Laravel/PHP: Swapping out the pagination class to your own - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@polymermallard/laravel-swapping-out-the-pagination-class-from-lengthawarepaginator-to-your-own-294c9d281ff <comment><AUTHOR> I had some trouble swapping out paginator classes in Laravel so I wrote an article about my experience in case it helps someone else in the future.</comment>


Google Instant Search Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy& <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem.

I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were _much more relevant_.

In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being taken to these shallow landing pages smothered in ads? Does anyone else think Google's search results are now _far less relevant_ than they were 5 years ago?

I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for.

<comment><USER3> Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error.

Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently.

Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can _type_ ). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.

<comment><USER4> it's funny you bring this up because we were just discussing site performance at work today. what i took away from it is this: speed is mostly relevant when there's a competing product providing similar value and you risk losing business due to inferior user experience.

if google were far better than their competitors at providing what users want (relevant search results they don't have to dig through) they could take 5 seconds and it wouldn't matter. the added value of getting what you want on the first try at the top of the page would keep people using that product.

yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results.

<comment><USER5> _yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results._

Are you sure?

<comment><USER6> Are we talking about opinions here? If so, I have mine, and: I agree with him. I might spend 500ms waiting for my search results but my greatest annoyance is still having to spend 10 minutes trawling through SEO 'content' to find a legitimate website.

<comment><USER5> _Are we talking about opinions here?_

Sorry, that was the point. We could talk about opinions, sure. But all major search contenders do significant user research into how people will react to much less significant changes than Instant Search. This change had its but user-tested and dogfooded for quite some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this little change is going to fundamentally change the internet landscape.

a) no more long tail keywords. those people will see an answer before they get to the part of the phrase that makes it longtail(so if you ranked for that 5 term keyword...too bad). i.e. if you rank for "best auto insurance companies", you've now lost all your business to those who rank for "best auto insurance"

b) much faster searching for users = less traffic for you. If you are below the fold...chances are that you are screwed. Why bother reading below the #5 result...if I can just add a few more keywords to narrow my search? Basically the scrolling is going to take me longer, than it is to adjust my search phrase.

c) much more focus on auto-complete. Before you'd see some auto-complete strings, that would show only 2-3 hits a month according to Google. But now this same string might get a few thousand, just because people are automatically shown those results.

Overall I find that it's good for users, good for high ranking websites, and bad for everyone else.

This is going to make the SEO thing much more competitive, since it essentially eliminates the long tail.

<comment><USER8> For me (and I'll admit it perhaps doesn't apply to others), it has almost no effect. I use the firefox search box mostly.

<comment><USER7> same, but search box is only good for your first search

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My opinion is that this is a challenge to Microsoft. _"So you want to compete in search, well match this! See whether your server infrastructure can hold up!"_

Having used the feature for a while, what I've found is that I basically don't finish typing. I just stop when I have good enough results. At first I found it annoying, but after I got used to it I found it very nice. Now I find myself annoyed that it isn't built into chrome's search bar.

<comment><USER10> The fact that it's not built into Chrome's search bar means that I will never see it after the 5 minutes I just spent playing with it. I've been searching from my browser, whether Chrome or Firefox, for a long time now.

<comment><USER9> How long do you think it will be until there are plugins giving you the same feature in Firefox and Chrome?

<comment><USER11> Marissa Mayer apparently said: " _Sometime in the next few months this is something that will be activated in the browsers_ "

via: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-chrome/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Speaking from a UI standpoint, I find the leap of the bar from the middle to the top of the screen to be very disorienting. I know that the middle-of-the- page input field is a real visual trademark for Google, but if they want to push this feature, they might have to move the box up to where it is currently leaping.

<comment><USER13> You would have to test it but I think some sort of non-distracting animation could help (a quick fade-out and fade-in maybe – even if it's only a few milliseconds long). Actually moving the search bar up with an animation would most certainly either take too long or be so fast as to be equally or even more jarring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the main issues for advertisers (as far as I can tell) is that this increases competition for the keywords which Google predicts first, and decreases traffic for the other keywords.

This already happened with Google Suggest, but I think that Instant search will result in even more users only interacting with the first suggestion.

For example, the term "social networking" will now get far more traffic than "social network", because it appears first. If I wanted to search for "social network", I can't just type it, I have to type it, press down, then press enter. Otherwise, I'm still searching for "social networking".

It creates more of a winner-takes-all market in search terms.

<comment><USER13> No you don't. Type "social network" (no quotation marks) and press enter, Google will then search only for what you typed, without the suggestion. It's not exactly obvious that you can do that but it makes sense. You can use Instant just as you used Google before and still get the same behavior, they seem to have taken great care of making this behave exactly like before (i.e. typing something and pressing enter will only search for exactly what you typed, pressing enter adds an entry to your browser's history just as before, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure if this was covered elsewhere, but this actually changes the SEO game in a subtle way. imagine you could rank for the term online deg but NOT online degree.

SEO's rejoice, this could be profitable for consultants and linkbuilders.

<comment> brown9-2 I'm curious if users will actually change their behavior because of this though.

For example, if you decide you want to go to google.com to search for "online degree", are you likely going to stop in the middle of typing your phrase when you notice some results appear?

For me the lag between typing and displaying of results seems a little too slow for this to really happen.

<comment><USER16> One of the articles I read talked about Google mentioning this....their research showed an average pause of 300ms between keystrokes (crazy!) but only 30ms between eye saccades, so users are looking around 10 times for every keystroke.

<comment><USER17> If I'm hunting and pecking, I'm looking at the keyboard, not the screen. Those saccades are most likely happening during the typist's search for the next key to hit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Could you please link to the actual announcement, not the front page of Google?

Google release their products incrementally, so not everyone has access to new features at the same time.

There's others in the thread who also don't have this in their locale yet and are also reduced to guessing.

<comment><USER19> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672461>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm really curious how they will count ad impressions in this new system. Can anyone find any comments on that? Google is CPC, but the number of impressions has a dramatic impact on price.

<comment><USER21> [http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187309)

Excerpt:

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

      * The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page
      (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).

      * The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing
      Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.

      * The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three
      seconds.

<comment><USER22> Three seconds? Yikes. Will be interesting to see how this impacts big money PPC spenders...

<comment><USER23> By definition it won't affect PPC spenders at all unless someone clicks on the ad. You can only buy CPM ads on the AdSense network.

<comment><USER22> It has the potential to drastically alter search, which thus would drastically alter PPC. The likeliest negative outcome is the gradual disappearance of any traffic driven from long-tail search keywords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a logical extension of the trend to do ever more computation on every key press. Think spelling correction and auto-complete. But here instead of just a local process every key press invokes hundreds of remote machines, required to assemble a single search results page. It's impressive and decadant to think your cat walking accross the keyboard can light up whole racks of remote machines.

<comment><USER25> > every key press invokes hundreds of remote machines,

Not really. Apparently Google has an improved cache system for the most common keywords. The pre-computed results come from just one machine.

<comment><USER26> Not really. Personalization, location, etc. affect a lot. I can't find the page I was reading, but it appears that in just running through all the first letters and seeing what is suggested (a is for...) some users are seeing personalized results. And if personalizations are showing up right from character 1, caching results can't really play a big role. Not at the user level anyways; results can certainly be cached further back, but multiple computers will be used just to decide if you deserve personalizations.

<comment><USER27> The fact that you see location and personalization affects the search result doesn't actually mean that they perform a real search using the query that you are actually writing in your search bar.

One possible way (I'm not sure exactly how it works at google, but I can guess) is that the search result is computed in many steps, one of which searches the indices and generates a list of relevant results, which then are passed to a personalization layer which modifies (reorders, merges, trims) the index results and finally it's passed to a presentation layer which renders the html page (perhaps there are other layers too, irrelevant for this discussion).

So, the "instant" search would basically replace first layer, the actual search in the big indices with a precomputed search list for each phrase generated by search suggestions (or a cache of these, which is filled by actual searches if the element is not present). The personalization layer would be free to do things to that precomputed search results, incurring into smaller load because of several reasons: a) fewer users have personalization and on fewer b) personalization has to access less data, and the whole search retrieve functionality is more IO bound than cpu bound.

As for location, there could be one of these 'caches' per location.

