July 2015 was warmest month ever recorded - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201507 <comment><USER3> Since 1880

Edit: I normally don't react to downvotes but this is a direct quote. Larger context: _this was also the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880–2015 record, at 61.86°F (16.61°C), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.14°F (0.08°C)_

<comment><USER4> How exactly do they do a fair comparison between 1880 and today? I'm assuming the temperature readings today are very accurate, but how accurate were the measuring devices going back in history, and their standards for taking temperature? Most of the thermometers I have in my house are +- 2F, which would eliminate the differences entirely.

<comment><USER5> There are significant temperature records that go back much farther than 1880 even. Many navies and armies kept records from all over the world, so we actually have lots more data than people think. There are also bodies of science that deal with 'aftcasting', which is making a weather forecast for a date in the past. These techniques have been refined to the point where we can make 1-day aftcasts for ~1850 that are comparable to modern 2-3 day weather forecasts in terms of accuracy, even with the limited data available (things like barometric pressure readings from ships).

I'm not sure about the technology used at the time, but the basic answer to your question that that they had a lot more thermometers than you expect, distributed globally too. And as we're discussing global averages, the noise about +-2F in your house isn't really the same problem.

Edit: Here's a neat 100-year reanalysis paper if you're interested. Abstract link here, full pdf available on the page: [http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175](http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-87-2-175). "Feasibility of a 100-Year Reanalysis Using Only Surface Pressure Data"

<comment><USER6> To be honest, and this is my opinion only, but 2-3 day forcasts, at least in my area, are _horribly inaccurate_. In my state, it's a common joke that being a meteorologist is the only job you can have where you can be wrong 95% of the time, and still keep your job.

Seriously, our forecasts are nearly always wrong. So.....saying we can make _as accurate_ of forecasts for 200 years ago...that's not really saying much.

This is after moving to two cities in the same state, more than 100 miles apart, the forecasts still _never get better_.

<comment><USER7> >To be honest, and this is my opinion only, but 2-3 day forcasts, at least in my area, are horribly inaccurate. In my state, it's a common joke that being a meteorologist is the only job you can have where you can be wrong 95% of the time, and still keep your job.

Meteorologists lower the quality of the data they receive.

People don't want bad news. People don't want to hear that it's going to rain on their weekend. People won't tune in to hear constant bad news.

So meteorologists take the positive and optimistic side.

The reality of forecasting is that much of the data, models, the warnings, are all created by the NWS.

The further you get from real NWS data, the lower the quality tends to be. It's like a game of telephone, except with forecasting.

National forecasters like The Weather Channel utilize tons of NWS data and models, and present it in a more friendly way. Generally there is a loss of quality here (and, when you look at TWC's buzzfeed approach to weather, it's not hard to see why they might respect clicks above all else).

Then, further down the pipe, away from the NWS and the actual source, away from National broadcasters, we get to local broadcasters. Once again, these guys are largely relying on upstream info, just packaging for the local audience.

It's not surprising that local meteorologists provide the lowest quality forecasting, because that's not really their job to provide highly accurate forecasting. Their job is actually to keep you watching through a commercial break, so the show remains on-air. The NWS is the service whose job is it to accurately forecast.

<comment><USER8> Another big problem is that people don't understand uncertainty, and therefore forecasters don't express uncertainty.

For example, just look at whatever near-term forecast you have handy. What are the forecast high and low temperatures for the next few days? What are the error bars on those highs and lows?

Oh, you couldn't find error bars? Yeah.

<comment><USER9> That's why I always check radar map forecasts. They forecast rain everywhere in my area but not at my exact spot? Yeah, I take my umbrella.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone else noticed that the conservative rhetoric has quietly switched from "global warming doesn't exist so we don't have to do anything" to "global warming isn't caused by people so there is nothing we can do"?

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's called global warming anymore, it's called climate change. Besides, I don't understand why it's ok for liberals to make fun of conservatives using "extreme snow" during winter as an argument against climate change but that liberals using exceptional heat during summer as an argument for climate change is ok. A few months of extra cold or heat is not enough to prove or disprove climate change. Last year we had an unusual cold summer, was that proof that climate change is not happening? We already have good scientific ways to measure climate change, let's stick to these (carbon emission etc).

I think we should start focusing on real solutions. Many conservatives are right to underline that simply increasing taxes is not the solution. So what's the solution? Innovation in new source of renewable or less polluting energy technologies. Both liberals and conservatives tend to agree here but they diverge in methodology. Liberals want to heavily tax fossil and subsidize renewable energy. Problem with that is that taxing fossil make life and the economy harder in the meantime and subsidizing often goes to cronies which is bad for innovation. Conservatives prefer having better environment for businesses which will boost innovation. Maybe there's some middle ground in there.

<comment><USER12> _> I don't think it's called global warming anymore, it's called climate change._

Global warming and climate change are one in the same. "Global warming" became the rallying cry for so many environmentalist quacks citing bunk science - people like Al Gore were universally skewered in the mainstream media - <USER2> it was toxic from a PR perspective. So they came up with a new term. "Climate change" has the exact same beliefs, political backers, scientists, corporate interests, and studies behind it as "global warming". It's just a new name.

 _> I think we should start focusing on real solutions._

The issue is that there is no scientific evidence that solutions are possible. The earth has gone through many dramatic "climate change/global warming" events, and these last occurred long before cars or other man-made pollutants existed. It will go through them again, regardless of how many carbon taxes are levied by liberals or Tesla's are sold. It's just a reality - mankind will eventually cease to exist on this planet regardless of what it does or does not do.

<comment><USER13> There must be a name for in-the-end-everybody-dies-so-why-bother logical fallacy...

(For some reason, these same people are often pretty worried about the state of the economy. Nations have fallen since the beginning of history, and in the end every business and every nation collapse, so why don't we just let them fail and see if the next one is better?)

<comment><USER12> It's quite a bit different. Economies were invented by people, are controlled by people, and therefore can be altered by people. The environment, however, has none of these characteristics. This is not a "logical fallacy" \- it's simply a fact that the environmentalists of the world don't like very much and have spent billions of dollars (mostly of other people's money- i.e. your tax dollars) trying to get people to ignore.

There is indeed a logical fallacy playing out in all of this, and that of course is that environmentalists/liberals are attempting to control something that all of the credible scientific evidence says we can't control. Controlling the universe, as it turns out, is much harder than bribing legislators to use the government resources to pursue one's agenda.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)

Mankind has been altering environments since when they only had stone tools. Your argument is basically, "I don't believe modern humans (with its 7+ billion population and sustained alteration of the majority of land area) have any noticeable effect on the Earth's ecosystem, therefore scientists who say so are wrong."

Stop being so willfully ignorant.

<comment><USER12> So your argument is that the ice age did not occur....how could it have, since the T-Rex did not have fossil fuels to burn, and fossil fuels are the source of all climate change events? Got it.

<comment><USER13> There's so many logical and factual errors that my head hurts. But for a start: the K-T extinction event (which wiped out the dinosaurs) was caused by an asteroid impact. Ice age, if there ever was one at that time, only played a secondary role.

