don't look important to the algo. Not just deprioritizing, but tossing those pieces out entirely. Except the algo's very wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Deprecating" might be a better term than "forgetting." Google's business isn't driven by long tail content. Probably it never was.

Maybe somewhere there is a Google disk with the the hash of an exact phrase the author typed into the search box. But statistically, that hash won't be found in hot memory vector space when cosine similarity runs on a nearby server. Finding the phrase would require a batch job that runs much longer than the engineered time limit Google imposes on search queries. Without a "let me know in 24 hours" option, Google's search will partition data into what should and shouldn't be accessible. That partition will always be according to Google's business goals. All the information may be indexed, but only the fraction of the index beneficial to Google will ever be accessible to ordinary users.

The crux of the story is that there is no business case for Google to return the author's web pages in search results even if the Wayback Machine implies that Google could.

</comment><comment><USER13> I maintain two web sites that date back to 2003. They are still very active (thousands to tens of thousands of uniques per day), but I and my users have noticed that only the more recent content (2012+) shows up in Google.

In a way I'm had to hear that Google is delisting the older content because I thought I was doing something wrong.

But it's still frustrating for my visitors because every few months I get a message about how they can't believe all the information there is on the site that they've searched for for years but never found through search engines but it's all right there on this one site. (It's something of a regional history site.)

I guess those sites have involuntarily become part of the "dark web."

<comment><USER14> Is it possible to check your access logs, see if google how much google, others are spidering?

I know very little about google's SOP, but had the impression they periodically rescan stuff.

<comment><USER13> I've built new sitemaps, submitted them to Webmaster Tools (or whatever they're calling it this week), requested a re-spider, everything.

Duck Duck Go finds it and shows it. According to the logs, Google spiders it, but chooses not to show it.

<comment><USER15> Google's spider is weird anyways. I have a site that has sitemaps submitted like three months ago and it still hasn't taken a look at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This has been been happening for years and getting increasingly worse. But it's not just old websites. I think it's certain types of content.

Here is one specific example out of dozens I've seen. There is a short satirical rant "published" on Pastebin called The Java Way. Posted in 2015. Unfindable on Google. It was indexed and findable around the time it was posted.

[https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22the+...](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22the+java+way%22+pastebin)

First result on DDG:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+java+way%22+pastebin&t=ffsb...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+java+way%22+pastebin&t=ffsb&ia=web)

The worst part is that Pastebin uses Google for its own search.

<comment><USER17> Amazingly, three hours after your post, this hacker news comment is now showing up in the top 5 for the Google query. Wow.

<comment><USER16> Not on my version of Google. But for me it started showing this as top result:

      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+java+way%22+paste...
      No information is available for this page.
      Learn why

I tested this on different browsers and IPs. Seems like it indexed the link from this thread, but can't display it because of DDG's robots.txt settings or something like that.

Bizarre.

<comment><USER16> Just for historic record: Google finally started showing a link to the original pastebin page and it is the first result. I suspect it's because someone submitted the page to HN, which shows as the second result now. ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19609280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19609280))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When web directories like Yahoo lost out to web search engines like Google, we lost something crucial. While search is good for answering questions you know how to ask, browsing was exploratory and led us to know what we didn't know. When it comes to learning a complex topic like mathematics, this kind of serendipity was very useful. There are some amazing resources on the web, but googling won't let you discover those.

Sometimes, the same idea is available in a book, in a TED talk, and in a podcast. Some of us are curating such resources categorized by topic / format / year / difficulty / estimated time. Our GitHub repo received 100+ stars in less than a week, so I thought it would be a good time to show it to HN. I'd love to get some feedback and critique from the HN community where I have learned and discovered so much.

Here's the Show HN post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604295)

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Awesome' directories have really given a nice resurgence to the Yahoo! style of organization. I think the problem with Yahoo! is that it simply got too big to be used as a directory. Niche directories are where it's at. (Also: Reddit wikis, which often are used similarly.)

<comment><USER19> > Niche directories are where it's at.

Agreed. And if we came up with a standard format for such lists you could make them searchable and we could end up with distributed searchable curated indexes that are not centrally controlled. And that is quite compelling compared to centralized fully algorithmic search systems run by mega-corps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Personally I have similar experience, but other way around. Every time I try look for anything in Google almost always most of results are from 3-6 years ago unless I specifically specify I want results from last month / year / etc. And I not just talking about technical questions, but all kind of stuff include music, travel information and such. I not even sure when the last time google provide me the link to some new website with fresh content.

Like it's sometimes feel like web completely frozen and all content moved into closed gardens. I switched to DDG a while ago for this and bunch of other reasons, but I wonder if someone else noticed this. Anyone?

<comment><USER21> I don't think your "3-6 years ago" and "forgetting the old web" are incompatible. I've noticed the same - Google seems to gravitate to results from 2014ish, even when newer information is available, or when I'm searching about an event from far before that time.

<comment><USER22> I thought I was going crazy with this 2014ish search result dynamic. I almost always have to use date filters to find recent information. Especially when trying to research products, reviews, types of products, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have a site that includes lots of older content. I checked the first page that came to mind (published in 2005) and it still shows up on the first page of Google results for the obvious search terms. So it certainly isn't as clear-cut as 'everything older than 10 years is not in the index'. _update_ checked another circa 2003. It's also on the first page of search results for a search on its title.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have been noticing (what appear to be) truncated search results in Google for some time now. At first I thought that was because I was accessing Google through Startpage. But that's not the case.

Anyways, I find myself using Bing more and more often these days, because the search results dig more deeply into the 'obscure'.

I'm not at all upset by this. It seems to me that as Google's results are not completely satisfactory, more people will make use of various alternatives. Maybe one day, search will become decentralized again, somewhat like it was in the 1990s, when you regularly made use of many search engines, like Altavista, Lycos, Excite, and Yahoo.

I would imagine that there must still be metasearch sites out there somewhere that submit your query to several search engines. I need to find one again and would appreciate recommendations.

<comment><USER25> The meta search engine www.dogpile.com still exists but I'm not sure how good it actually is.

<comment><USER24> Found a very good one. In case anyone's still reading this thread: searx.me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The assertion that this is because " _indexing the whole Web is crushingly expensive, and getting more so every day_ " is a bit flawed. Since old content is very unlikely to be updated, it doesn't have to be re-crawled a lot. I'm certain Google has a score that tells it how often the content of a given site is likely to change. This argument of expense becomes even less durable when you consider that DuckDuckGo, a company with an infinitesimal fraction of Google's resources, is perfectly able to keep that kind of content in its database.