I'm sure that they don't do any query "as you type" because the 'instant' page result is always the result of the first "search suggestion". Try to type "F#" (as user 'singular' suggested), the first suggestion is "f to c", and the search results are about temperature conversion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this is Google's way of training the average user to search like a pro. Many people don't understand that sometimes it takes multiple queries to find what you need. This seems like an extremely effective way to communicate that and encourage users to fiddle with their queries.

</comment><comment><USER29> This change has the brilliant side-effect of coaxing users to give more specific descriptions of what they are searching for.

Before instant search, a search term was sufficient if it brought up the desired result in the first page or two, but now users will continue typing until the page they are looking for appears in the first two or three results.

Google could (for example) use this info to come up with better descriptions for subsets of ambiguous searches, improving the relevance of search suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER30> They're talking about it live right now <http://www.youtube.com/google>

</comment><comment><USER13> And it doesn't break the back button! I was a bit worried about that but you can either make a 'snapshot' of the current search results by pressing enter or clicking the search button (just like before only without page reload) or by just waiting a short time (about three seconds), presumably so as to not clutter up your browser's history.

It's a really smooth experience and they seem to have though of everything.

<comment><USER31> Managing browser history was the #1, #2, and #3 issue I had to deal with when I was doing a similar project. If you are very careful and clever (I recommend the jQuery history plugin) you can make it work properly, but it's a headache.

Google has made it very slick, although they at least have a fallback: "oops, Google Instant won't work on this browser ( _cough_ , IE) so here's Google Brewed." If you bill your service as instant search, you need to work with even lame browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is really cool, though I think I'd have to change my search habits dramatically to really benefit from it. It'd probably be better suited for people who don't know exactly what they're searching for. Then again, I wonder if it would just confuse them further.

<comment><USER33> It sounds like it would be confusing... but they let you switch it off, so all the best to them.

<comment><USER34> The other angle is: most of the time I use the omnibox etc to search, so I don't interact with Instant at all, but having it there on google.com for the few times I am searching for something more complex (misremembered song lyrics are a favourite of mine) is also useful.

<comment><USER33> True. I guess it depends on your working pattern.

Personally I start with the browser's search field, but then (dunno why) if I need to make some changes I do it in google page itself (about 50% of the time, I'd estimate). So I think It will just annoy me to have Google try to give me results a fraction of a second earlier like an overly keen student: I personally don't feel the need and instead I feel it will disrupt my thought flow.

That said, I am not criticising Google. I think it's one impressive piece of technology and much kudos to succeed. And as you pointed out there will be many people out there who will be able to add this to their searching procedures, and for the rest of us we can always disable it.

It's win-win. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I for one turn off google suggestions on every new pc/browser I use, it is a distraction to me and actually causes me to type slower. Maybe because I've been in front of a computer constantly for 15 years but I can type my term much faster than being distracted by results and clicking on the dropdown for them.

I just wish I could disable this account wide so every time I clean my cookies/cache in Firefox I don't have to go back to preferences and turn it off again.

<comment><USER36> OTOH, with this feature sometimes you are going to change what you're searching before finishing it, because you can already see you're going the wrong way.

Also, it has tab-complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Do we really need this? Isn't the time it takes to finish a query the last problem on our hands? Or am I just a spoiled fast typer?

<comment><USER38> Wasn't Outlook good enough? Did we really need faster search in Gmail?

This is gonna be one of those things you didn't know you needed till you got used to it, then you'll look back and wonder how you ever lived without it.

<comment><USER37> Well waiting for your computer to respond can be really frustrating. Having to finish typing something isn't so bad. For me anyway. So it'll help, but for such a huge infrastructure overhaul, is it really worth it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> That is genuinely impressive. Never seen anything like it before on any other website. Not sure it's needed now with the great autocomplete but it sure looks really great.

<comment><USER40> I built something like it a few years ago:

<http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder>

No autocomplete, though.

<comment><USER41> As did I, back in mid-2003. Of course, it was just an excuse to try out the then-new "Google Web APIs" :-)

<http://lars.com/tools/IncGoogleSearch/inc-google-search.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Try typing "fuc" -- it's smart enough not to be instant :)

<comment><USER43> Works with some swear words in Italian too. Wonder if they compiled a list or if they've got an algorithm that says "wait, this is about to return some naughty results".

<comment><USER44> It's [edit: not exactly] SafeSearch:

Q: If an offensive or lewd word is a fraction of my query, will Google push these results in front of me as I type?

A: As always, we provide options to filter the content you see in search. You can choose to set SafeSearch to filter out explicit content, and parents can lock SafeSearch to the strict setting. In addition, autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech.

<comment><USER42> AFAIK not SafeSearch but "in addition," the second part of your qute.

<comment><USER13> You basically have to press enter if you want to search for a term with possible pornographic, violent or hateful content (that's what they just said in their Q&A). That seems like a sensible solution to me. Safe Search doesn't figure into it.

<comment><USER44> They probably do something like: if a search term returns a high density of SafeSearch-flagged top results, then don't autocomplete.

<comment><USER27> and if it doesn't autocomplete in the plain old search suggestions feature, then it will not appear in the instant results, because these are precomputed results for queries that are generated by the suggestion engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So how long before we can buy our way to the top of the search term suggestions? What kind of analytics can you do about how streaming search changes the way people compose their keywords? It's an interesting new feature.

<comment><USER32> I actually wrote a post a while back about Google's search term suggestions [1]. Most interesting fact I found was that Facebook actually has one of the top-ten suggestions for the letter "w" because of people entering "www.facebook.com" into Google so often.

[1] <http://www.alfajango.com/blog/google-one-letter-suggestions/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Multiple submissions on the same subject:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391> <\- This one

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388> <\- This is an explanation

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346> <\- First

</comment><comment><USER47> Well, it's impressively fast, however, I'm not sure I will ever get to use it considering I do most of my search from the Google Chrome Omnibox and very rarely visit the actual google homepage...

<comment><USER48> Exactly what I thought. It's a great feature, but just going to google.com takes up time. Maybe future integration into Chrome?

<comment><USER34> It's a UI challenge, but as Techcrunch reports, this may well be in browsers at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I often use Google to search for very specific phrases -- error messages, for example, in quotes -- and that doesn't help. It actually hurts.

What hurts even more is that Google returns documents that don't contain all the search terms, but where the missing search terms can be found in incoming links (or so it says).

If you try to use the allintext: parameter you're almost always considered a bot (why??!?) and your queries get delayed or you're shown an indecipherable captcha (they're getting harder, or maybe I actually am a bot, because nowadays I fail to solve every other one).

It seems Google is aiming at some lower common denominator of the general public, someone who can't spell, can't type, can't be bothered to learn a basic search syntax and just wants to know where to buy the latest gadget.

There is a space to be filled for a "Google for grownups".

<comment><USER50> This isn't a great solution, but prepend words that aren't showing up with a + sign to enforce that they appear on the document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The shortest link to the explanation, for those of us who don't have javascript turned on by default and want to read about it, or who don't see the new interface:

<http://www.google.com/instant/>

"Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8."

</comment><comment><USER25> This change may be helpful for users, but will be even more for Google advertisement programs. Basically, they can show more advertisements for each user visit.

For example: user starts typing a long tail keyword search and an unrelated result is displayed. Even though the user was not looking for that specific keyword combination, he will see the results (and the ads) for that keyword.

</comment><comment><USER51> Will some integration be done for those of us that search on the Chrome navigation bar instead of opening google.com in the first place?

<comment><USER13> From the Q&A: That will be out in a few months. They are working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The instant results seem to be served from memory rather than an actual search being performed. For example, try searching for:

zqqx

and after the 'x' is typed, no instant results appear. However, Pressing 'enter' to submit your search will show you the full results.

A new Google game: what's the shortest non-blacklisted key sequence that returns 0 instant results.

<comment><USER13> It looks like zqqx is (for whatever reason) one of the words for which instant search is disabled. Try the four letter word starting with f, you will see exactly the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Looks like "q" is the starting letter for your project name if your punting for it to be the next big thing.

<comment><USER53> * you're

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Auto-complete/Tab complete is priceless! Feels like I'm using Vim on google.com. Thank You!