And yes, all scientists (at least sane ones) would agree that, if a several- kilometer-across ball of rock and iron falls from the sky, it will have such a disastrous consequence on the climate (among other things, including "staying alive" for most people) that our modern Global Warming will look like a summer picnic in comparison.

...which is basically non sequitur.

I'm not even sure why you brought up dinosaurs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Climate change is the biggest problem of our time. I wish there were more startups focused on solving it - there are so many opportunities to make money here while improving the world at a global scale. Mitigating the effects of climate change for businesses could easily be worth $1T+. More VCs should pay attention to these opportunities, and more startup founders should enter this space.

<comment><USER14> Here is a proof of your concept. The Climate Corporation ([https://www.climate.com](https://www.climate.com)) is a SF based company founded in 2006 by two ex-Googlers. Its purpose is to help agriculture adapt to climate change. It was acquired by Monsanto in 2013 for $1.1B.

[ETA: I had a feeling you knew this, and indeed while I was writing, you captured this info below as well. Hope your project is going well.]

<comment><USER15> Another proof of concept: Opower ([http://opower.com/careers](http://opower.com/careers)) is a DC- and SF-based company. It uses behavioral science to drive increases in energy efficiency among consumers, a competency it sells to utilities who use it to meet government EE regulations.

<comment><USER16> This is mainly marketing, to help utilities improve their reputation (according to Opower's employees I've met this year).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad they're some tangential evidence to back up my month long moaning, "It's like literally never been this hot before".

<comment><USER18> Unless you were continent hopping all month, I'm afraid it doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it possible to separate the warming that's caused by man-made pollution/CO2 from the earth's natural cycles?

Obviously, we're getting warmer because of pollution, but is that on-top of a natural warming cycle? Being partially counteracted by a natural cooling cycle? Could we all be saved by an ice-age?

<comment><USER20> There's a ton of information about the available science, from high-level overviews all the way down to nitty-gritty technical details, in the periodic reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They're published every several years, and the most recent one is from 2014.

A good place to start is the so-called synthesis report, which covers a mixture of physical science, human impact and public policy. Page 6 of the "summary for policymakers" includes a graph showing that although the error bars are still pretty big, the observed warming is consistent with estimates of human-caused effects, and vastly larger than can be explained by the "natural cycles" we know about.

[https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment- report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI...](https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment- report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those who believe that climate change is real, and a significant threat to our longevity on this planet, would you please view / read this and share your thoughts?

[http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=...](http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14473)

I don't believe defeatism is helpful, but I got a very Prince "Party Like It's 1999" feeling after consuming this. What should we do? If we pull all the fossil fuels out of our economy tomorrow, everything will crash. Not to mention that there is zero political will to even contemplate this. So what should we do?

<comment><USER8> What we should do is transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as is reasonably possible. Not simply pull them all at once, because that won't help anything as you say, but start moving smartly in that direction. Fortunately we already are, even if not as quickly as we'd like. I think in the next few years we'll see rapid change as solar panels and batteries become cheap enough to compete with traditional energy on their own terms.

I don't see the case for human extinction here. Your link mentions it, but doesn't appear to lay out the case at all, so I don't know what that statement is based on, but I don't see how it would occur. The potential disruption due to climate change is immense, but people will survive. The problem is not how to keep humanity alive, but how to keep civilization going without some sort of major backslide, and without getting a couple of billion people killed.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the thoughtful comment. As for this point: >I think in the next few years we'll see rapid change as solar panels and batteries become cheap enough to compete with traditional energy on their own terms.

I'm unsure how the recent slide in oil prices is effecting the comparative competitiveness of fossils vs. renewables. Not helpful, I imagine.

<comment><USER8> When it comes to electricity generation, I don't think oil prices affect it much. Oil isn't cost competitive for electricity as it stands.

The fall in natural gas prices _is_ affecting it, since natural gas is competitive for electrical generation. But coal still rules when it comes to cheap electricity, as long as you ignore the externalities of course.

I think what's going to happen is that pretty soon, solar plus storage will be price competitive even with coal. Then there will be a big shift. It's unlikely that the price of coal will drop much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's what they said last month! Get your story straight, scientists!

</comment><comment><USER9> I would really like to see a graph of the mean temperature of the hottest month in each year, so we can see how this trend compares to noise.

<comment><USER23> It's difficult even with that. The mean temperature is calculated via inference (obviously you can't have a thermometer everywhere). And there's occasional adjustments to how the global temp. is inferred. The NOAA recently did one [0].

They have a nice comparison list of the ten warmest years [1].

[0] [http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/pag...](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/page-1/)

[1] [http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/pag...](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2015/5/supplemental/page-3)

<comment><USER9> That's interesting, should be hard to not introduce a systematic error.

<comment><USER23> That's why I prefer the data from satellite measurements.

There's a couple for surface temperature at [http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/](http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/) & [http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air- temperature](http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24>
        Data: Hottest month ever!
        Group A: Weather != Climate.

        Data: Coldest month ever!
        Group B: Weather != Climate.

Round and round we go.

<comment><USER20> That's a bit of a false comparison. Most of the "coldest ever" headlines that you'll see are talking about particular locations or regions, which have extremely high variance. If you look at enough different subsets of your data, you're bound to find both high and low extremes _somewhere_. But this article is talking about a global average, which is much less noisy.

When you look at global average temperatures over a comparable span of time (since ~1880), every year in the last couple of decades has been pretty close to a record high. The last record low was more than a century ago. [http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is to be expected during an El Nino year. Let's see how big it gets!

</comment><comment><USER26> I suspect that, man-made or not, we are past the point of being able to "fix" it and probably just need to adapt.

</comment><comment><USER27> Good job guys, you better find a way to reach these earth-like planets faster.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it continually amazing how many people find NASA sending rockets into space all the time to be an expected and everyday part of modern life, but then don't trust them with a thermometer.

<comment><USER15> Temperature measurement is a hard problem, hard enough you could write a PhD on it. Asking questions about methods etc. is entirely acceptable.

The issue is when people refuse to recognize that thousands of scientists have made this their career, and thousands of PhDs actually have been written on temperatures past and present, and think that talking heads on Fox News reciting memos paid for by fossil fuel companies contain even the semblance of a real critique.

<comment><USER28> > Asking questions about methods etc. is entirely acceptable.

I am fascinated by the topic of temperature collection methods through the years. Is there an easily digestible source with explanations?

<comment><USER15> Not that I know of, unfortunately--most of what I know I've gleaned from conversations with a brother who works in the field, and from [http://realclimate.org/](http://realclimate.org/) , which has some decent technical information for a blog (but unfortunately has declined a bit IMO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting to me that if you say "today was hotter than any day on record" The answer given always seems to be global warming. However if you say "today was colder than any day on record" (also happens very frequently) the answer given is "That's weather, not climate."

Edit: Apparently this is not interesting to HNers. Bring on the downvotes.

<comment><USER30> Seems there are now three things that can not be discussed rationally: politics, religion and climate change.

It is a perversion of science when a scientific theory is no longer subject to healthy criticism and skepticism.

<comment><USER8> That's because politics has consumed climate change and made it its own.