I agree with the observation that this is about shifting everything to current data, because people overwhelmingly care about things that happened a few days ago. There used to be a long tail of users searching for old data and references, but I suspect they're fading away. Biasing the index towards recency also has legal advantages for Google, because delisting old content makes it less likely to receive takedown requests in connection with "right to be forgotten" legislation.

<comment><USER27> Crawling isn't the real problem, nor is the bulk storage for the crawled pages.

What do you do with these pages after you've crawled them? You need to build an index out of them, and serve that index out of some kind of low latency storage (DRAM, Flash). That makes increasing the index size very expensive. The index size has to be limited, and selecting the right pages to include in the index is thus a core quality feature for a search engine.

<comment><USER26> I'm having trouble imagining that Google would be more limited by the ratio of hardware power vs data size today than it was in the early days. If keeping the whole index in DRAM is now a requirement, then yes, I'd expect a hugely reduced overall dataset - but wouldn't that affect way more sites/pages than the comparatively few dropped historical records?

I still suspect that this whole thing is more about bias (and personalization, be it correct or incorrect) in the results.

<comment><USER28> Google's index has been in memory for most of its life now: [http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/jeff-dean-keynote-at- wsd...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/jeff-dean-keynote-at- wsdm-2009.html)

It's actually more complicated than just a single static index, which is also why it's unrealistic to expect a search engine to be deterministic at scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's not just the old web. I have a small website that does not show up in Google's results. When searching for the title of the site it's the 7th result on DDG yet does not appear on Google at all (Google runs out of results after 19 pages, which is also ridiculous considering the search is very common). When I search for the domain name (sans tld) on Google the associated YouTube page is the first result, also an unrelated Twitter account, and even a Reddit comment that links to my website (Reddit is a more effective search engine!). But my website is not listed. Finally, if I search for the full domain name the website shows up as the first result.

This has been a problem for three years, it's incredibly frustrating, and also demotivating.

<comment><USER30> Google does have some webmaster tools where, after you prove you own the site, you can check if there's something you have to fix about it to get listed, can submit new URLs for them to scan, etc..

<comment><USER31> Even if your site is perfect according to Search Console/Webmaster Tools, that won't get you listed on Google Search.

<comment><USER32> Google Search Console will tell you what pages were submitted (via sitemap) and what pages are indexed as well as any errors.

<comment><USER31> Yes but they _don 't show up in the fscking search results_ even for highly matching searches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I would not be surprised that if along the way, googles search results were optimized for income of ad revenue, over other metrics - knowingly or not.

I to have complained about the search results of google going down hill. I was told "I was just to technical".

Whatever the case, the web is not the same as it was in the early 2000s and it really is sucking if you are wanting to search for something.

</comment><comment><USER34> Google Scholar started to forget articles [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19599365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19599365)

<comment><USER34> Downvoted against the evidence given. Anybody cares to explain why? Thank you.

<comment><USER35> I didn't downvote, but you link to a comment by yourself that isn't much longer and links to a blog post by yourself, and you already made a comment with basically the same content elsewhere in the thread. That's close enough to spammy self-promotion to get you downvoted irrespective of whether people agree with you

<comment><USER34> The newer coment is one hour after the older one. I made it after I was downvoted. As for the spammy self-promotion, thank you, I linked to a HN comment (made yesterday, relevant to the matter but with no reactions at that moment) instead of the blog post directly exactly because I don't want to replicate links. Finally, while these comments will fade from attention, if not already, that blog post will remain, excuse me for giving first some evidence that's something wrong with Google Scholar. Obviously spam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Funes- From my experience I can say that the web is filled with garbage that tries to exploit whichever search engine you may be using, while also trying to exploit your own attention with flashy headlines and sensationalistic content. These two go hand in hand.

It wasn't that long ago that any Google search would return a big list of blog entries; personal, non-commercial blogs, that is. That was the case with YouTube, as well. I remember people making and uploading videos just for the sake of it. Even I did that (I had a January 2006 account), and the purpose was only one: sharing what you liked to engage in. Nothing more. I guess that's part of the long-gone, old web. When I browse the web nowadays, I feel like I am constantly being sold something, because I actually am.

<comment><USER6> > I guess that's part of the long-gone, old web.

That old web still exists! It tends to get drowned out by all of the commercial sites, and you won't find more than a hint or two of it through Google, but it is still there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Previous discussion from when Tim Bray's article was posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840)

</comment><comment><USER37> One of the changes that made Google forget the old web is favoring https sites. This is a big benefit to new and commercial web sites because setting up SSL is still a burden for non-comercial publishers.

<comment><USER38> I feel like LetsEncrypt is a 5-minute burden. Unless I'm being naive - I've only used it in personal projects. Thoughts?

<comment><USER39> Plenty of websites out there being kept up by volunteers without hardware access, the original owner having died or otherwise gone MIA. It's not always possible to add https, particularly when the site owner died 10 years ago and someone has an 'agreement' with the hosting provider to keep a website up as a memorial. No, I don't have any specific examples right now, but anecdotally I occasionally come across a website that's been in such a read-only form for as long as a decade due to family members being willing to continue paying the $15/year hosting fee, but not having the technical knowledge, passwords, or interest to fix problems. Sometimes there's evidence of a partial upgrade (the search engine stopped working due to a php upgrade), or a forum that has been converted to a static site entirely (the login buttons don't work either). In any of these cases, getting LE working is almost certainly more trouble than it's worth for whoever is currently paying the fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Google has, for quite some time now, preferred magazine style websites that grow exponentially.

Their search engine algorithm is designed to favour rich media content and websites that are growing, because this is how Google grows and learns.

Favouring the "old web" would not help Google's business model which favours growth.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's very worrying that people seem to forget how Google plays around with their platform and tinker with the results, because for a lot of people Google Search is HOW they navigate the internet. I'm most disturbed by how articles critical of Google completely banish.

An article from 2011, it's not particularly damaging anyway, just the kind of things that happen in tech:

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-busts-itself-for- distri...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-busts-itself-for-distributing- malware/)

If you search the title of the article:

\- DuckDuckGo: First result

\- Bing: First result

\- Yahoo: First result

-Dogpile: First result

\- Yippy: First result

\- Google: Does not show (I've gone through the 4 pages of results with no luck). To find it you need to use the "site:zdnet.com" option, and then it's the first result.