</comment><comment><USER55> Annoyingly busy. I sort of feel like this is a prime example why you don't put engineers in charge of UI. Just because we can is not a good enough reason to do it.

Also, having both a dropdown and a whole page refresh, what?

<comment><USER56> It feels less busy after you've used it for a little while, and your brain has had the chance to adjust to having most of the page change whenever you type something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> kind of cool, but I immediately turned mine off.

I could imagine using it in some situations though, when I am really digging for some information and not expecting my query to bring my desired result to the top few spots.

</comment><comment><USER58> The real question is... will this increase or decrease Google's revenue through Adwords on the result pages?

They will for sure show more ads, maybe making chances higher for a user to click an ad, but at least for me, after trying it out a bit, it seems like I focus more on the results themselves when typing, as they change all the time, without giving attention to the ads.

And as already mentioned, long tail searches might be used less often, so you cannot buy cheap uncompetitive ads to drive traffic to your site, you have to use the big keywords that are suggested.

</comment><comment><USER59> Is Auto-Complete Optimization something SEOs already focus on? For example, trying to get the keywords they rank well on placed relatively higher in an auto-complete list for Google, Bing, etc?

<comment><USER60> Typically, no. Let us say you have a keyword like 'patio umbrella' to toy with. You've purchased the domain patioumbrella.com and already gained a huge one up in the SEO rankings for Google's algorithm. What's next in line? Creating original content that Google thinks associate with that keyword. Emphasis on "what Google thinks" because Google believes if you're ranking for a keyword, you should be ranking for related keywords. [re: GKT synonyms]

So, in the keyword tool, I search 'patio umbrella' and generate synonyms. I see things like "patio cushions", "wicker patio furniture", etc. Google would give me more rank value if I also created content for these keywords.

Lets say patio umbrella (lights|stand|base) show up in autocomplete (which they do). If I try to rank for all of these keywords, most of which aren't related to my root keyword, Google will be confused as to what my site is actually about.

(This is my understanding and my experience)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> From their FAQ page <http://www.google.com/instant/>

* 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.

Does anyone know which are these new technologies?

<comment><USER62> <http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=673630>

(I apologize profusely, I just couldn't resist.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Why would I want Google to begin searching at 'he' if I'm looking for 'hello world'? Will the instant search list relevant results so early on, so as to save me from typing the whole term?

<comment><USER34> It doesn't search for 'he', it searches for the first autocomplete from 'he' - which happens to be Hertz, oh well.

<comment><USER63> Thanks. I should have known they were smarter than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I work at a company where we have been doing this sort of stuff for a while now. It's very impressive in the case of Google because of the size of its index and the level of error tolerance of the matching sequence used. I wonder how complete these instant results are compared to the now lame old click-to- submit search results? I tried to test and noticed the count of instant results is slightly smaller but the top items appear to be the same most of the time. Anyone has insights?

<comment><USER65> Well speed is nice but I sure don't want to loose quality of search results for that. Google is fast enough as it is. I would say that it's probably unfeasible to process a query over the full web index so there some amount of corner cutting going on here. What type?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is pretty mentally jaring, I realized how much searching is a process that I had practiced in certain way for long time. In a couple minutes playing with it , I found myself figuring out how to search for something again. I know there are objections to the UI, or whether it actually improves the search results, or whether the speed increase is worth it but just from a mental perspective it has made me realize how the act of searching is wired into my thought process.

</comment><comment><USER67> Try typing 'F#', the instant results are irrelevant to F# the language (probably due to the # symbol), but when you click search they become relevant.

I would prefer it to be consistent :)

<comment><USER27> This happens because the "instant" search results are basically precomputed search results of the "first suggestion".

When you type "F#" google search is actually suggesting you "f to c" and the results is displayed accordingly.

It seems that google is not simply executing the partial search as you type (it would be too expensive even for them)

See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1674707>

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> In my opinion, this is the same kind of Google-think that brought about Google Wave. It's extremely impressive, no doubt, but it doesn't seem like something users were clamoring for.

Just as Google will learn a lot from Google Wave despite its low usability, so will it learn a lot from this, whether users really want or use it or not.

Only time will tell if Google's engineering-centric culture will ultimately win for it in the end. Its been all wins so far, hasn't it?

</comment><comment><USER69> My question is how will this and previous auto-complete moves by Google effect the "long tail" search market. Will this reduce the number of truly unique queries and instead group people into already existing term categories? I know auto complete has been in effect for a while, but I wonder if this will only make it even more effective, thereby changing user behavior and simply re- enforcing the already existing terms.

</comment><comment><USER70> Google Instant will make Google's Web History less useful (if it was of any use before) and easier to trick, since the History records only if you actually press Enter after the query or if you click a results. However a lot of information can be revealed from the description of the results that Google offers and so people won't always have to click Search to get the info they required.

<comment><USER13> It also remembers when you were looking at search results for more than three seconds (it will even distinguish between normal searches and those three- second things). Unless you can be done in less than three seconds you cannot trick Web History.

<comment><USER71> With link-hinting, it's quite possible to be off the page in under 3 seconds. Of course, the percentage of Google users who use link-hinting is... very small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Well that was interesting. I started migrating my blog from TypePad to WordPress last week and it's been "down" or intermittent since then. What's amazing is that Google has erased 5 years of really highly ranked search results.

For example I had the #1 or #2 result for "liquidation preference" and now it's nowhere to be seen. I wonder if the "real time" will turn Google into Twitter...sad if true.

<comment><USER71> If your site has been down recently, then that's what removed it from search results, not Google Instant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Bing Instant? : <http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/>

</comment><comment><USER74> Anyone else find the constantly refreshing search results annoying? If so, do you know of any cognitive psychology literature to explain why? I personally find this instant search infuriating and just want my standard old Google search back, where things do NOT change unless I'm mentally prepared for them to change.

</comment><comment><USER61> I keep thinking that Google is on a mission to make us lazy. What after Instant search? Google Mind Reading Search!

<comment><USER75> Google is on a mission to build AI. Perhaps a side-effect of that is lazy humans, but that's definitely not their main goal. :)

<comment><USER61> Smart AI + Lazy Humans = Feelings of Hollywood sci-fi being right

The smart thing about Google is that their progress is incremental in the sense nobody will realize before it takes over their lives. In a way it already has, but imagine your relationship with Google in 10 years down the line. You will be literally hooked to it and it will know what you are going to do next. I just wish _Don't be evil_ stays ingrained in that AI :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> am i overlooking something, or is there no way to use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button now?

<comment><USER77> If you hover over a result in the suggestion list, there's an I'm Feeling Lucky option on the right.

Did people ever really use that for anything besides google bomb jokes though?

<comment><USER38> Heard Marissa Mayer say one time that while people don't use it they like the fact it's there (let's them know Google is fun and has a sense of humor).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Strangely, it's not working yet for me in Chrome (dev channel) but it works in Safari 5.

<comment><USER79> yes, similar here. Safari 5 & Chrome don't have it enabled. Firefox does. I thought it was related to the use of encrypted.google.com or customized search, but it doesn't seem like it. At least not directly (and incognito mode doesn't help). And I don't want to clear my google cookies which might solve the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> This doesn't work at all for me in Opera. Has anyone else had success in Opera?

edit: Apparently Opera is not among the browsers listed here: <http://www.google.com/instant/>

<comment><USER81> It does work, you just need to mask as Firefox: <http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/09/08/google-instant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I wonder if this will cause average users to begin understanding and using the "tab complete" interaction. That could open up interesting uses in all kinds of apps.

</comment><comment><USER83> I hate this and thought I'd bumped something this morning when I discovered this "feature" accidentally.

Really distracting the jarring transition.

</comment><comment><USER84> This looks more like a "labs" feature than a real improvement. Doesn't add any value to me... glad they allow us to disabled it.

</comment><comment><USER85> Does anyone know of a firefox plugin that will allow us to blacklist sites we don't want to see in our google search results?

</comment><comment><USER86> Just 'w' will give weather, but with an extra 'w' ww will give 'facebook.com' as the first result, that's interesting.

<comment><USER87> Not that strange considering it is the most popular site on the internet next to google.com. If it's trying to predict your destination this is correct a staggeringly large percent of the time.

Of course "your" implies the masses. They use Google like we would use the address bar.