I find it really disturbing that so much of (American) politics today is a debate over _facts_. Politics should be about debating priorities and principles and approaches based on commonly accepted facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Last February was also one of the coldest.

[http://www.weather.com/news/news/top-five-coldest- february-m...](http://www.weather.com/news/news/top-five-coldest-february- midwest-northeast)

<comment><USER32> Except if you look at the linked article and change the month to February. [http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary- info/global/201502](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201502) Second hottest on record

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> sure. more than half the data used in their models is fake made up numbers. Can't trust anything noaa has to say. using non made up temperature data shows we're actually very slightly cooling.

<comment><USER34> I don't see why using inferred/model data is a bad thing. It is simply not feasible to measure the temperature at every location in the world. Satellite data, combined with in-situ and model calculations can very accurately fill in for missing data. The only other option here is to sit on our hands and say "oh well, I guess we can't predict the weather because we don't have perfect data", which is completely unreasonable.

<comment><USER35> There is another potential concern besides the inferred data (which, as you say, should be reasonable), though I don't know how much it would affect any of the larger conclusions (if they are affected at all).

[also, this reference is somewhat old now; I haven't checked if this problem has been addressed in more recent models]

There is evidence[1] that the climate model software doesn't handle floating point properly (which is, unfortunately, a very common problem).

        "... there exist differences in the results for different ... parallel
        libraries, and optimization levels, primarily a result of the treatment
        of rounding errors ... the ensemble spread due to the differences in
        software system is comparable to the ensemble spread due to the
        differences in initial conditions ..."

Rounding errors on different hardware, operation ordering, and optimization level screams that the software isn't properly handling[2] IEEE 754 floating point. This _could_ be a serious problem in an iterated model that is chaotically sensitive to initial conditions (hence the use of ensemble forecasting).

/* regardless, we need a lot thorium reactors ASAP */

[1] [http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-12-00352.1](http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-12-00352.1)

[2] (pdf) [https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/02Numer...](https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/02Numerics/Double/paper.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


How Facebook, Google, and Twitter 'embeds' Helped Trump in 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/26/facebook-google-twitter-trump-244191 <comment><USER2> Techmeme Summary: _Nancy Scola / Politico: Study: interviews with tech staffers show how Facebook, Twitter, and Google helped Trump team as part of ad services; Clinton team declined embeds_

Link to the peer-reviewed paper (as per article) from the article: [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2017.13...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2017.1364814)

>> Quotes from the article:

While the paper does not detail the specific tasks Facebook carried out for Trump, it describes the sort of work the company did generally for 2016 candidates, including coordinating so-called dark posts that would appear only to selected users and identifying the kinds of photos that perform best on Facebook-owned Instagram. Twitter, meanwhile, would help candidates analyze the performances of their tweet-based fundraising pushes to recommend what moves the campaigns should make next. Google kept tabs on candidates' travels to recommend geographically targeted advertisements.

One unnamed tech company staffer is quoted in the study as saying, "Clinton viewed us as vendors rather than consultants."

>> End of quotes</comment>


Removing the strange #t and #f of the if's in Racket bytecode - <AUTHOR> http://gus-massa.blogspot.com/2014/04/removing-strange-t-and-f-of-ifs-in.html

<comment><USER2> Is your code available somewhere?

Also, you should submit your changes as pull requests for the compiler.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just pushed them to [https://github.com/gus-massa/racket- branches/tree/gus](https://github.com/gus-massa/racket-branches/tree/gus) . It's based on an old commit, because I had to do all the tests in a fixed version do the comparisons.

<comment><USER2> Awesome! I'll look into merging this.

Do you have a full version of your bytecode analysis code as well?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good recruiter experiences? - <AUTHOR> I have a recruiter who's been more dedicated than most at trying to get me to interview for a job. The job sounds interesting, but I personally think I'm underqualified for it, and I'd hate to go and make a bad impression. I'm concerned that the recruiter is more concerned with getting bodies in front of the hiring manager than with finding a good applicant, but I don't know if I'm off the mark there. Has anyone here had any positive experiences with recruiters, especially ones where your mind was changed about the job or the process? Or are the horror stories mostly true? <comment><USER2> Good recruiters are a rare breed, but they do exist. You always have to remember that recruiters are middlemen and their ultimate goal is to get paid to place. Somethings I generally look out for are who are this recruiters clients and how senior they are. The recruiting industry has very high turnover and most people don't last very long. If you're dealing with a recruiter who's been doing it for years, chances are they are doing something right. Finally, see if the recruiter is focused on the industry or even better a niche (selling specific set of skills) or just recruiting generally.</comment>


Tell HN: Thank you for this community - <AUTHOR> Shout-outs to everyone who contributes high-quality submissions/comments.
Despite the large userbase HN has today, it's still one of the most informative communities I've come across. Also thanks to the mods for their effort in keeping it this!<p>I'd only wish something like HN would exist for every interest/discipline (So many of mine don't have valuable online communities) <comment><USER2> Very interested too, to an extend that I'm often torn between Reddit / subreddits when it comes to crowdsourcing knowledge on a specific topic.

How much work would it take to achieve this?

</comment><comment><USER3> > I'd only wish something like HN would exist for every interest/discipline > (So many of mine don't have valuable online communities)

For instance?

<comment><USER4> I thought about starting something like this for new moms. There's plenty of content out there in the niche, but nothing centralized that I found.

<comment><USER5> What would you expect to be discussed?

Why limit to new mothers? What about new fathers? (I recently became a father - hence the question)

<comment><USER4> I think new fathers would be a good focus too. In my experience moms and dads have some overlap of questions but also some diverging questions related to their differences. I am sure you could serve both, but was thinking about niching down. And my experience is that there were a lot more moms discussing issues on the internet than there were dads (this was a few years ago).

I guess there is baby center but the is is pretty old school and more focused on q&a (like stack overflow, rather than hn).

As far as what would be posted, I envisioned the same kind of link heavy, intelligent comments as on hn. My SO thought something similar was already happening on Facebook.

<comment><USER5> I guess that traditionally mothers have been more involved with raising infants than fathers. I am fortunate to be able to provide AND have the freedom to participate fully in raising our child.

My very limited exposure to (online) communities centered around rearing children has give me a negative bias... [reinforcing gender biases, excessive spiritualism, etc]

On the other hand - I devour every article I can find on child rearing, child psychology, etc. It helps that my sister has a phd in psychology. It is my job to be the best parent I can be - and to do that, I need information.

Luckily, my wife has already had two children, which makes my life so much easier.

I have no idea what is happening on Facebook... Honestly, I would value a resource similar to HN focused on raising children. Serious and valid information and in depth discussion is extremely hard to find. At least, I find it difficult to find the information I value online.

<comment><USER4> Here you are: [https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-a-hacker-news-clone-in- un...](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-a-hacker-news-clone-in-under-a- minute-without-writing-any-code-96fb15547677)

When you make a million dollars, you can thank me :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitfinex Adds 12 New Altcoins to Its Cryptocurrency Portfolio - <AUTHOR> https://altcoinreport.co/bitfinex-adds-12-new-altcoins-to-its-cryptocurrency-portfolio/ <comment><USER2> Bitfinex has added the below altcoins to their portfolio increasing their market reach by about a billion dollars.