</comment><comment><USER42> Holy shit. With all the other reasons to consider abandoning Google the one thing I've held on to is the depth and reliability of their search results. I just _assumed_ they would never abandon their core strength in this area.

This might be the straw for my personal camel's back.

</comment><comment><USER43> Worth noting that was an de-indexing bug this weekend affecting all Google servers and a lot of pages.

Might be just that. More information: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/googles- de...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/googles-de-indexing- issue-still-not-fully-resolved-but-google-is-working-on-it-315070/amp)

<comment><USER44> Non-amp link: [https://searchengineland.com/googles-de-indexing-issue- still...](https://searchengineland.com/googles-de-indexing-issue-still-not- fully-resolved-but-google-is-working-on-it-315070)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Unfortunately google is the only way to search old usenet archives from the web, since they bought out such archives. That search leaves much to be desired.

Only the relevance search has results for usenet posts, you can't order by date, and other then using date ranges, there's no way to only see usenet posts.

For example searching for "gamer" before 1/1/2000:

relevance [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22gamer%22$20befor...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22gamer%22$20before$3A2000$2F01$2F01%7Csort:relevance)

date [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22gamer%22$20befor...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22gamer%22$20before$3A2000$2F01$2F01%7Csort:date)

<comment><USER46> Well Usenet provider Giganews has 10 years of Usenet, but I don't know if they kept it from 1990 or... just threw it away.

<comment><USER45> Ten years doesn't even go back to when google bought dejanews's archive, in 2001.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Author says:

> I also find misleading the title of BoingBoing's report of this story: > "Google's forgetting the early web". The two posts mentioned here are not > "early web", nor really "old".

While the title of this author's post is "Indeed, it seems that Google IS forgetting the old Web"

</comment><comment><USER48> > But this only makes bigger the problem of what to remember, what to forget > and above all who and how should remember and forget.

And today, if the big search engines decide something will (no longer) be indexed, they can make it effectively unreachable.

<comment><USER6> > they can make it effectively unreachable.

I think you mean "unfindable", not "unreachable". It may seem pedantic, but I think there's a critical difference there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> For better or worse, Google is very explicitly not a card catalog though. One might disagree about how Google determines relevance--and the criteria are opaque. But, in any case, it's quite different from a card catalog which, with the caveat that the work in question must be part of the library's curated collection, is completely non-judgmental about the relative importance of a given item.

<comment><USER50> It used to be. I remember when one of the selling points of google was how many pages they indexed and how fast your search came back over that data set.

I guess no one at Google is getting a promotion by making sure old pages can be returned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The reason is simple: apparently they are not making money on old content searches.

<comment><USER52> And the reason they are not making money (I'm guessing) is because older web sites are much less likely to use one of Google's spying plugs, such as Analytics or Fonts. Or the ads themselves after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Interesting that DuckDuckGo has it first.

Increasingly I've found if I know _what_ I'm looking for (ex: a specific article or web page), DDG is quite good at finding it.

Google still excels where I'm looking for info on a topic but not sure what I need. (You end up treating search terms like labels on a venn diagram whereas DDG is more traditional, using search operators to prune the list of possible sites)

</comment><comment><USER54> Can we add (2018) to the title?

</comment><comment><USER55> "Reputable SEO company from India" is to blame.

</comment><comment><USER56> [https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Seven+Things+we%2...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Seven+Things+we%27re+tired+of+hearing+from+software+hackers%22&meta=)

Works for me

</comment><comment><USER57> It kinda makes sense google thinks using a Pareto distribution (Matthew Effect) is correct, people search on popular topics, so popular results are typically the correct one.

BUT... now we have a big problem with what google filters and promotes. It has altered its search engine to ignore search modifiers in some of its products. Such examples, Google wants to be in the TV/Entertainment business so its promoting hollywood above content creators. And many results favor CNN/NBC on its platforms, even with "exact title searches". Its using its business models to override consumers wants.

Its like google turned the search into a BuzzFeed top 10 generator.

</comment><comment><USER58> When searching Google for simple words that should return a lot of content the results are limited to around 20 pages. If I click the link to not omit similar results it changes to around 45. The results don't cover every company in a specialist area or every good article on a topic, what's more after you go back a number of pages the results start turning into junk. That seems unnecessarily harsh on any relevant site that isn't a "top site". The x-billion results returned number is still at the top from the days when you could search through a seemingly infinite number of pages.

</comment><comment><USER59> Here's a blog post I wrote recently on a similar topic:

[https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/02/google_i...](https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/02/google_index_coverage/)

On my website, the Google index coverage is clearly falling with age of the content. According to the Search Console only about 60% of my posts from 2006 are indexed.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just yesterday I was thinking to myself that the results I was getting from Google where more artificial (paid, SEO, etc) and less organic than before.

That means I am getting less and less value out of my Google searches these days, but only from certain topics like e.g. recipes / food searches. Coding and technical searches tend to return high quality results, but that may be because StackOverflow exists...

</comment><comment> Const-me I think google applies arbitrary undocumented filters to their output. I have noticed it more than once, e.g. see this comments thread, couple weeks old: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19420383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19420383)

Personally, a year ago I have switched the defaults to duckduckgo.com on my devices, works OK for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER61> It should better develop an algorithm to forget (deprioritize) old posts on subjects in which old posts actually are irrelevant. I.e. tutorials on old versions of actively-evolving technologies, top-10-best-mobile-apps-for- something posts from past years etc.

<comment><USER6> Tutorials on old versions of software are not universally irrelevant. Sometimes, for some people, they are invaluable. I know such tutorials have been godsends to me before.

"Relevancy" is very context-dependent. I don't see how a human can accurately determine it for others, let alone algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it should be job of other sites to keep an "index" on certain subjects and make that searchable via Google. Just like Wikipedia, just like Reddit, just a lot of other content aggregators.

</comment><comment><USER62> I thought part of Google's ranking algorithm includes how often a site is updated? Perhaps there's some inclusion of how often an article is accessed which also determines a page's ranking?

</comment><comment><USER63> I've had the opposite issue when searching for how to do something in perl. I'll frequently get 15 to 20 year old results from the perlmonks.org website instead of something more recent.

</comment><comment><USER64> Google is the new Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER65> >Unless we're all missing something here, it seems more correct to say that Google forgets stuff that is more than 10 years old.