As someone touched on above with longtails, the real interesting bit will be to see what the Google keyword tool says about search terms next month(or maybe the month after that). We'll have to see if longtails have fallen off the face of the Earth or not. Maybe the autosuggest will still have a major impact vs. what they see in the SERPs below as they are typing.

Edit: I got Walmart as the first result for 'w'. Could be a location-based decision engine potentially. Fuckin rednecks

<comment><USER88> It's almost certainly location based - the first result I see for "b" is "bart", which I imagine only applies if you live in the Bay Area (for those unfamiliar: <http://www.bart.gov/> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> <smartass>I like the way it instantly changes my C# queries to C in the suggest list.</smartass>

</comment><comment><USER90> This would be awesome on image search.

</comment><comment><USER91> I'd really like to use the arrow keys to navigate the results instead of the suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER92> I love it. This makes it much quicker to edit and tune your query to get what you want.

</comment><comment><USER93> interesting UI issue/inconsistency (in Chrome)... when pressing tab, it can either complete the current word/phrase or move to the X, so <enter> can either do nothing or clear the search box

</comment><comment><USER94> So, does the referrer still include the keyword phrase used?

</comment><comment><USER95> Google Instant Search is just too distracting.

</comment><comment><USER96> This is a total ripoff of keyboardr.com.

<comment><USER31> Or you could say it's a ripoff of zippily.com which I did four years ago over the weekend after Google released their Ajax Search API.

Except that live search was already something that was happening on lots of sites back then. By now it's hard to see that instant searching is even novel, much less a ripoff of any other interface.

Google putting their completion together with their instant search (an opportunity not available to API users, of course) is pretty neat, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> what does "?sclient=psy" mean?

<comment><USER98> I'm going to guess it means "psychic mode" which they just made a joke about in the presentation. "It's not psychic, but it's clever".

<comment><USER99> The internal codename for this project at Google was "Psychic Search".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Instead of writing a lengthy comment on HN, I wrote a blog post: 9 Ways SEO Can "Best" Google Instant: <http://goo.gl/ez2a>

It's a spicy title I'll admit, and guaranteed to raise the ire of some HN folk, but that was not my intension.

</comment><comment><USER101> I think saving time sales point is the biggest bullshit from G. Google should be more honest to there users. They should tell us that they need more page impressions+ads.</comment>


Laboratory-evolved bacteria switch to consuming carbon dioxide for growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191127161450.htm <comment><USER2> Ridiculously bad article. No organism consumes CO2 for energy.

Organisms consume CO2 to get the C for material to grow the organism.</comment>


TLS in Linux 4.13 kernel - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/networking/tls.txt <comment><USER2> LWN's coverage of this patch: [https://lwn.net/Articles/666509/](https://lwn.net/Articles/666509/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks Jonathan.

Everyone: the above gives a lot of very helpful context & explanation for this (from when the patch was first posted in Dec 2015)

<comment><USER4> The merged patch does have some significant points of difference from the one described in 2015, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldn't implementing TLS in the kernel result in a substantial increase in the exposed attack surface? This seems to me as if it would be similar to the time that Windows moved the graphics into the kernel and the havoc that ensued thereafter.

<comment><USER6> It appears the design of KTLS is intended to minimize the complexity necessary inside the kernel; the TLS handshake is handled in user space and then the TLS state is transcribed to a KTLS file descriptor which handles the traffic thereafter. This means the very complex public key part of TLS is user space. The kernel isn't involved with certificates etc. The kernel handles the symmetric cryptography once the user space handshake is complete. So yes, the net attack surface inside the kernel increases, but it isn't as though they are embedding some OpenSSL equivalent into the kernel.

The paper reports a relatively small performance improvements. But I suppose if you're Facebook (they and RedHat implemented this) and performance improvements are measured in millions of dollars you care a lot about 7% less CPU utilization.

<comment><USER7> >> The paper reports a relatively small performance improvements. But I suppose if you're Facebook (they and RedHat implemented this) and performance improvements are measured in millions of dollars you care a lot about 7% less CPU utilization.

You think 7 percent is a small performance improvement? IMHO it's rather large. I take the time for much smaller than that.

To understand why, let me ask a question do you think doubling performance is a good thing? In other words a 100 percent increase in throughput or a 50 percent reduction in execution time. I hope your answer is yes because a lot of people think so. So what's 7 percent? Well imagine there are 7 different areas of your code that could be improved with each one contributing 7 percent. That's 49 percent or about what we'd call a significant improvement. Fixing up a number of single digit things adds up. But there is a more sinister side to it. Suppose you wanted to let those 7 little things go, and look for the big fish - the one that's going to get you 50 percent all in one shot. Guess what? It doesn't exist. Why? Because these little things add up to about half of your time, so to find the big one would imply taking the execution time for _the rest of the code_ down to zero, because that's the only place there's 50 percent left. Unless you're doing something really poorly, there isn't a big win to be had. Performance comes from compounding the effects of many small optimizations.

If just moving TLS from the application to the kernel gives 7 percent - presumably by eliminating overhead - that's a good thing. Even if it's just 7 percent of time in communication which is only a portion of application performance, it's still a good thing.

\--- note, this is a comment about performance and says nothing about tradeoffs in security by putting TLS in kernel ---

<comment><USER6> >> You think 7 percent is a small performance improvement?

I think a 7% reduction in CPU utilization for TLS is small given the vast bulk of systems that spend most of their time IO bound on network interfaces and/or storage and will see little to no improvement in throughput. I allowed that Facebook may see this as an important improvement given their scale; it could be worth millions of dollars in power and/or hardware.

>> that's a good thing ... it's still a good thing.

Sure, it's good. I didn't characterize anything as "bad," merely "small."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the real advantage is that you can pass arround your encrypted connection as a file descriptor. so when you add encryption to some service, you do not have to manually replace all calls to read/write by libssl library functions but instead you can just continue to use read()/write() calls. pass tls connection as stdin/stdout to another process ect...

this is how plan9 does tls and how it really should have been in the first place. adding tls support is one function call to wrap an existing file descriptor in tls and you get another file descriptor back.

<comment><USER9> But you can accomplish that by simply having an external process or thread terminate the TLS connection, and connect to your process over Unix domain sockets.

Of course that is inefficient. But that is what KTLS is at its core: an optimization.

<comment><USER8> of course you can make a pipe and spawn a process that does the translation. why's nobody doing that? because linux is a cargo cult and nobody does the sane thing until it is provided by the infrastructure. because of fork not mixing well with multithreaded applications... now finally linux got its shit together so there is no more excuse why todo it in a covoluted way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No mention of memory cleaning policy and other security guarantees. I hope this is handled properly.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's too bad KTLS was completed for FreeBSD but still not integrated.

<comment><USER12> We're working on it. What we had was great for us, but pretty complex and not really upstreamable.

I'm almost done with re-writing it to use the same M_NOTREADY mechanism as async sendfile, and to do all the framing in the kernel, rather than doing the sendfile() framing in-kernel and sosend() in userspace. This removes the majority of the code, and makes it quite a bit simpler. The downside is that it depends on my vectorized mbufs. Hopefully we'll have something public in the next few months.

<comment><USER13> Just offering a few words of thanks and encouragement for your work regarding this. When this is ready it's ready. But thank you in advance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder why they opted not to use the existing packet transformation code that is already in the kernel? The same code is used as part of linux ipsec implementations.

<comment><USER15> The layering inside the kernel is completely different...

        Kernel Connection Multiplexor

        Facebook's primary motivation was to gain access to the un-encrypted bytes
        in kernel space. KCM is used to decode the framing, and make intelligent
        scheduling choices, before sending the frames to user space. KTLS sockets
        are mapped 1:N to user space sockets, where N is the number of user space
        threads, which are usually mapped to cores. Using this scheme, KTLS + KCM
        is able to reduce the total number of thread migrations of an individual
        request

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe the link should be updated to use the 4.13 tag [0] instead of the master branch.

[0] [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v4.13/Documentation/n...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v4.13/Documentation/networking/tls.txt)

</comment><comment><USER17> What's funny, is that I was just reviewing my custom built kernel's menuconfig, saw TLS, and briefly wondered why I didn't recall seeing that when I first ran the config, then figured I had just missed it. Never thought maybe it had recently been added.