Aion Request Network IOSToken Loopring BnkToTheFuture Token Cofound.it WAX SingularityNET Medicalchain ODEM Dai</comment>


To avoid Indian ban, BlackBerry maker allows govt. access to encrypted messages - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100831/blackberry-research-in-motion-ban

<comment><USER2> Note: This isn't supposed to be a political comment. I don't like politics and I don't want to indulge in it neither am I interested in patriotism and other such things. What I do care about is the suffering of human beings and finding solutions for their problems. This comment is such an observation of a pressing problem I see around me.

\----

This is precisely why I don't want to stay in India beyond a certain point. This isn't just something about privacy, but it's the symptom of a cancer that's spreading through the system. That might sound like a sweeping statement, but it isn't. The Indian state is slowly disintegrating due to the cause and effect caused by _decades_ of corruption (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India> ) and growing discontent.

As of now in India there are Kashmir separatists to the north who want to overthrow direct rule of the Indian state after decades of conflict and the rise of oppressive practices by the Indian state (see: [http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,PAK,,3ae6a8558,0...](http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,PAK,,3ae6a8558,0.html) ). I see stories like these ( [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7973499...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7973499/Boy-11-shot- dead-in-Kashmir.html)) depressingly often in the news. These people are want a solution and they are willing to spill blood for it.

In the south there is a growing communist insurgency consisting of impoverished people who have been long denied their rights and have taken up arms in protest (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite- Maoist_insurgency> ). The interesting thing is that these groups have entrenched their power by acting like an ad-hoc government collecting taxes, dispensing justice and winning the confidence of the villagers through goodwill schemes that the government should have implemented.

What fuels it is the fact that outside the metros there is no visible infrastructure development and government functioning is reduced to the distribution of voter cards. Most people attribute this to a lack of resources, but that isn't quite true. More than $ 125 mil. are spent on creating rural health centers yearly and budgets are allocated based upon need by bureaucrats with little or no accountability to the people there are supposed to serve [disclaimer: my mother is such a bureaucrat and I read her files at times]. However, no one knows what's going on "over there" on the ground and recent reports aren't too encouraging. In fact, it's treated as a fact that most of the allocated money is swished off into a few pockets through a network of scams that often prey upon the illiterate.

Anecdotally, I know of villages just a few hours outside New Delhi in which ingenious scams take place. For example, the state has promised food and ration for school going children with uniforms. So, what happens on the ground is that a few officials come together and sell the provisions on the open market and buy substandard food instead. This wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the fact that the education system in the villages is so broken that many of it's graduate are still effectively illiterate. In fact, the teachers themselves under new schemes are often high school graduates who have been taught under the same system.

The list goes on and on, but the trend in general is that these "facts of indian life" come together to form a potent environment which ferments chaos. What will emerge out of this chaos is something that no one can predict, but what is certain that India won't have a congenial atmosphere necessary for stability and wealth creation (wealth over here means things that matter, not money). What is far more disturbing is that few are willing to even look at the problem let alone start developing solutions for it.

tl;dr: Basically, the odds aren't on the PR guys side.

<comment><USER3> The number of times you are getting downvoted reminds me of a disturbing trend I've noticed in online discussions about India, and in the papers when I've visited the country. There's a crazy nationalist streak there that doesn't seem to be familiar with the idea of "loyal opposition" or the value of dissent. That worries me a lot more than the corruption.

<comment><USER4> Get surrounded by neighbours like India does, have your workplace called as chop shops, be the butt of several "stealing jobs" jokes and you will automatically feel a little touchy when some armchair critic sits and posts twenty things wrong in the country and basically calls your nation unfit to live. What I see above is not loyal dissent by any means.

<comment><USER2> Um, I am not exactly an arm chair critic. I actually think that in order to find a solution to a problem you need to look at the truth first.

I can't tell you how I feel when I walk by a child slaving in a teashop. That child doesn't know the meaning of loyal dissent. That child doesn't have people speaking up for him/her. That child needs to have a future and I am willing to spend a large part of my life trying to give them one. However, in order to do that you need to see the truth.

I have not written a single opinion in that post except for the observation that this state is slowly disintegrating and although I might be wrong I have tried to prop it up with data. If you feel hurt by it then I am sorry, but this is what the cards are and I would rather spend my time deciding how to play the hand.

<comment><USER4> I am making the below post assuming you are Indian citizen. Lets look at the truth then.

> when I walk by a child slaving in a teashop.

You know quite well that child labor is illegal in India and we have a huge enforcement problem. When you walk by such a child, why don't you report this to the cops? Why don't you pass on this information to CRY or some such NGO. Have you tried speaking to the guy who employs the kid and tried to get the child enrolled in some school?

My point precisely is that as a dispassionate observer, you are not doing anything to solve the problem. I will state why I believe there is reason for hope.

When I had gone to get my driver's license in Hyderabad, I was turned down on the pretext of not knowing some archaic clauses because I did not come through an agent and hence had not bribed the person incharge. However, next time round, there was a redhat system on which I had to give my test (no more answering questions to some guy). Now there is a very clean smooth system with very little scope of corruption.

A billion plus population and a poor one at that will lead to chaos. To jump from that to a country disintegrating calls for quite a leap of faith. I highly doubt that there has been a study of failed states to definitively conclude that your figures lead directly to a disintegrating state.

<comment><USER2> Have you ever realized that we are all addicted to hope?

I think that you ought to read Collapse(see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed) by Jared Diamond ). Whatever he has written is so profound that I still haven't finished the book i.e. I need time to assimilate it in. You see, everything is a part of a complex chain of causality and in order to figure out anything while avoiding infinite recursion we need to create mental models of those interconnections and analyze upon that. I can't go into the data ad infinitum to prove the point. I need to pick up blocks of concepts and hold them up as black boxes in order to observe how the bigger box behaves with them.

This means that my comment can extend as long as I want and I can write entire books on the constructs of this scenario, but we need to stop it somewhere. This is why I have taken that so called "leap of faith". I am open to the possibility that I am wrong, and I hope that I am wrong, but that doesn't make the problem any less pressing.

<comment><USER4> That book does sound extremely interesting. Will definitely be reading that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somehow I fail to see how this is "shocking" news. India is just kindly asking RIM to provide to them what they did provide to the US and other western governments for years, namely the ability to snoop on the message traffic.

And of course a real criminal or terrorist can just use any encrypted IMAP server in a remote location to exchange messages in secrecy, completely bypassing RIM and the snooping effort...

<comment><USER6> Sure, if by "kindly asking" you mean "we'll shut you down unless you comply".

And the fact that "serious" criminals will not be impeded makes this even more of a suspicious measure - looks more like it's aimed towards snooping on innocent parties, such as journalists and political opponents.

<comment><USER7> Can US government do the same? If it can I see no problem in Indian government expecting a similar capability.

<comment><USER6> The US government has an implicit capability to eavesdrop because RIM servers are located in the country. _Requiring_ that servers be placed in your country with the _only_ purpose of being able to eavesdrop is simply despicable. You have no problem living in a country that freely imitates the human rights/ privacy record of Saudi Arabia?!