"The right to be forgotten"

</comment><comment><USER66> It's not just the old web. Google's results for political content or content with political implications have become increasingly strange in the past couple years. I noticed this when trying to recall the story of a false rape accusation that occurred on my college campus when I was a student. This saga consists of three articles: a) initial reporting of the reported rape]([https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2012/09/cornell-police- inve...](https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2012/09/cornell-police-investigate- reported-attempted-rape)) b) [a police statement that they had irrefutable video evidence that the initial report was false ]([https://cornellsun.com/2012/11/28/cornell-police-report- of-a...](https://cornellsun.com/2012/11/28/cornell-police-report-of-attempted- rape-on-campus-was-false/)) c) [an article defending the school's policies on sexual assault in light of a and b]([https://cornellsun.com/2013/02/25/after- false-report-cornell...](https://cornellsun.com/2013/02/25/after-false-report- cornell-defends-new-rules-for-sexual-assaults/)). All three of these articles are impossible to find unless you search for exactly the right thing.

For example, if you search for "Cornell Police: Report of Attempted Rape on Campus Was False" on Google (the exact title of the second article), you find it. But, if you search for any variation (e.g. "Cornell Police: False Report of Attempted Rape on Campus") - the later articles (b and c) are impossible to find.

I've never been able to find a satisfactory explanation for why the discoverability on these articles has been turned to zero. I _think_ that there are some odious websites devoted to covering false rape accusations, and these articles may be inheriting the low reputation of the publications that link to them. Or, perhaps the hosting website (student newspaper) is doing something to de-rank the stories. In all cases though, it seems wrong that in response to a query "cornell trolley bridge false rape accusation 2012", Google's top results would be "Why false rape accusations are rarer than you think"

</comment><comment><USER67> Sounds like _somebody_ is ripe for disruption.

</comment><comment><USER68> I disagree with the author.

Google is the old web, no wonder The similarities between Hoolie and Google.

(hooli is a fictional company in the HBO series Sillicon Valley)

</comment><comment><USER69> My guess is that Google prioritizes new content over old with the argument that it is more relevant.

</comment><comment><USER70> This article itself could use a 2018 tag (does that make it part of the old web? ;) ).

</comment><comment><USER71> google is the dual of the old web, the old web was a jungle, that's why we wanted google, and now google is the urban regulation body

</comment><comment><USER72> Gotta make way for the new spam.

</comment><comment><USER73> Matt Cutts fallout.

<comment><USER74> What do you mean?

<comment><USER73> Matt did an incredible job at Google search and left in 2016, since then it's been downhill, not entirely because of him, but it's certainly a noticeable effect, especially if you followed Matt's google search related Q&A's, videos, etc when he was at Google.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. It seems to me that Google started going downhill before 2016.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I think this is not "forgetting the older web" but the algorithm simply penalizing things that look like they pretend to be from the past.

<comment><USER76> That would be interesting, because it seems like a lot of blogs pretend to be from the present by updating the post/last modified date frequently but leaving the content the same as several years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Google is pretty much useless for anything older than a few years, as well as for many less popular topics. I can't even remember how many times Google decided to drop a crucial word in my query to show me something, anything, instead of admitting it pulled a blank. Instead of playing the endless game of "intitle: filetype: inurl:" just use something else (DDG maybe).

<comment><USER78> DDG is much better to get a wider scope of search results while Google is good for personal things. Most the old forums and post do come in the first DDG search, but not on the first Google search. I have started to hate Google's Personalised filter bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I think it is more of a case of google suppressing information to the mass public. Relevant information is becoming harder and harder to find with their search, and let's not forget Project Dragonfly.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yep. And I thought I was the only one thinking Google's brainwashed web isn't representative of what's out there. It's not only the old stuff, though. I have a suspicion Google won't show you pages without Google ads on them.

</comment><comment><USER80> Google's profit is driven primarily by ads. The old web is no longer the primary target for Google. Companies like this should probably stop pretending they are non-profit charity or labeling themselves as enablers of a 'better world'. At least this way people would have more realistic expectation, but hey, why should a mega-corp care what people really want...

<comment><USER80> downvote all you want...

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> The post unflatteringly compares Google with DuckDuckGo. But doesn't DuckDuckGo use Google's technology?

<comment><USER82> No, it uses Bing AFAIK

<comment><USER83> Not only Bing, from their docs:

"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."

(Regarding search results + instant answers: [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/results/sources/))

<comment><USER28> How current is that page? Yahoo used Google since 2015.

<comment><USER84> That just raises the question: To what extend does DuckDuckGo still depend on Bing?

I've asked before, and no one seems to be able to provide me with a source that states that DuckDuckGo is just Bing. Yet it comes up every time DuckDuckGo is mentioned in a positive light.

<comment><USER28> Does anyone outside the company know how DDG works? IIRC a job description hinted at their backend being in Perl, but little else has trickled out. It's easier to find out how Google works, through patents, presentations, the Percolator paper, etc.

Saying that Bing is one of hundreds of sources is like saying that PageRank was just one of Google's 200 signals. Or that Google was just one of hundreds during Bing's hiybbprqag brouhaha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> _Bray writes that: "I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google's competition is doing better."_

Those who forget the past are doomed...to be marketed to again.

As Vernor Vinge noted (he popularized the notion of "The Singularity") not indexing something basically amounts to erasing it from the awareness of the majority. If you can control the past, you can control how people think about the world. If you can control the past, you can control the present. The ability to quietly erase something from popular consciousness amounts to a huge chunk of power.

There should be a concept like Net Neutrality. Perhaps there should be a search neutrality -- if you're going to index, you need to index _everything._

<comment><USER86> It's literally impossible, and it was never true in humankind history.

<comment><USER85> If it's literally impossible, then we're doomed. Being able to choose what to index is can literally be used to censor reality for most of the population.

 _it was never true in humankind history._

Basically everyone using search was never true in humankind's history.</comment></comment></comment>


Autonomous Boats Could Service Some Cities, Reducing Road Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/news/228215-autonomous-boats-could-service-some-cities-reducing-road-traffic/fulltext <comment><USER2> This article reads like a freshman essay. Autonomous boats! Self assembly! 3D printing!