</comment><comment><USER18> In these days of containers, wouldn't it allow a government to coerce a container-hosting company into using an unsecure kernel? Such a kernel would see all traffic, unencrypted... or did I miss something?

<comment><USER19> Please don't believe for even a second that your container host can't already extract the cleartext just because the SSL is executed in the container context.

A kernel facility like that certainly makes an attack even more obvious and maybe harder to detect. But if this is a concern you can't use external hosting.

This applies to VMs too, the hypervisor can see and transparently modify everything going on. There is development going on with special CPU instructions that could prevent the hypervisor from reading VM memory, but that is not state of the art and I would not trust it for a long time.

You can't even be really sure that a bare metal server you are renting is not extracting the cleartext via a modified bios/efi, bootloader etc, or modified hardware at the worst.

<comment><USER18> "that certainly makes it even more obvious": that's what I meant... easy mass surveillance

<comment><USER19> If a government wants to do that, and the hosting company is not able or willing to fight it on a legal basis, it's really not about how easy or hard the actual implementation is. This makes nearly zero difference in the grand scheme of such a surveillance program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh man - this is great. I hate having these proxy processes just for this task.

I will begin experimenting with this kernel this week.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is why we need microkernels.

<comment><USER22> Can you explain this position?

In particular, my impression is that a large reason of why microkernels failed in the '90s - see e.g. OSF/1 - was the overhead of message-passing. The two most popular kernels today that vaguely resemble microkernels, namely Darwin (Mach-based) and NT (with its subsystems), do no isolation between parts of their kernel and just have ordinary function calls. TLS exists in userspace and works extraordinarily well, but the desire to move parts into kernelspace is specifically to avoid the overhead of copying data between kernelspace and userspace and to allow using things like sendfile() that wouldn't be possible across address spaces.

<comment><USER23> I think he meant to say that we need unikernels - a lot of people (including me) sometimes make that same mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks similar to AT-TLS (application transparent TLS) on IBM mainframes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Please link to pdf?

<comment><USER26> Here you go: [https://netdevconf.org/1.2/papers/ktls.pdf](https://netdevconf.org/1.2/papers/ktls.pdf)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Small, solo and bootstrapped. What if you land a massive client? - <AUTHOR> I run a small SaaS and am the only employee (I have plenty of industry advisors though).
We currently operate with less than 50 accounts in total. Word of mouth has led to discussions with a very large enterprise and the numbers being thrown around are staggering (for me anyway).
How would you tackle suddenly scaling from 50 to thousands of accounts? Would you even consider such an account given the circumstances? Has this happened to you?
I'm way out of my depth here so any advice is greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I went through this twice (being super small and getting a large enterprise sale), first time was scary, and while I'd love to say second time wan't, honestly it was just as scary but I felt somewhat more prepared.

In my case we had about 100-125 small business accounts on the platform and suddenly had interest from a Fortune 500 firm that had revenue in the 4-5 billion annual revenue and 4000 employees. I had a few more people then just myself (I think 4 FTEs, 1 Part Time), but not enough to support all those users or the needs of an enterprise.

To be fair, enterprise deals can ruin you if you try to approach it like any other sale. They aren't like your SMB sales. Enterprises are wiling to pay because they know their demands are not the same as the local small business. One key thing I learned, you should be honest with the enterprise in saying (something like this), hey we absolutely can support you but as you can imagine it will also mean I need to scale my team to give you the kind of support you deserve and that fits my standards... They love hearing this because it also answers one of their key worries.

There are so many details, learnings, comments, if you are curious and want to hear more of my experiences I am happy to share the good/bad and share. You can find my email in my profile if you want to connect.

Good luck, you are obviously doing something right!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. The advice about explaining your need to scale is great. I've made them aware that we currently don't service accounts of their scale but we can scale up. If talks proceed I'll be sure to expand on this.

Thanks very much for the email offer, I will take you up on that (putting out a fire right now though).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is one of those problems that are nice to have. It could be challenging, scary and difficult but it's also a nice opportunity.

Just be careful and good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hear it can be great to have these kinds of clients, but it also sucks as they can really throw their weight around and force you to go in a direction you don't want to go.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for a UI framework? - <AUTHOR> We're working on a powerful UI framework that offers many advanced features such as a touch-friendly component library with form elements, advanced data-tables and charts, form validation, data-binding, visual themes, etc. For developers, such a framework boosts productivity tremendously by saving time they would spend developing or integrating individual components from multiple sources. Even with professional support and all these features, we don't see a lot of interest and we're wondering why that is.<p>Would you ever pay for such a product?
Do you think that commercial frameworks of this kind need to have a large company behind them in order to succeed? What would lead you to pick a commercial framework in favor of many free alternatives? <comment><USER2> I might if it's a one-time payment and not a subscription service. However, these days before I choose something I base my decision not only on the actual merits of a given product/project, but also on its popularity. Like it or not, if there is a large user base, everything is easier (on average), from documentation to support. If you can replicate that and convince users you're a viable choice and unlikely to disappear soon, you have better chances. I'm not going to invest my time in learning and using a product that might get abandoned next year, and if it's not open source I'm really screwed up then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the very valuable feedback.

We provide source code on GitHub, but the project is obviously not open- source.

We offer perpetual licenses and one year of support which includes new releases. If you want to use the latest version after your support has expired, you need to extend your support subscription for approx. half of the original price. Do you feel that one-time payment should entitle you to receive support forever?

<comment><USER2> No, there is no reason why one-time payment should entitle anybody to more than a limited support period (one year is more or less standard).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are already a plethora of fly-by-night Javascript frameworks. Outside of hobby projects, I'd wager that most people prefer not to use frameworks that lack an established track record. For a business, the cost of switching frameworks after the fact is simply too great. Unless the framework has a sizable userbase and has been around for a few years, I wouldn't use it in any serious projects. To get a large enough userbase that people will feel comfortable using it in serious projects, you're going to need them to use your framework in those hobby projects. However, those projects are the least likely to have a budget, and the most likely to utilize free resources. This is why I do not think a commercial framework can succeed.

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends on how much the framework costs. I spent 3 years of my career using Sencha ExtJs[0], a framework you could use commercially by paying a license. I was in India back then, and could not afford the license to use it for personal projects I hoped to turn into a side business. By the time I came to the US, they changed their pricing model so that you now needed to buy a 5-pack license to be able to use it.

There is a lot to like (and a little to dislike) about the Sencha family of frameworks, but the licensing alone made me look at alternatives inspite of being familiar with it.

[0]: [https://www.sencha.com/](https://www.sencha.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see Sencha strategy used elsewhere in the industry. For example, Netlify recently changed their pricing model and introduced a minimum of 5 users in paid plans. From this standpoint, I understand why that is happening. If you divide an amount equal to several developer monthly salaries with the expected number of licenses sold per month, you get a pretty high number. A large framework is a big battlefront as each widget needs to be tested, documented, and accompanied with examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that as there are quite a few decent quality free frameworks, the paid-for alternatives have to offer something extraordinary. This is exacerbated by the fact that community support and shared code/instructional blog posts will be harder to come by.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, but I would argue that commercial frameworks offer professional support, have a nice documentation and offer many examples which may save you a lot of time in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> By default I'm very reluctant to use proprietary libraries because I would have to invest time into learning something that I can't use freely in future projects, and I might even expose myself to some kind of risk of patent infringement or something.

Basically, if there's no freely available way to do what I want, I really prefer to come up with such a solution myself, so that I can then use that in my hobbies, nonprofit projects, etc.

I would be more likely to consider it if there were clear licensing terms that allow use in open source or nonprofit projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would say don't try to do everything. A lot of frameworks - bootstrap, WordPress, etc start off quite well, then become extremely tedious because they try to be too powerful. I've stopped building "responsive" altogether and just go for simpler websites that look good on both web and mobile.

But I would pay for components.

I would pay for form validation for example. Or something that makes data and chart look good on a touchscreen. Just don't force me to take everything else bundled with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is that it's very hard to ship form components and form validation separately. Developer experience is much better if all components implement form validation and other things in the same way.

Our framework has top-notch form components and multiple form validation options. We also offer responsive charts. Our charting library is based on the same principles as the rest of the framework. The experience is much better if all components are designed to work together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We already pay for inspinia here. It's great. I think the business is legit.