<comment><USER8> The Indian (and other govts) asked for the server to be placed in their country because otherwise RIM will invoke the technicality that that don't have to honor Indian govt's snoop requests since the server isn't located within Indian jurisdiction.

Complying with foreign snoop requests for a server located in the US _may_ (IANAL) make it possible for somebody to sue RIM in US courts for complying with a request that didn't come from US law enforcement. So RIM is highly unlikely to honor snoop requests for servers outside the country making the demand. Hence the demand to place servers within countries interested in snooping on their citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm following this story with some interest because it may have an impact on my startup. There are conflicting reports on this[1]. RIM appears to be saying they haven't given anything up, and there is some question whether they _can_ give anything up, given BES is based on PKI and RIM doesn't have the keys.

[1] [http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech- now/entry/indi...](http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech- now/entry/india-s-blackberry-farce-there)

<comment><USER10> It isn't needed for BES, if you have BES you have a corporate office that they can turn up at with a warrant (and or a battering ram) and take all the messages they want.

This is about John Doe mailing John Smith and discussing things they don't want the government to know about.

<comment><USER11> Well, if your corporate office is in e.g. India, at least.

So this whole hullabaloo is just about whether or not India will be able to sniff messages going through RIM's servers? (I think I've seen this referred to as BIS?) Do they just want the ability to do this without having to go through procedures first with RIM; that is, without telling RIM that they're going to decrypt messages?

<comment><USER10> If your corporate office is outside India, then A) they probably don't care and B) if they suspect you of some sort of tax evasion/crime they can always serve your Indian office.

The problem is that if they try and intercept John Doe's (or Patel's) email and have to serve a warrant in Canada it becomes an international incident.

They just want the same cozy relationship that the US/UK/Canada etc have with each other where they quietly share all your communications with NSA/GCHQ/CISC anyway.

<comment><USER9> My startup is working on making endpoint-to-endpoint security for email really easy. I'm wondering what that cozy relationship is going to look like for us (of course, that is a Lamborghini problem ;).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some hidden issues in Indian society

        Zero social mobility

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility>

        One of the most corruption nation in the world

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India>

        836 million people live on 20 cents a day

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India>

        Pakistan is a better nation to do business than India

<http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/>

        Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad

[http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians- among-...](http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most- corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm)

</comment><comment><USER13> It would seem the best method to negate this intrusion would be to utilize tools already in existence, PGP being the most obvious. To date though, there is no working beta (that I'm aware of) of a mobile solution in the thunderbird/openPGP vein. I understand the inherent vulnerability of having your private keys on a mobile device, but is anyone working in this space? Is it possible within the confines of the iPhone, Blackberry, etc. mail client? I know personally I would pay quite a bit for an app that mimics the thunderbird/openPGP integration on a mobile device.

<comment><USER5> There is an android app that does that: <http://pgpmanager.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER13> Thanks for pointing this out. Looks like a promising new project, but I wouldn't say it quite mimics openPGP on thunderbird - i.e. no integration with a mail client.

<comment><USER14> I believe k9 mail has gpg integration.

<https://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=13#c68>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I disagree that a message is _encrypted_ in the first place, if more than the two end parties can read the message! If RIM can "decrypt" a message meant to be private between two parties, the message was never "encrypted" in the first place.

<comment><USER10> The call from your GSM cell phone to the base station is encrypted - the link to somebody else's landline phone isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can US government decrypt the messages or get them via Warrantless Wiretapping, or force RIM? If the answer is yes, then I do not see any reason why India or some other country should not be allowed to do the same.</comment>


Watch Out Rivals, With Latitude API Google Starts Taking Location Very Seriously - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/google-latitude-api/ <comment><USER2> outside of search and gmail which of google's pet projects have gained significant traction? Orkut? App Engine? Nexus One store? Wave? Google voice?

Google has a pretty bad track record - until they improve I don't think there is anything to fear when they launch these pet initiatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> AdSense, AdWords, Maps, Docs, Chrome, Calendar, News, Suggest (now integrated into the main search) and Android all seem to be doing pretty well.

<comment><USER2> Good catch Chrome and Android should be on that list.

AdSense,AdWords and Maps are search add-ons. Google suggest is also (a rather uninteresting, but useful) add-on to search.

Calendar is a Gmail add on.

The docs suite was essentially acquired via writely they didn't build it in house.

The point I'm really making is that just because Google enters a space doesn't mean they will dominate. They don't at a lot of the projects they attempt.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fair assessment to say that Google doesn't automatically dominate every space they enter; but it doesn't mean they can't.

It seems to hinge on how important they determine the space to be. I can't think of a product they've backed and promoted heavily that hasn't dominated the space it occupied. Wave is probably the black sheep of the bunch, but it just got opened to the public today.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


George Orwell never dreamed of advertising as invasive as Yahoo's proposal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/yahoo-wants-to-patent-billboards-that-spy-on-the-public-for-targeted-ads/ <comment><USER2> I am already enjoying benefits of grouplization. Real-time traffic is monitored via millions of smart phone GPS and Inertial sensors. The data (may or may not be satisfactorily) anonymized, and analyzed and sent back to my smartphone to make route decisions when commuting.

But its a slippery slope that consumers slide down over and over. I recall days gone by where SUN Microsystems engineers engaged in heated debate about caller ID and whether that was too much an invasion of privacy. Then, they argued that online sales would never take off because of the weakness of Internet security.

Yahoo's patent application seems to me to be a natural outcome, once our smartphones are outfitted with so much sensing capability. Be outraged, but don't be surprised.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and this is the opponent's technology:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8925019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8925019)</comment>


Are the NY Times and Washington Post Buying Fake Clicks from China? - <AUTHOR> http://vesselnews.io/fake-newsflow-new-york-times-washington-post-buying-clicks-china-traffic-jumps-half-traffic-two-months/ <comment><USER2> Betteridge's law says "no", and the amount of bias shown in the first paragraph was enough to make me stop reading.

<comment><USER3> It would be even more astounding if the new Chinese traffic was genuine.

<comment><USER4> Or real.</comment></comment></comment>


A Rails like framework for Clojure. - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/macourtney/Conjure

<comment><USER2> All these Rails clones! They think they can just ape Rails' idioms and then they'll have the power of Ruby's _metaprogramming_ at their disposal and -- oh, wait.

<comment><USER3> rails is a pretty mature framework these days, and it's got tons of plugins that are actually easy to use. It's a pretty steep road to get something up to those standards. When I need something that has everything already neatly solved and ready for cranking out stuff fast -- I always chose rails.

I'm currently trying to learn clojure and enjoying it immensely. It's a lot like ruby (powerful and fun) but with easier syntax and it's way faster. Looking forward to read through the conjure source.

One thing that bugs me with most of the clojure web frameworks that I have looked at is that they a. use ant instead of maven and b. don't provide a canned method to generate a war file. I don't like the advice "just leave a screen with slime and emacs running on your server". It runs on the JVM for crying out loud -- a little more enterprise is appropriate :)

<comment><USER4> "just leave a screen with slime and emacs running on your server"

Another way to do it is just load the swank jar on your server (the server side of slime). In your server startup, include a call to (start-swank). Then you can connect via slime whenever you want using M-x slime-connect, and you don't need emacs + screen to stay running.