Ignores the big issues: * For large boats, fuel is expensive. The person operating the boat is a tiny fraction of the cost. * Maybe electricity is the idea? The article doesn't say. * Shifting city garbage to the night? Collecting aggregate garbage isn't really the problem. The problem is getting it from the alley to the truck. No boat is going to help here, unless you're in Venice.

This article doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Even the model doesn't accurately represent the dreams of the article; it clearly is not a 2x4m hull.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have used NYC ferry service, and it is awesome. It is a resounding success with people that use it, but it costs the city money. (The fare is the same as subway $2.75 but the true cost is $5.60+ per trip).

[https://www.ferry.nyc/routes-and-schedules/](https://www.ferry.nyc/routes- and-schedules/)

The other problems is that it doesn't run often enough, and in good days it can get overcrowded, but in bad weather days it is underused.

Having a fleet of autonomous boats will allow to:

1\. Run the service more often, (smaller but more frequent boats)

2\. Have more routes/trips

3\. Scalability. Have more boats ready for peak demand. (it is harder to scale when you have hire and train humans, but if it is all autonomous, that it is simply of an issue just buying more hardware and deploying them on demand).

<comment><USER4> They might _eventually_ be able to cut costs a little by automating the job of the helmsman (coxswain) in confined waterways where there are few navigational hazards. But automated ferries will still need trained seamen on board for safety to deal with the situation in case of a man overboard, flooding, fire, or power loss. A boat isn't like a car where it can just pull over on the side of the road and the passengers get out.

<comment><USER5> The USN though they could skimp on training on ship operations.

Oh lets see that's not working so well as quite a number of captains and senior staff are getting (rightly) crucified at courts martial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nope. Never. Not going to be a thing. Have a look at any busy harbour. Look at all the various ships, aircraft, and even animals moving about. Ships need humans onboard. They need the adaptability to handle strange situations in strange circumstances. They also need to anticipate how the other human- operated ships will react, something AI is horrible at atm. And at night? It doesn't get any easier at night.

Harbours are the hardest part for ships. Built me an autopilot that can reliably handle ocean crossings (not course holding, actual safe ship operation) first before telling me that it can handle a busy harbour.

<comment><USER7> > Harbours are the hardest part for ships

I know almost nothing about it, but don't ships have to hire local pilots to navigate harbors, due to the local knowledge and complexity?

<comment><USER8> Yes:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/nyregion/an- apprenticeshi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/nyregion/an- apprenticeship-to-become-a-sandy-hook-pilot.html)

<comment><USER9> That dude is linehandling with a tie and white shirt. HAHAHA. Fake new site so it doesn't surprise me. I deal with the new sailors who come out of these maritime institutes. There is no substitute for OJT.

Can you imagine getting the tie pulled into the wildcat. Youch. That has to be a OSHA no-no. Dopey picture. Like $70K fine in my world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Actual article (this one is a teaser): [https://news.mit.edu/2018/fleet- autonomous-boats-service-cit...](https://news.mit.edu/2018/fleet-autonomous- boats-service-cities-reducing-road-traffic-0523)

</comment><comment><USER11> why do these boats need to be autonomous?

<comment><USER12> In San Francisco the typical ferry requires at least 3 crew members. There's a captain, two deckhands and sometimes a coast guard officer (I'm assuming to prevent hijackings which an autonomous system wouldn't be liable to).

A few years ago when BART workers went on strike the ferry service had to call in all available workers. The people they brought in were clearly amateur, they needed a lot of supervision and seemed to struggle with assisting with the docking/undocking procedures. Boating requires a lot of labor, and it seems like there isn't much of it that's trained and ready to work.

<comment><USER13> Why doesn't SF have a better ferry system? Almost everything in the bay area is within 5min of... the bay. Seems like a no-brainer. What's the hold up?

<comment><USER14> Outside of San Francisco, a lot of the bay shoreline is not much more than acres of foot-deep mud and salt flats.

[http://www.charts.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/18651.shtml](http://www.charts.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/18651.shtml)

Sierra Point, Coyote Point, Redwood City are the only current viable ports along the south. Creating new ports for a ferry system would involve a lot of dredging in addition to the infrastructure construction, which is not only costly but severely impacts the already damaged wetlands that line the bay.

<comment><USER15> I wonder if hovercraft might be an option that wouldn't require the dredging. I.e. [https://www.hovertravel.co.uk/](https://www.hovertravel.co.uk/)

EDIT: I guess it's been considered before in 2011 [1] But it appears that the hovercraft themselves were more expensive and carried half as many people. But compared to the cost of dredging for ferries, maybe it's still cheaper?

1\. [https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/11/01/east-bay-looks-to- hov...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/11/01/east-bay-looks-to-hovercraft- for-ferry-service/)

<comment><USER16> > But compared to the cost of dredging for ferries, maybe it's still cheaper?

I think the point is that it doesn't matter, if it's simply not cheap _enough_.

The shallowness of the estuarial coastline _significantly_ drives up the cost (be it with dredging or more exotic technologies like hovercraft), and that's the (short) answer to why we don't have more ferry service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really nice and all but I'm pretty sure shortage of workers is not the reason this doesn't already happen. But if this helps to raise money / grants, I'm for it.

<comment><USER18> It may not be a shortage of workers, but that hiring the required workers makes the boat too costly to operate at the price point they want.

That said, given the number of variables you have to consider when operating watercraft it seems like a challenging problem to completely automate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I could see a company like Disney using autonomous boats for WDW as it's all a pretty confined area. If you haven't been there, they use a lot of boats to ferry people around. (Actually think they already are using some autonomy for their show rafts but not 100% sure)

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash First time in a while an HN headline made me laugh.

I've lived in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York most of my life. I've sailed, done jet skis, onboard motor, offboard, name it. Loads of boating experience all around.

And yet every single time I dock it's always a struggle to time and execute it _exactly right_ , even with fair weather, even with someone else to jump off and tie the boat up to the dock.

Autonomous ferries are the dumbest idea I have read on this site in a long time. The complexity is light-years beyond the trials and tribulations of Tesla's "Autopilot." People could drown, or at least keep themselves afloat while the water ruins whatever electronics they brought aboard.

I would sooner trust an autonomous car than an autonomous ferry, and that's after reading about those Uber/Tesla crashes.

<comment><USER20> Have you ever tried to fly a quadcopter drone manually? It's _really hard_ ; I could barely get one to hover, after hours of practice. Yet AI quadcopters that can fly in ornate formations and execute complex maneuvers are well known [1]. Don't discount what AI can or can't do just because it's hard for humans.