You just need to make a very good brand for it and be able to show people that they need it. Once they use it, they'll see that they are getting something better than the bootstraps that you can find(which is still great, but for a professional project you might need something extra).

Also, work on your pricing. Maybe sell a basic version with the option to pay for the (very expensive, hard to maintain) components separately.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for very valuable feedback.

For those who seem interested, you can find more about our product at [https://cxjs.io](https://cxjs.io).

It's free for non-commercial use. We would be very happy to assist you to start using it, either for a hobby or a business application.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are dozens of such frameworks already... how do you differentiate?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are dozens of frameworks, but few of them provide a complete set of features. For example, it's very hard to find a really good grid (data-table) implementation, a complete set of form components + form validation, and charts in the same package and most business oriented apps need all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Such a framework would need to be extremely flexible in order to really support _all_ use cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's impossible to support all use cases. Our philosophy is to support most common use cases and allow custom components that are specific to the app. Almost all apps need forms, admin pages, dashboards, but some may also use advanced components such as schedulers, pivot grids, rich HTML editors, etc.</comment></comment>


Absolute File System Design - <AUTHOR> http://research.swtch.com/2008/02/absolute-file-system-design.html

<comment><USER2> That's really clever. If each disk sector has an inode and offset label then fsck becomes trivial. Why isn't it common? Because sector payload is no longer 2^n bytes. Any arrangement of labelling will increase disk head seek operations.

Labels and checksums are used in InnoDB 16KB pages. However, in this case, database rows are always smaller than one page and waste occurs anyhow.</comment>


UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson Sacked over Huawei Leak - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-48126974 <comment><USER2> Relevant discussion a day ago:

Vodafone Found Hidden Backdoors in Huawei Equipment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19786102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19786102)

<comment><USER3> While this is being touted as a smoking gun, calling it a "backdoor" may be reaching:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/30/huawei_enterprise_r...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/30/huawei_enterprise_router_backdoor_is_telnet/)

<comment><USER4> I think this article is disingenuous. It's telnet on a nonstandard port with hardcoded credentials, that was added back in after being removed when it was spotted in previous security testing.

Edit: this according to one of the sources in the Bloomberg article, who claims to have read internal Vodaphone documents [https://twitter.com/raistolo/status/1123283199348621312](https://twitter.com/raistolo/status/1123283199348621312)

<comment><USER5> A telnet service responds to a plain port scan. So it was categorically not hidden. Vodaphone explain this themselves in the linked register article:

>It added the Telnet service was found during an audit, which means it can't have been that secret or hidden: "The issues were identified by independent security testing, initiated by Vodafone as part of our routine security measures, and fixed at the time by Huawei.

<comment><USER6> So a backdoor is okay incase it's not hidden?

<comment><USER3> A vulnerability is not as damning if it wasn't intentionally inserted to be a backdoor. It being easily discoverable suggests that there was no intention to hide it, and thus it was not intended to be a backdoor.

If conversely the vulnerability was difficult to find externally, was publically unknown, and was seen being used for attacks, that would be suggestive of a deliberate backdoor, and far more damning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The same Gavin Williamson who threatened China with military action while the Chancellor of the Exchequer was there trying to hold trade talks? I'm shocked.

[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/16/gavin- willi...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/16/gavin-williamson- china-warship-threat-philip-hammond)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to know how he was caught. Not enough security on his phone - or old school interviews and sources?

<comment><USER9> They probably couldn't even tell him how they caught him, because then they'd have to admit that GCHQ is spying on most government members, too.

<comment><USER10> Given the technical aptitude of most politicians in the UK, he may equally likely have used a government-issued device

<comment><USER11> This sprang to mind:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- politics-15396956](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15396956)

Letwin had a habit of reading correspondence whilst in a public park in the mornings and then dumping it in public bins once dealt with. Mirror reporters just followed him around and fished sensitive material out of the bins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> maybe conspiracy but I have a feeling this is part of US strategy to kick Huawei out of Europe, from the last few countries that didn't already ban them, UK and Italy. I can't imagine any way for UK to allow Huawei to build 5G once US said it is forbidden

</comment><comment><USER13> The concern I dont understand. If all traffic is encrypted, what is the risk of Huawei equipment handling traffic? Are people worried about spying or being able to switch interrupt service?

<comment><USER14> One worry is that in a war situation (cyber or shooting) the Chinese govt might be able to disable UK networks, for example by sending an obscure sequence of plaintext bytes which is understood by the routers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> isn't the fact that she was trying to have Huawei participate to the infrastructure without people knowing it the actual scandal worth being sacked for? that's crazy

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder, if Huawei is really spying for China and May (and other politicians) know about this and endorse that, shouldn't that be treason?

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure it qualifies under the Treason Act 1351:

> When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King, or of our > Lady his Queen or of their eldest Son and Heir; or if a Man do violate the > King's Companion, or the King's eldest Daughter unmarried, or the Wife of > the King's eldest Son and Heir; or if a Man do levy War against our Lord the > King in his Realm, or be adherent to the King's Enemies in his Realm, giving > to them Aid and Comfort in the Realm, or elsewhere, and thereof be probably > attainted of open Deed by the People of their Condition, and if a Man slea > the Chancellor,Treasurer, or the King's Justices of the one Bench or the > other, Justices in Eyre, or Justices of Assise, and all other Justices > assigned to hear and determine, being in their Places, doing their Offices: > And it is to be understood, that in the Cases above rehearsed, that ought to > be judged Treason which extends to our Lord the King,and his Royal Majesty.

or the Treason Felony Act 1848:

> If any person whatsoever shall, within the United Kingdom or without, > compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend to deprive or depose our Most > Gracious Lady the Queen, from the style, honour, or royal name of the > imperial crown of the United Kingdom, or of any other of her Majesty's > dominions and countries, or to levy war against her Majesty, within any part > of the United Kingdom, in order by force or constraint to compel her to > change her measures or counsels, or in order to put any force or constraint > upon or in order to intimidate or overawe both Houses or either House of > Parliament, or to move or stir any foreigner or stranger with force to > invade the United Kingdom or any other of her Majesty's dominions or > countries under the obeisance of her Majesty, and such compassings, > imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions, or any of them, shall > express, utter, or declare, by publishing any printing or writing or by any > overt act or deed, every person so offending shall be guilty of felony, and > being convicted thereof shall be liable to be transported beyond the seas > for the term or his or her natural life

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love that people are rationalizing for a dictatorship-lead China with concentration camps in the west (xinjiang), religious oppression in the south (tibet), democratic oppression in the east (hong kong), and aggression in the east (artificial islands in south china sea, nearly crashing into US battleships, massive buildup in warships), that is seeking to invade Europe with spy technologies from its state firm is:

huawei doesn't have backdoors => the backdoors are (easily?) found by security audits. nothing to see here.

<comment><USER19> Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for. Please read the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800040) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In general, this is one of the news threads that I persistently don't understand. There is too much information missing. Why are European countries so keen on allowing Huawei to build some critical infrastructure? Do they face threats from China? If so, how are these made? And then there is the other side of the coin, that the US allegations look credible overall, but it is also known that the NSA and GCHQ built spying tools into existing European infrastructure. Is the US trying to do this again but this wouldn't work if Huawei was involved?

Which companies can actually build these kind of networks? Couldn't e.g. France and Germany build them on their own? Or would that be too expensive?

Questions over questions...

<comment><USER21> It's geopolitics. In short, when there is only a choice between US and Chinese manufacturers, whichever doesn't matter because they're both considered equally hostile. Chinese is cheaper though.

<comment><USER22> There is a third option... the EU countries develop its own technology.

<comment><USER23> Which would be quite expensive</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Derek Parfit has died - <AUTHOR> http://dailynous.com/2017/01/02/derek-parfit-1942-2017/ <comment><USER2> I hate most philosophy, but I read Parfit's technical _Reasons and Persons_ and genuinely enjoyed it. Did you ever think teleporters could be the basis for an argument against souls? Parfit thought so. Plus, his writing is optimized for being understandable -- no flowery bullshit. You don't need any special knowledge to appreciate his work.