I've only learned the JVM as part of learning clojure. What advantages would a .war provide?

<comment><USER3> Advantages:

Easy to get a server running: just install tomcat or jetty on your production machine, sftp the war file and it automatically deploys.

Init.d scripts are tricky to write and get right, by using a tested script from a distro things tend to work out of the box.

Monitoring -- easy to hook in some monitoring script that can reboot tomcat or jetty should the server stop responding.

Techops generally know how to deploy a .war file -- I would not feel comfortable telling someone to learn lisp just to deploy a webapp.

pretty interesting with swank -- need to look into that.

<comment><USER4> The war file and swank shouldn't be mutually exclusive, I just haven't bothered with a .war because by default Compojure starts Jetty itself, and I didn't want to bother with compiling the .war and restarting the server to test changes. Once you get addicted to reloading code from your IDE, you don't want to go back. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rails is a Ruby framework, Django is a Python framework. Each one uses the strengths and idioms of its implementation language to be and become better.

These ports don't make sense. Clojure is not Ruby, there will always be a disconnect between Clojure as a language and a framework ported from Ruby.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...or Rails in Clojure will turn out even better than the original. It is not as if Clojure lacks the meta-programming power has made Ruby Rails so elegant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://github.com/danlarkin/madison> is another interesting project. I believe the intent is to port Django to Clojure.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...but last commit was in April.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, Dan hasn't touched it much last I saw. I was interested early on as I had spent a bit of time in Django (not a ton) but was more interested in Clojure web dev. But due to it's lack of movement I haven't bothered.

I may take a look at this one but I dunno, I don't have the ties to Rails to give that appeal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Conjure seems to be in early dev stage. It'd be a good idea for it to be packaged with bleeding edge of the clojure rt instead of 1.0.

None the less, it looks very promising.

</comment><comment><USER9> Although Clojure is an excellent tool, keep in mind it is still in early development.

It can be used to publish simple websites pretty elegantly, but for now it is relatively "low level"- I would say it still has a ways to go before being "Rails like."

<comment><USER10> Aside from having access to all the Java web frameworks, Clojure has Compojure and Conjure on the higher level and Ring (equivalent to Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack) for lower level.

I wouldn't discount Clojure as not ready for complicated web applications based on it's young age; Java servlets can be written in Clojure. Not that Java servlets are great, but they are widely used for non-trivial web sites.

Clojure is great at removing the ugliness of some Java APIs, I recall that Compojure is built atop servlets.

<comment><USER11> Compojure is built on top of Ring, but can wrap a Ring "handler" function in a Java servlet.

This functionality has been merged into Ring 0.1, so you may now be able to wrap a Conjure application into a Java servlet as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Bing Now Powers 30% of US Searches - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/04/11/bing-now-powers-30-of-us-searches/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29 <comment><USER3> These numbers are bogus, as far as I can tell.

I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers show Google at 98.7%. The numbers are similar across 10 other domains I own.

I challenge anyone to show me a site that gets 30% of their search engine hits from Bing. Seriously, if your Bing stats are even close to 30%, please share with us.

<comment><USER4> To my surprise, for March, Bing is at 15% and Yahoo is at 11% for BCC organic searches. My demographic is older, female-r, and more middle American than most of y'alls are. (Even with that, I cannot remember BingHoo being above 20% in _years_.)

<comment><USER5> When did it jump up? Do you know of anything they did that'd make them suddenly more popular?

<comment><USER4> You guys should hire me for SEO consulting if you can't answer this one in- house. ;)

Jokes aside: BingHoo share, followed by comparison to Google (which makes it harder to see).

[http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra- an...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-answer-2.png)

[http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra- an...](http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-answer-1.png)

I'm not specifically aware of anything material which would have materially affected BCC's performance on BingHoo in the last 3 months, and the big candidate for affecting performance at Google (Panda or whatever you guys call content farming internally) largely seems to have missed me. When you compare year-to-year to back out the seasonality, though, both Yahoo and Bing show strong growth in my Jan/Feb/March numbers and Google growth is much more muted. Feel free to backchannel me if you want the spreadsheet.

For reasons known only to the Excel gods, the X axis considers the last data point (March) to be in February.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that if you wanted a job at Google it would not be terribly difficult for you to get one. ;-)

Anyway, I bet there's probably somebody in search quality whose job it is to track these numbers, but I don't know who it is, and it's easier just to ask you. Plus, this way the HN community gets some interesting numbers. Thanks. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Important to keep in mind that when Hitwise/Comscore/Nielsen/etc. measure "Microsoft/Bing powered searches" they're including a LOT of searches that never leave MS/Yahoo's sites. If you do a search on MSN Autos or Yahoo! News or in Facebook's web search, for example, those are all powered by Bing and count toward their share.

Contrast with Google, where very few searches on Google's entire network lead to another page on Google (most of that traffic goes out to other sites like those we own/control). Thus, while 30% of web searches may be Bing powered, the Statcounter numbers are the ones I'm much more inclined to look at as a comparison. 8% for Bing and 11% for Yahoo! seem like plausible figures for outbound traffic sent from those engines.

<comment><USER7> Rand, I thought one of the providers (Hitwise or Comscore) started to separate out internal v. external links. Perhaps those were just pure links, like when a link at MSN.com went to a search results page?

I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?

<comment><USER6> I think you're correct that Comscore controls for/removes links to searches (like Bing's news links) but not for the queries done "in network" (at least, not that I'm aware of).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft inflates their search share statistics with sites like this: <http://www.clubbing.com>

Where they bribe people to play games that "search" on Bing in exchange for points they can use to buy things.

Additionally, this site is really easy to automate bots for (there are whole communities that work on this) in order to automate the prize winning process.

Even still, that's all good for Microsoft as far as I can tell, since even playing with bots brings up their share in the search market.

<comment><USER8> For anyone that can't tell what the site is about at first glance: it's a collection of word-based games (think text twist) and every time you guess/figure out some word correctly, a search to Bing is fired off in a separate frame.

The reasoning behind this Bing-fueled gaming experience is so that you can "research" words as you play...or something.

It's all very shady/hilarious.

<comment><USER9> Google is doing the same thing with A Google a Day: <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383379,00.asp>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using Bing since I found the Bing Rewards (<http://www.bing.com/rewards>), which gives you a point per 2 searches and lets you redeem the points for something later on. I have not found myself going back to Google, yet.

<comment><USER11> So each point is worth between $.007 and $.01 (based on the gift card conversions).

Assuming you make 50 searches per day, you'll make at most $.50 - is it really worth it for a half dollar a day?

<comment><USER10> I don't know... $0.50 (Bing) vs. $0.00 (Google). What is better for me when I can still find whatever I need to find in both?

<comment><USER12> Weird that you find them comparable. I've compared the two and Bing's results are just kind of weird (old results and non-related results come up). It's worth 50 cents a day for me to have decent results.