Other advantages in ferries' favor; unlike most streets, the docks for autonomous ferries could be designed around the AI's capabilities. Also, ferries don't travel at 70 MPH. :)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4) (6-year-old video!)

<comment><USER8> Things not in ferries' favor: wind, water currents, depth, other shipping which is often not very maneuverable and yet moving fast, no lanes, complex rules about giving way to other boats, and no ability to fail safe (just turning everything off is dangerous, possibly deadly).

Ferries crash real good, too (read to the end, about the second crash):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Staten_Island_Ferry_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Staten_Island_Ferry_crash)

<comment><USER9> Did the ferry's crash because they were autonomous?

No quite the opposite. Human error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Personally I would freak out. It would be just like being in an airplane completely on Autopilot with no pilots even for emergency. Except that this is on water, and not air.

<comment><USER22> It would certainly be a novel way to kidnap a bunch of people over the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This has the same problem as Musk's pneumatic tubes. When it fails, people are trapped. One mistake and you have a boat full of dead people.</comment>


Whatever happened to Microsoft's $150M investment in Apple? (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/20/what-ever-became-of-microsofts-150-million-investment-in-apple/ <comment><USER2> It also settled the lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft over the Windows GUI stealing from the Mac GUI. They agreed to share IP and trade IP and work together.

Microsoft hasn't done so well in the smart phone market like Apple has.</comment>


AT&T's fascinating third-way proposal on net neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/15/atts-fascinating-third-way-proposal-on-net-neutrality/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like the idea of my ISP providing me QOS controls, but this isn't that. The outward facing branding looks like user control but is just a runaround to keep their peering links saturated for their not-opted-in customers. Is this not just hiding paid prioritization under an opt-in system?

Also, this is about charging the 3rd parties now, but smells like paving the way towards charging customers for access to non-saturated links on a per- service basis.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you start a data vendor/broker business? - <AUTHOR> I have a few niche markets where I think there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to create Bloombergs, Capital IQs, FactSets or even CrunchBase or CB Insights like offerings.<p>I just have no idea what is involved in such a business. How do you approach data sources? What is your value prep to them? How do you price these things? Amongst many many other questions <comment><USER2> Follow the intrinio guys, they are an interesting case study on how to set up such a business

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a data source. Approach me with a price and list of what you want, then we talk.

Millisecond Precision BTC price? Yes I do!

Everything has a pricetag. Same for other data sources.</comment>


PrioVR: Get your ideas moving - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yeitechnology/priovr-get-your-ideas-moving

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, the original title was "Kickstarter for Full Body VR Suit". Surely this one, "PrioVR : Get your ideas moving" is a lot less descriptive?

<comment><USER2> FWIW (I see this has dropped off the front page now), I agree with you. The former title actually explained what the link linked to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Has anyone tested the tech this is based on recently?

I tested it last year and it didn't work too well, but would be very interested to hear if they've ironed out the bugs since then.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've sent YEI a message to inform them about this thread, so hopefully we will have some official response.

<comment><USER3> Hello, my name is Steve and I am a developer at YEI.

We've worked a lot with the inertial sensing technology behind the suit, and have found it to be stable and well-suited to the task of motion capture. The biggest thing that can go wrong with this kind of technology is the presence of large magnets or ferrous objects nearby, but even in the roughest environments we've taken the current version of the suit to(mostly conference halls with giant steel beams running through them), we've always been able to calibrate it to work in the environment. There are also ways to automatically account for temporary magnetic distortions by relying on the gyroscope.

Outside of these sorts of distortions, inertial sensing has always seemed like a solid option for mocap to us, and one with a lot less potential for error than an optical or IK based system. I'd be glad to hear about any bugs anyone has experienced with inertial sensors in the past, and I can let you know what our system does to alleviate or sidestep those issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> VR seems like its getting incrementally closer to becoming a real thing. I wonder though, would that have been true without kickstarter?

<comment><AUTHOR> I really hope this gets funded.

As popular as the Sixense Stem kickstarter is (exceeded its target within hours), its severely limited by the max number of sensors (5) in its working radius for full body immersion (joint positioning in particular) or multiple player usage.

We really need something like this in order to push the boundaries. The alternatives cost a small fortune.

(p.s. Not affiliated, just really want this to happen.)

<comment><USER5> Well one alternative could be something like kinect, if you're willing to stay in one room. Although that might be harder to make really low latency?

<comment><AUTHOR> Overlooking the optical limitations of the kinect, think of the potential uses for equipment like this.

Accurate motion capture anywhere (think of what we already achieve with GPS and limited device gyroscopic data alone), full body augmented reality (your body is the controller, lol) while walking down the street, the obvious VR and gaming implications, etc.

This is so much bigger than the ability to hit a ball around or wiggle your booty on a TV screen IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great, until you walk into a wall!

<comment><AUTHOR> You could walk around the perimeter of the wall to 'calibrate' your safe environment, although thats dependent on the sensor drift (they say its very accurate).

I'm assuming with the combination of all the (multiple) inertial sensor data they could probably account for that to a pretty accurate degree.

<comment><USER7> Thats cool but still, what do you when you hit a wall in real life but could still go on in the direction in the virtual world ? That would need some confusing repositioning i would guess

<comment><AUTHOR> I would expect the game itself to modify its virtual world to account for my physical boundaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is this an improvement over using a kinect to sense full body motion?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kinect: is basically an optical sensor so it requires line of sight. It utilizes computer vision and a 3d depth map (generated by using an IR projector and receiver) to make an educated guess as to your bodies orientation. Line of sight (needs to see you), Field of View (need to be within range), Body orientation (need to look humanoid, i.e. upright with 2 arms and legs), movement speed (not faster than the optical sensor or IR projector), clothing (not too baggy), lighting (low IR), etc, can all effect the (limited) accuracy of the kinect.

PrioVR: A system like this provides accurate positioning of all necessary joints in your body to form a true 3d representation of your skeletal orientation without any of the optical limitations or guesswork of the kinect. You could also use it outside, walking down the street, with a laptop in a backpack. i.e. it could be used for augmented reality in any situation.

In the future, I would expect a HMD (some kind of visor - an oculus with a camera in the short-term maybe), a full body suit (like this), and some gloves (the next project these guys will be working on) to be how we augment reality. I don't think we can let this opportunity slide, which is why i'm being so vocal about it!