I highly recommend _Reasons and Persons_ : [https://www.amazon.com/Reasons- Persons-Derek-Parfit/dp/01982...](https://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Persons- Derek-Parfit/dp/019824908X)

Here's an illegal copy online, which can convince you how good his stuff is: [http://chadpearce.com/home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit- Reas...](http://chadpearce.com/home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit-Reasons-and- Persons.pdf)

The closing words:

"Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes."

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you enjoyed him and I'm sad he's gone.

But you're misremembering as it's not an argument against souls, it's an argument about what constitutes identity. You'll notice the article about it on Wikipedia has no mention of the word 'soul':

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

<comment><USER4> I was also going to point out that often misunderstanding about Derek Parfit. He is also misunderstood similar to Soren Kierkegaard. The argument for self and against Emmanuel Kant are not anti-Super Natural.

<comment><USER2> It's not "anti-Super Natural" _per se_ , but he _is_ against a separately- existing entity. Why Ulysse Carion yesterday is the same person as Ulysse Carion today is much like why France yesterday is the same country as France today. Personal identity is much like "national" identity -- it's not a very profound connection, just a high degree of correlation and continuity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just finished a seminar with him last semester - couldn't have asked for a better and more charitable teacher. His gentle temperament really shined in his effort to understand all the nuance of his students' counterarguments. The world lost a truly brilliant mind.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like Parfit's writing. His two most important books are probably _Reasons and Persons_ and _On What Matters_. In _On What Matters_ ,[1] he suggests a new ethical theory which is a synthesis of consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and social contract theory.

[1]: A nice EPUB: [http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=35E9FA954593C060F52...](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=35E9FA954593C060F52D2C863975D638)

</comment><comment><USER7> Philosophy is useful for study because it helps us organize our thought processes and reasoning, with a rigor that one wouldn't otherwise hold themselves to. This is probably why philosophy majors are sought for employment, because the degree signals good critical thinking skills.

</comment><comment><USER8> It is unfortunate that it takes his passing for me to be exposed to his work - however the last hour of familiarising myself with the broad strokes has concluded with the purchase of his first book.

</comment><comment><USER9> _" Some of us ask how much of our wealth we rich people ought to give to these poorest people. But that question wrongly assumes that our wealth is ours to give. This wealth is legally ours. But these poorest people have much stronger moral claims to some of this wealth. We ought to transfer to these people, in ways that I mention in a note, at least ten per cent of what we earn."_ [1]

[1] [http://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/1/3/14148208/dere...](http://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/1/3/14148208/derek-parfit-rip-obit) Quote from conclusion of third volume of _On What Matters_

</comment><comment><USER10> May he RIP.

The philosophy of personal identity is one of my favourite subjects in philosophy so his work came up a few times when studying that.

Worth reading up on some of his work if you like philosophy, alternatively there are a (few) videos on youtube mostly on moral philosophy IIRC.

<comment><USER11> What are the best things you've read about personal identity?

<comment><USER12> Here's a good starting point: [https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Conte...](https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/9780631234418/001.pdf)

I'd also recommend Mark Johnston's work on the topic. Human Beings ([https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=jph...](https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=jphil&id=jphil_1987_0084_0002_0059_0083) \- behind a paywall, unfortunately) is a wonderful essay. And his book Surviving Death is a good example of creative contemporary philosophy that's actually fun to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ah, the "Repugnant Conclusion" guy. I last read his writing decades ago, and remember finding it pedantic and less than inspiring, though better than the "infinite variations on the trolley problem" moral-intuition-diddling. Still, I'm glad to hear he was a good teacher, and sad to learn of his passing.

PS -- If you want some truly excellent philosophical writing, give Thomas Nagel a read.

<comment><USER14> Nagel is the philosopher who argued that mechanistic or materialist explanations for evolution are not sufficient and that they must have some kind of teleological underpinning. This willingness to rely on "magical" forces that he can't expand upon underpins Nagel's work.

I wouldn't recommend him to anyone unless you're interested in the history of philosophy of science, and would like to be directly familiar with all major 20th-century philosophers in that space.

<comment><USER15> Nagel's work is well worth reading. It's not good to only read people who agree with your world view.

<comment><USER16> I feel a lot of times that many modern philosophers simply not qualified enough in natural sciences. I've read Mind & Cosmos but gave up halfway: Nagel simply does not get evolution.

Contemporary philosophical discussion many times is like typical forum debates on the Internet about basic science - someone says something stupid and the others try to educate him, he don't get it and write his same stupidity again and again until everybody is tired to reply.

In the academic world this is called publish or perish: if you are a philosopher you should fear more from being forgotten than from proper and decisive falsification - so you just have to be loud, even if you are wrong. If you defend your wrongness skilfully you will have your followers anyway.

But I'm just simply don't interested in whether Nagel will get evolution eventually, or Putnam & Searle get computation sometime in the future* (just to provide another example)

* _I thinking about their theory that a rock can implement any computation - if we provide proper mapping between the states, without taking into consideration the complexity of the mapping as part of the "computer" here. It is ok if someone doesn't get Kolmogorov but not clear why they should make a living from it, or at least why should I support it by buying and reading their books. ;)_

<comment><USER15> You don't make any specific criticisms of Nagel's work, so I can't say anything on that point, except that I didn't see any misunderstandings of evolution in the book.

>Putnam & Searle [don't] get computation

Putnam essentially invented the functionalist computationalist theory of mind that you are implicitly defending, so I'd say he probably understood it at least as well as you do. (He later changed his mind about its viability.)

More generally I wouldn't doubt Putnam's ability to grasp technical material. This is a guy who contributed the solution to one of Hilbert's problems ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem)).

>It is ok if someone doesn't get Kolmogorov

No-one has provided a solution to the rock problem in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Scott Aaronson _speculates_ that this notion might be helpful, but he doesn't work out the details. In fact it seems rather unlikely that his proposed solution would work, as the mapping from abstract computational states to the physical states of actually existing computers is also extremely complex, and not obviously any less complex than the mapping from these states to physical states of rocks, waterfalls or whatever. Since we can't actually specify any of the relevant mappings, it's very difficult to say for sure that they differ significantly in terms of Kolmogorov complexity.

<comment><USER16> > I didn't see any misunderstandings of evolution in the book

The greatest feature of evolution that it makes teleology unnecessary. It can operate as a mindless/goalless algorithm. Of course evolution may be operated by someone/something with specific goals instead of pure chances, but thats just an unnecessary assumption until it proved - so we may employ Occam razor here until someone proves it. The possibility of design without a designer is one of the main point and contribution of the theory and it should be fully understood - even if if later turns out (which have not happened yet, and no sign for that happening beside metaphysical opinions...) that there was a designer.

> of actually existing computers is also extremely complex, and not obviously > any less complex than the mapping from these states to physical states of > rocks

You can't be serious: First map a Computer chess program states to human interpretable visualization to play chess against it And then do this with your rock.

First is mainly one-to-one mapping of digital signs to pixels by using a static table, the second is..., I'm not even sure how to inject my move into the states of the rock, but no idea either how to extract its response. You know why? There is simply no one to one mapping there. The states of a rock is a large bundle of everything without interpretation, the states of the chess program is CLEARLY more constrained - the proof is empirical: it CAN be implemented.

Like if you say that the set of all positive integers contains the solution of factorizing any large number. Of course it does: you just have to point to those numbers. ;) But how? All states are not the solution - selecting the proper states is the computation, and if those selection mechanism is in the mapping process then the mapping IS the computer.

<comment><USER15> >The greatest feature of evolution that it makes teleology unnecessary.

That's what Nagel is disputing.

> Of course evolution may be operated by someone/something with specific goals > instead of pure chances, but thats just an unnecessary assumption until it > proved

Nagel isn't a theist or an ID advocate. The existence of such a designer isn't part the thesis of the book.

>First is mainly one-to-one mapping of digital signs to pixels by using a static table

I was talking about mapping to a _physical_ state, not an abstract computational state. If you try to specify the relevant "digital signals" in physical rather than computational terms, you'll find that it's an impossibly complex task. Even individual transistors are enormously complex physical systems. We simply don't know whether the mapping to physical states would be significantly more complex in the case of the waterfall. If you're allowed to cheat by using more abstract states (e.g. "on" or "off" for each transistor), then you can equally well cheat in the case of the waterfall by giving names to disjunctions of physically distinct states.