<comment><USER13> When did you do the comparison? In the summer of '09 when Bing launched I gave it a shot, but just did not like it as much as Google. A few months ago I went back and tried it again, and have not gone back to Google since.

<comment><USER12> I've tried it a few times since it launched and just did a quick try doing a self-Google. Again, less useful results than Google.

<comment><USER14> Google have a special case for vanity / people searches. I don't think that searching for yourself would given an accurate representation of the two search engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not too surprising. Just yesterday, I found that Bing had managed to get itself back in the list of search engines in my Firefox installation. I use a Mac! The only thing I can think of is that I must have updated the Flip4Mac WMV codecs, but I didn't even let it install Silverlight. If Microsoft is trying this hard to push Bing in so many ways, I'd be surprised if they _couldn't_ manage to hit 30% while the competition is resting on their laurels.

<comment><USER16> Much respect to Firefox for being the torch bearer in the darkness and all that, but their secret auto-updates in the background are why I don't use them.

I use a Mac not because I'm some techno-illiterate neo-lithic throwback, but because I'm a raging control freak. On the Mac I feel like I'm in control. Programs that go and do random weird stuff behind the scenes break that fragile illusion. :D

The worst was when Firefox's stealthy self-updating broke itself. I don't remember which version that was (sometime in 2008? 2009?) and it might have been on a work machine (Windows? Vista?) but there was basically no going back (couldn't use previous versions because of stealth updates...), and no going forward (wasn't gonna sit around waiting for them to patch it).

<comment><USER17> All a little off topic, but...

      menu Preferences -> Advanced -> Update

      seek to "When updates to Firefox are found"

      check "Ask me what I want to do"

Now you have your control again.

<comment><USER18> Continuing off-topic -- I hate programs that think updating is more important than whatever I had in mind when I launched the program. I prefer programs that update/download in the background while I get stuff done then let me update at my leisure when they've finished downloading.

<comment><USER19> I was just thinking the same thing - why doesa Firefox insisted on installing updates just when I open it to use it (which really is exactly when I don't want it to be doing it). Why not do the updates when I close it down?

<comment><USER20> The potential for data/program corruption is much higher when it is closing down (think of what happens when the computer shuts down, or when the program is closed immediately followed by a shutdown. )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The most important number is search advertising revenue. The entire online services division (which includes Bing) has revenues of around $2 billion per year. Google's AdWords brings in about $15 billion per year. Microsoft is nowhere close to 30% of the search market, revenue wise. For individual ad clicks Microsoft gets about as much as Google, so clearly Microsoft is not doing 30% of "real" searches (actual people looking for actual things and occasionally clicking on an ad.)

<comment><USER22> > _"The most important number is search advertising revenue."_

The effects of that kind of thinking at Google is why I often use Bing - <USER2> often Google's results appear to be skewed toward ad impressions rather than usefulness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sorry. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but can someone explain how I'm expected to resolve these two statements as something other than contradictions:

 _Yes, Bing-powered search ...clocking in at 30.01%_

 _Google in the same time period dropped .. to 64.42%, ceding that ground to Bing._

[Edit: Oh, sorry. yeah, I'm a fool. It reads _That was a rise from its February tally of 28.48_.. So Bing was already almost 30%. I get it now. That said? No Way.]

</comment><comment><USER24> I manage a site with 61.92% of users using Internet Explorer

Google = 92.66% Bing = 3.65% Yahoo = 2.03%

</comment><comment><USER23> This just really isn't sitting well with me... so, warning. Total conspiracy- theory cynicism ahead.

These numbers are from a company that at least in part appears to generate revenue from supplying analytics, and helping other companies tune their search results. While that may put them in a good position to tally these kinds of numbers, it also strikes me that it puts them in a good position to benefit from a redistribution of search-engine market share.

I'm not making an accusation at all. I'm far from informed enough to do so. That said, I'd love some insight on this angle from someone who's more familiar with the space that Hitwise is in.

<comment><USER25> Hitwise has been around before Google. I've never known them to be in the middle of a controversy. It's always possible, but application of Occam's Razor wouldn't look favorably on your theory.

<comment><USER22> "They're making money" is often the simplest explanation - not that I'm advocating a conspiracy theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > clocking in at 30.01% in March according to Hitwise. That was a rise from > its February tally of 28.48%. Google in the same time period dropped from > 66.69% to 64.42%, ceding that ground to Bing.

So Bing gained 1.53% while Google lost 2.27%. Where did the other 0.74% go?

<comment><USER27> ddg perhaps

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> According to Statcounter the number is closer to 20%. [http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US- monthly-201103-2...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US- monthly-201103-201103-bar)

<comment><USER29> Really? It says 8.72% for Bing for April 2011.

<comment><USER30> Yahoo is just bing search, so they're combined I assume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's important to note that Google made 88% of it's revenue outside of the US in 2009.

Here's is a paragraph describing how Google legally dodges tax:

" _The Dublin subsidiary sells advertising globally and was credited by Google with 88 percent of its $12.5 billion in non-U.S. sales in 2009._ "

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate- sho...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows- how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html)

So it seems a bit silly to focus solely on US searches. These are global markets we are talking about.

EDIT: link

<comment><USER32> I think you misread the quote. 88% of the non-US revenue going through Google Ireland doesn't in any way imply 88% of the total Google revenue being non-US.

Bing results are total garbage outside the US at the moment, so it's no surprise that their share would be low. And likewise it makes sense for MS to concentrate on reaching a critical mass in a single market first, and only worry about the rest of the world later.

<comment><USER31> Indeed. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yahoo search uses Bing? I must've missed the memo... that could help explain the 30% value - Bing's _site_ usage is still a percent and a half below Yahoo's.

A question, if anyone out there has an answer / speculation:

> _Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in March 2011. > This means that for both search engines, more than 80 percent of searches > executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of > 66 percent._

How much of that is impacted by the ridiculous number of queries Instant generates?

</comment><comment><USER34> That seems to be a large increase. I was under the impression that Bing/Yahoo made up 10 or 15%. Wonder what the change has been.

<comment><USER35> I did the same double-take. They both make up between 10 and 15% -- when MS bought Yahoo's search traffic, they effectively doubled their traffic and jumped to about 24-28%. So that's the number they've grown from recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Right... the majority of the searches involve terms like "download firefox" and "download chrome". :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> People just use Bing to search for porn so Google can't see that. Then they use Google for pretty much everything else, which is not much.

<comment><USER38> I suspect the same. It would be really interesting to see an analysis of search terms on Google vs search terms on Bing. Bing's video search also lends itself to porn searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What % on non-windows?

</comment><comment><USER40> This doesn't foot with the traffic to our site. Would be cool to have our own little unscientific survey, as I'd like to see what experiences other folks on here have... can you fill in the following?

1) Domain

2) Audience

3) Google/Yahoo/Bing % of traffic

4) Notes

<comment><USER41> 1) <http://ama.ab.ca/>

2) Auto club (similar to a AAA club in the US) (see 4b).

3) Google: 89.29%, Bing: 6.2%, Yahoo: 3.4% (see 4d).