<comment><USER8> The new Kinect for the XboxOne seems to have vastly improved on the limitations of the Xbox360 Kinect. The PrioVR seems to be too ahead of its time. We don't have the battery tech to power all the tech you would be carrying on your body to play any immersive games for an extended period of time. Therefore, you would more than likely be tethered to a power source. If you need to stay in one location, might as well use a Kinect where you can be entirely free of wires. Powering just a visor would seem more feasible than a whole gaming rig. In addition, the current get-up seems cumbersome. I don't imagine that most consumers want to spend time strapping a multitude of sensors to their body just to play a quick game. The sensors themselves are great, but until we can shrink them down enough to embed them in actual clothing, I don't think we'll see them in commonplace usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that the kinect is more convenient for casual gaming.

That said, I have yet to see a convincing demo of the new Kinect, so far only having seen increased resolution on the depth visualisation. By the very nature of the technology it will still have the same limitations as its predecessor.

The technology in the PrioVR may be a more cumbersome than ideal, but the proposed sensors are already smaller than those shown in the visualisation ([http://i.imgur.com/oSBEloE.png](http://i.imgur.com/oSBEloE.png) \- the middle ones are the new sensors). As for further miniaturisation, well it has to start somewhere (hence kickstarter, i guess).

As for power usage, this kind of device (low powered sensors with a single wireless hub) combined with a mobile phone and some kind of communication bridge would likely give you hours of full-system use (the PrioVR, this: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041280918/vrase-the- sma...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041280918/vrase-the-smartphone- virtual-reality-case) for display and some bridge to access the mocap data on the phone) off a simple 5Ah battery. Or you could go the oculus route, and just have a laptop in a backpack, powering everything through USB.

This isn't just about gaming. This is capturing full body movement for usage in a huge variety of applications. I'm worried that given the current traction this project has, it will fail to fund, and we're going to end up setting back immersive AR/VR for another decade.

<comment><USER8> I agree that you have to start somewhere for miniaturisation, but if this technology is introduced prematurely and consumers don't take to it, you may be doing more damage than if you just let the tech mature in labs and commercial applications. Just look at the Virtual Boy. VR tech died at the consumer level when that failed.

I doubt that you could get hours of gameplay. Maybe if you were playing something very simple, you could do hours, but a fully immersive world would destroy battery life.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought a quarter was pretty small (in UK here, so not sure of the comparison). In my opinion, this company is bringing what is currently a multi-thousand dollar setup down to consumer price levels. If they don't get the response they expect from this campaign, who is going to invest the millions to make it smaller? Surely that WILL be the death of these type of systems?

As for power usage, graphically intense 3d games on the iPhone 5 have about 2-3 hours battery life on a 1.5Ah battery (thats screen, CPU, GPU, etc), so I'd say its still perfectly realistic to expect hours. I don't know the power usage of this kit though, but i would expect it to be low solely based on its function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much more would it cost to get the wireless version that they show in the video and most of the pictures? This Kickstarter is only for the wired version which seems archaic in comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its important to note that only the sensors are wired. They connect into a hub on the chest (which transmits wirelessly), so you aren't tethered to anything.

The wireless sensor version (which they sell as a professional mocap device) costs about $4000 (which is still inexpensive for a current mocap suit) [http://www.yeitechnology.com/productdisplay/3-space-mocap- st...](http://www.yeitechnology.com/productdisplay/3-space-mocap-starter- bundle) (plus straps).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Multiplayer fights are going to be bloody...

</comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty awesome. I can't wait to play online multiplayer FPS games with this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm so excited with all these recent advancements in consumer VR!</comment>


Quantum Entanglement - <AUTHOR> https://leimao.github.io/blog/Quantum-Entanglement/ <comment><USER2> If you already know what a vector space is and what a tensor product is and you recognise and understand bra-ket notation I would say there's a very good chance you already know what quantum entanglement is.

So who is the target audience for this?</comment>


The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/106LQoUzt-41OMt4ssyizwIMNUjn893f4/view <comment><USER2> Could also be labeled "Meta-Surveillance: How to make a list of everyone interested in Surveillance" given that it's hosted as a google drive document instead of _any other sane format in the world_.

<comment><USER3> It's a PDF.

<comment><USER4> I know what PDFs look like, they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner. It's a Google page wrapped around a PDF.

<comment><USER5> >they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner

I don't understand how can someone who doesn't even bother to logout out of his google account or use something like firefox containers care about privacy. The document has to be hosted somewhere no matter what and google drive isn't any worse than random web page which uses google analytics.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't Google Drive show the identity of someone reading the document to other people reading it, or at least the owner? That's worse than just collecting analytics internally at Google.

<comment><USER7> No. If you aren't authenticated, it shows your presence in a shared document as "anonymous [metastable animal designator]"

<comment><USER6> I should have made it clear I was assuming that people were authenticated to their Google account. I think most people who use GMail never log out, and might not check the URL and realize they were navigating to a Google doc.

<comment><USER8> Then you entirely missed the point of the comment you replied to: that if you willingly impose google surveillance on yourself you really don't have any space to complain about being reminded of it.

<comment><USER6> I think you're missing my point that even if you willingly impose Google surveillance on yourself, Google Drive is still worse than Google Analytics because your personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers, not just Google.

<comment><USER9> > personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other > readers

View activity is not surfaced to users. View activity is tracked, and in a _GSuite domain_ (such as your job) an admin can audit that activity. For a standard Google account, a user cannot know whether another user has viewed that document, let alone which user. Is there a way you're seeing this that I'm missing? If so I'd like to know about it so I can raise it as an issue.

If you're thinking about docs/sheets/slides presence, unless you've been shared directly on the document the owner (and other users) only see "Anonymous <Animal>".

If the document is shared to you comment/edit access, that comment/edit activity _will_ show up in the document's activity stream, but at that point the owner of the document already knows you have access by virtue of sharing it to you.

I realize you probably don't have much incentive to believe me, but as an engineer on Drive I can say that we take privacy incredibly seriously.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared Google Drive documents since then.

If it's not the case that the owner of the doc can audit activity, I stand corrected.