>There is simply no one to one mapping there.

Not sure what you mean by this. If the rock has a sufficient number of possible physical states, then you certainly can specify a one-to-one mapping from chess states to rock states. It's true that this mapping will be difficult or impossible for humans to exploit. Rather obviously, that's because computers were designed in such a way that it's easy for humans to manipulate their states in certain ways, whereas rocks weren't.

<comment><USER16> > That's what Nagel is disputing

We have many many evidence that random mutation is enough for describing the biological evolution on Earth. If the mutation is controlled by someone than it is done according to random distributions as far as we currently know. He should provide evidence if he thinks otherwise but he is not doing it and not qualified for it, thats only what I see.

<comment><USER15> >He should provide evidence if he thinks otherwise

That's what he does in the book. But Nagel isn't claiming to make any original contribution to biology or evolutionary theory. His main aim, as far as I can see, is to point out that the standard arguments for mutations being random are less strong than is usually thought. I don't think he claims to know whether or not mutations are in fact random, or what controls them if they are not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Europe heatwave: record high of 45C (113F) expected in France - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/25/highs-of-45c-expected-in-france-as-heatwave-scorches-europe <comment><USER2> This is the video that opened my eyes on climate change 7 years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznsPkJy2x8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznsPkJy2x8)

It's amazing to think that humanity is still mostly clueless about what is going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ironic given the EU has just missed passing a zero carbon 2050 pledge.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/20/eu- leade...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/20/eu-leaders-to- spar-over-zero-carbon-pledge-for-2050)

<comment><USER4> Well in Central Europe climate is getting pleasantly mediterranian. People spend hollidays in the country instead of going to Spain. Agriculture is booming.

I do not miss cold rainy summers of my youth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will you miss not having your country swamped with hundreds of thousands of climate refugees? Because they're coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> this terrifies me</comment>


Musk: new Tesla summon feature will "follow you like a pet" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1404855 <comment><USER2> As the owner of several pets, I'm not sure I want an electric car following me "like a pet". I've been tripped by my dogs more times than I can count -- if my car tried the same thing, I'd probably be in a wheelchair.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only use for this I could think of would be if you had a massive circular private driveway. Then you could summon your car from the parking spot to the front of your mega manor.

Which is cool if you are extremely rich.

</comment><comment><USER4> The first person to create an actual RC-like controller that can be used in place of your phone will be a millionaire. Then again, I wonder if you can just use one of those gamepad mounts for most phones with this.

I really love Tesla and Elon right now.

</comment><comment><USER5> How did I get to the place where I need to summon my car? Did I take an Uber or something?

What would complete this feature is a valet mode where I can get out at the front door of somewhere and the car will find its own parking spot.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tesla feels more and more like Kit from Night Rider</comment>


Hive's Design Principles - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hive.com/hives-7-design-principles-c59d593ae58b#.33d6mc9n6 <comment><USER2> > Options are a cop out. It's the designer's job to figure out the best way to > use the product, and delegating that choice to the user is pure laziness. > Hive only resorts to options as a last resort.

I think if you are building a simple tool to solve a simple problem, this makes sense.

On the other hand, I think this gets abused in the _other_ direction: by designers using this as an excuse to not think about flexibility, or engage in humility. It's like the misuse of premature optimsation, but for designers.

For example, I think it's instructive that almost[1] none of the popular pro tools in any industry follow this guideline. Those tools are not for easing users in, they are for getting shit done: they understand that the idea that some UX designer can come along and tell the entire photography world how to process raw files, or tell developers how to build software in N different languages, or what a film editor's process should be for making movies etc, is utter druff.

This is why, as I understand it, the film industry reacted to strongly and negatively to Final Cut X: Apple were saying "we don't care what your current process is, you must now edit films this way, in this order, using this process, because we know better".

[1] I wanted to just say "none" here, but I obviously haven't used all pro tools

<comment><USER3> Agree 100%. And even if it's not a pro tool, what's wrong with having options? I think it comes down to two reasons:

1) It clutters the user experience

2) App designers are benevolent gods that keep users from self-harm

Now 1) I can understand, though in that case I prefer something like Overcast, where the settings menu has a submenu called "Nitpicky Details", for those of us who really care. 2) seems to be a prevalent opinion in the business these days -- while it makes sense for security on mobile devices (no root access etc), a lot of times it's just pure conceit IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The principles seem to contradict themselves at least a couple times.

Don't guess what they want to do (Predictable) and leave it Open; yet you know what they should do and don't give them an option (Opinionated).

And

Don't surprise them (Predictable); yet surprise them (Delight)

<comment><USER5> Delight, reward ... no. Just help me do what I need to do, and try to stay out of my way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Options are a cop out. It's the designer's job to figure out the best way to use the product, and delegating that choice to the user is pure laziness."_

Yes. Open source does not get this at all.

<comment><USER7> No. Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design and I hate it. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if there's a choice between doing something two different ways, rather than adding an option, the developer should pick the solution that fits 90% of their target audience and ignore the remaining 10%. The problem with that is that every time you make that decision, you ignore a different 10%, and eventually your software is only suitable for users who stay inside the box that the developers made for them, not the long tail of users with niche use cases. I think open source devs don't "get" this because they tend to write software to scratch their own itches and they often have their own niche use cases. Maybe the reason they had to scratch their own itch in the first place was because other software was too inflexible to fit their needs.

Of course, some open source projects do have this philosophy, and when they start removing options, I switch to something else. GNOME is a good example. I wish the current version of Nautilus (GNOME Files?) had half the options of the file managers that forked from earlier versions of Nautilus (Nemo and Caja,) because I actually use those options.

<comment><USER8> > Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design

Here's a Slack example of this. We moved from HipChat to Slack and two of the "options" we as a team dearly miss are:

1\. Being able to set a status that reflects what we're doing if unable to chat for the time being, not just a binary online or away. Now I have to inform the team I'm on a conf call or will "brb - making lunch" in a chat room which distracts everyone. HipChat was pretty flexible that way, it's a small thing, but for our team hugely important, especially for remote workers.

2\. Being able to specify how long I'm AFK before setting me to "Away". Sometimes I take calls on my mobile (we have apps for our internal SIP/asterisk stuff) and I like to wander around when chatting because it stretches my legs. But I find annoying that on longer calls Slack assumes after 30 mins of no activity I'm "Away" and "grey blobs" me making it look like I'm completely offline. Unfortunately the "Snooze notifications" don't cut it because it still doesn't let me convey, at-a-glance, why I'm deferring your messages.

From googling around it seems these are common gripes that Slack don't see as a priority to fix.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things Slack does well, but as paying customers, not addressing these two issues causes some low level resentment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These appear to be incomprehensible drivel.

</comment><comment><USER10> Note: this about hive.com not Apache Hive.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow! I thought it's Apache Hive.

We're officially out of names :(

</comment><comment><USER12> The title is both inaccurate and misleading.

> Hive's 7 Design Principles

They are _Hives_ design principals. Not necessarily for everyone.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, we've updated the title from "Design Principles to Make Great Software".</comment></comment>


China Is Maneuvering for International Leadership as the United States Falters - <AUTHOR> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-03-18/coronavirus-could-reshape-global-order <comment><USER2> Perhaps the only accomplishment of the current US president :)

How he handles other people/nations is truelly a president unworthy and the effects will only be visible when it is too late.

<comment><USER3> My children will bear the likely end of worldwide american leadership that trump brought and emphasized with his fumbling at this critical time. It's yet another way trump's supporters and enablers in the republican party bear shame.</comment></comment>


[Indiegogo] Greek bailout fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/greek-bailout-fund#/story

<comment><USER2> More than 1.5 million euro and almost 90K backers.

Even if it doesn't work, it's worth already because of this: "Many Greek people are messaging me to say how overjoyed they are to hear that real people around Europe care about them. It must be hard when you think the rest of the continent is against you." [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/01/greek-b...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/01/greek- bailout-crowdfund-politicians-euros-people)

</comment><comment><USER3> 109,142EUR collected in a few hours, that would be amazing if the campaign could make it.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is absolutely amazing that this has gotten so far so quickly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Almost 800,000 euro currently.</comment>