EDITED TO ADD: I suppose the root of my confusion is that it's pretty hard to distinguish the behavior of Google Drive from Google Docs; and once the lack of privacy has been observed anywhere (e.g. using Docs the workplace), it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me" list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

<comment><USER9> > Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the > workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a > particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Right, which is the notion behind the Activity Dashboard in Docs too (GSuite only). If you left a doc open and watched who popped up, you can effectively know who views a document, so it was exposed as a panel instead. You can disable your own activity showing up for document editors (which applies retroactively) from that same pane. ([https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png](https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png))

Obviously, in GSuite especially, view activity is recorded and your GSuite admin can audit that activity, but that's kind of an obvious need for a business.

> Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared > document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared > documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that > sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared > Google Drive documents since then.

If you open a link-shared document, it add it to your Shared With Me list (and Recent list), but none of that is visible to the sharer. If you're worried about even "Anonymous Fox" showing up, go to the /preview url, e.g. [https://docs.google.com/document/d/<docid>/preview](https://docs.google.com/document/d/<docid>/preview). This still adds it to Shared With Me/logs events on your account (it'll show up in your Quick Access results), but none of it is visible to the sharer and they won't even see your icon.

> it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google > Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

This is a struggle, I agree. I work on it and sometimes I struggle to remember what applies on GSuite vs. consumer. It's a complicated product and therefore doesn't have one straightforward answer, especially in light of the myriad of policies that GSuite admins can enable/disable. For instance, whether we even record your search queries in Drive (for showing as recent searches in Drive) is controlled by a policy your admin can set.

> It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite > environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me" > list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

Right. Consumer: shows up in SWM, GSuite: shows up in SWM & you show up in Activity Dashboard to editors (unless you turn it off as shown in [https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png](https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png) \-- it may default to off in your organization anyways).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Heh, I missed the first ' and parsed the title as

        (The Color of Surveillance): ([Monitoring of] [Poor and Working Peoples Reading List])

instead of

        '([The Color of Surveillance]: [Monitoring of Poor and Working People])' [Reading List]

but I suppose the latter is partially about the former anyways.

<comment><USER11> Same here. Initially thought this was about libraries monitoring what poor people read.

<comment><USER12> Yes, that was confusing. I've repunctuated above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mirror in case Drive crashes: [https://sdan.cc/archive/CoS4%20Reading%20List.pdf](https://sdan.cc/archive/CoS4%20Reading%20List.pdf)

<comment><USER14> here's another mirror _in case drive crashes_

[https://gist.github.com/philshem/71507d4e8ecfabad252fbdf4d9f...](https://gist.github.com/philshem/71507d4e8ecfabad252fbdf4d9f8bdd2/raw/d4d45eb07cb8a1ee2cc1e9d449ba700bfcb8bbf9/CoS4%2520Reading%2520List.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lists don't make good HN submissions, because the discussion ends up being about the lowest common denominator of the items on the list, making it generic instead of specific. Generic discussions are less interesting because there are fewer unpredictable things to say. When threads turn generic, they become repetitions of previous discussions, and usually turn nasty, almost as if that's what the mind turns to for amusement in the absence of new things to chew on.

It's better to pick the most interesting item on a list and submit that. Curiosity thrives on the diffs between a new thing and other related things.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20lists%20denom&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20diffs&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER15> It's a shame, because some of those links are really interesting.

If they only included a little bit of a narrative, they could easily make those links take on new meaning. Maybe even mixing examples of old with new (like the surveillance and terrible abuses toward labor leaders in the 19th century)

I think the list is a good starting point for something a little more cohesive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kind of amusing that this PDF is hosted on Google's servers, given that Google is running the largest surveillance operation in history.

<comment><USER17> That would be the NSA, which I guess is the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Raw pastebin of the PDF contents here (Google Docs/PDF lol) so even those of us with JS off can view it.

[https://pastebin.com/raw/baHYyHyX](https://pastebin.com/raw/baHYyHyX)

</comment><comment><USER19> The title is quite confusing. Maybe a moderator could improve it... The content is good.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wait, poor working people read?

<comment><USER21> Every time I hear that term it's typically university students (and their professors or related groups, in this case Georgetown Law) co-opting that label and projecting their ideology on an idealized group of people whom they don't have much in common with (besides some vague anger at society and elites) - yet are convinced they know what's best for them... often pushing mass centralized systems as the solution.

Systems that these same people will just happen to control and then later the 'vanguard' never actually gives up said power to the working poor. This story has repeated itself in history a bunch of times and it continues to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the hands of the Chinese government being on such a list could get you sent to a reeducation camp. The US isn't there yet, but "yet" does too much work here. If you ever wonder why pro-gun folk are so adamantly against gun registration, remember the yet. If 1A won't hold, 2A through 10A likely won't either.

<comment><USER23> And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to organize.

I would argue that in the modern world strong encryption and other safeguards against surveillance much more worthy of of 2A protection than firearms..

<comment><USER24> People have this idea that gun owners would stand in an empty field shooting at tanks with their handguns, and whoever won in that field battle would win the control of the country, which is quite silly. First, if enough gunmen rose up, the US would be ruined, and the tyranny with it. Sure, they can bomb any rebelling city, but those rebelling cities are their cashcows. Enough of those destroyed and the tyranny is less profitable than freedom; too many of those destroyed and the country as a whole is ruined. Even if the factories are not ruined, big population losses would be equally bad.

Or they can do terrorism. Assassinations, sabotage of infraestructure. Tyrants live somewhere, and they send their children to school. Collaborators(which probably would be civil servants, police and the army) also need to sleep somewhere and have children and family. They could just be shot while going home, or killed by IEDs while patrolling. Infraestructure is much easier to destroy than to repair. Killing the power grid or destroying a bridge hurts the rebellion as much or more than it does the dictatorship, but I don't think they would care much.

Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop overreaching.

I agree that it is quite foolish that these people support things which actually work against them, but do not understimate what hundreds of thousands of angry gunmen could do. Even if they didn't win, they would ruin the US. And making tyranny less profitable than liberty is a good protection against it.

<comment><USER25> Basically, terrorism for freedom? I have hard time to find situation where it actually worked that way in the past.

If it would be that easy, ISIS would do it long time ago.

<comment><USER26> > I have hard time to find situation where it actually worked that way in the > past.

US?

<comment><USER27> That was armed insurrection, not terrorism.

The difference is more than just "the winners write the history books". The methodology was different. The patriots/rebels/insurgents weren't setting off truck bombs in city centers in the hope of making people not oppose them, and not just because they didn't have truck bombs. They weren't trying to assassinate the governor. It was fundamentally a war, not terrorism.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>