4a) Numbers from the last 30 days, so this is relevant. 4b) We have members in ~1/3 of all households province-wide, so we feel our traffic represents an average online user well. 4c) 350,000+ Unique Visitors monthly (search + organic). 4d) Search-specific traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It only lists Yahoo and Bing here to come up with that 30%, what about Facebook search? Is that not counted (or counted separately)?

It's "Powered by Bing"

<comment><USER42> Personally I am not a big fan of Facebook search. I can barely ever find links I've posted or any non-person/group/game/widget content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google's search is bad (spammy advertising), but Bing's isn't any better. Recently at work I went to do a search for something innocuous like

"what words can you put s in front of and still have a word"

And the number 2 result was something about anal sex. I'm like WTF??? I'm at work!

How they can tout themselves as a major search engine in 2011 and not understand the concept of NSFW I do not know.

\----

My predictions:

1) So long as Microsoft keeps throwing money at it, Bing will continue to improve.

2) So long as Google's main source of revenue is advertising, they will continue to try to find that "sweet spot" of bombarding us day and night with ads, but _not quite_ enough to make us switch.

It's like a choice between new evil and old evil... either way that ain't a good thing.

<comment><USER43> Well, Apple seems well on their way to making their own curated internet, so don't give up all hope.

<comment><USER44> What makes you say this?</comment></comment></comment>


Why the 'wet tea leaves' drug raid was outrageous - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/01/11/why-the-wet-tea-leaves-drug-raid-was-outrageous/ <comment><USER2> All drug raids are outrageous. The stupid war on drugs is tearing society apart, criminalising citizens, filling jails, ripping apart families, wasting police and court resources, throwing away tax on enforcement, missing out on tax revenue and funnelling billions to organised crime. All because people want to get high, which is (for most drugs) a personal choice health issue.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a difference between crimanal drug usage and illegal drug usage. I mean, if it's a warehouse with massive ammounts of drugs in-out, then yes, a raid makes sense. There are criminals doing illegal things in there. However, a drug raid with the same tools preformed on an apartment is insane, it's going to be a group of people doing illegal things.

I will confess an error in my thinking, in that it's really hard to legally define what I describe, if not impossible. But, as the bible says (paraphrased, and this is probably the first time I've ever quoted it..) "I would not destroy the city if there is a single innocent inside of it." If you can't make the law work, than maybe it shouldn't be there.

<comment><USER4> > _I mean, if it 's a warehouse with massive ammounts of drugs in-out, then > yes, a raid makes sense. There are criminals doing illegal things in there._

Let's rephrase this a bit:

> _I mean, if it 's a warehouse with criminals doing illegal things in there, > then yes, a raid makes sense._

Currently much of the drug trade is managed by criminals, and once you're breaking drug laws you might as well go ahead and break other laws e.g. human trafficking, extortion, etc. But that need not be the case, and it's not hard to imagine a warehouse with "massive ammounts [sic] of drugs in-out", where a raid would be totally unjustified and illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This case centered around a field test, using a test kit which was highly prone to false positives and conducted by someone who wasn't trained how to use it. This was used to get a search warrant, which was executed by a SWAT team. A judge ruled that the police were not liable for relying on the faulty test.

However, I think it's important to consider this in context. There have been multiple recent scandals in which US law enforcement was found to rely on supposedly-scientific evidence which was, in fact, nothing more or less than fraud upon the courts. (For example [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated- fo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic- hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for- decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html) and [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crimelab- massachusetts...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crimelab- massachusetts-idUSBREA242FK20140305)). These scandals would have been easily prevented by the ordinary scientific practice of using control samples, so the fact that they weren't prevented indicates systematic bad practices.

And there are widely-known deceptive practices still in use. For example, police bring "drug-sniffing" dogs with them, which bark whenever an officer cues them to, and courts accept this as though it were probable cause for a search.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think Kerr's article was pretty good, but he does undersell the scope of the complaint. I thought the Hartes' were just trying to sue the officers personally for the bad policy. But their complaint was a lot bigger. From the judgement:

 _Plaintiffs filed this action against various defendants alleging violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for unlawful search, unreasonable execution of the search and excessive force in violation 2 of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs also assert a claim for municipal liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Finally, plaintiffs assert numerous state law claims against defendants, including trespass, assault, false arrest, abuse of process, intentional infliction of emotional distress and false light /invasion of privacy. This matter is presently before the court on defendants' motions for summary judgment on all of plaintiffs' claims. As explained in more detail below, defendants' motions are granted in their entirety._

<comment><USER7> The article stated they spent 25,000 on legal fees I believe. Their lawyers probably did the smart thing and tackled the issue on every front possible to see what would stick.

As my dance instructor might have said... they seem to have taken a holistic approach (to their lawsuit | to dance) in an effort to achieve better results.

<comment><USER8> That $25ooo actually went only to a court order so that they could receive a copy of the documentation about the case leading up to the search. The cost of the case to the Harte family was not mentioned, and I'm hoping it was done on contingency.

> After spending $25,000 to get a judge to order the Johnson County Sheriff's > Department to turn over documents related to the search and investigation > leading up to it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Robert Harte, along with hundreds of other people, became a suspect when Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jim Wingo saw Harte, his son and his daughter emerge in August 2011 from a hydroponic gardening store and wrote down the Hartes' license plate number"

How is this legal? I cannot believe that this is a satisfactory level of probably cause needed for the police to start digging through people's trash and raiding their homes. It's incredible. On that note, I don't believe for a second that there even was marijuana in the trash before they searched for it.

<comment><USER10> This did not satisfy the probable cause. Police dug through the trash and conducted a field test, and the field test incorrectly tested positive for THC. The author criticized these field tests in the original piece as being wildly inaccurate and too easy to coerce into positive results.

<comment><USER11> Those test kits are sometimes called probable cause kits, since they produce false positives so frequently. The conspiracy theory is that they're working exactly as desired and that more accurate kits would be counterproductive to their actual purpose.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why would they do that? Why fake the test that will make you raid the empty house and look bad?

<comment><USER12> Police go on fishing expeditions all the time. Just because they don't actually have proof of the thing they were looking for doesn't mean they can't find anything to hang you. I once had a traffic stop evolve into the officer telling me I could either let him search my car or he'd call in a dog to give him probable cause. There really wasn't anything for him to find, but he doesn't have any reason not to play the odds.

<comment><USER13> Luckily this particular practice is no longer legally sanctioned: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodriguez_v._United_States)

<comment><USER14> It would be nice to have a card that lists these landmark decisions, so that when pulled over you have a way to quickly have handy the names of cases.

"If you don't let me search your car, I'm going to call in a dog ..." "Officer, the Supreme Court ruled in People vs Rodriguez (2015) that a traffic stop becomes unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation."

Of course, making such an argument at the time might be unwise, but at least you know that the law is on your side if you decide to decline the search.

<comment><USER15> I've seen various apps for that, including an enumeration of your rights by jurisdiction as to whether you're required to show an officer ID, stop & frisk laws, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> An excellent reply and elaboration to the original article. Although I had my own qualms about Kerr's article (I commented here on HN when it was posted) having read his blog posts for ten years now I have a lot of respect for his erudition and even handedness. I look forward to his surreply which he promises to start working on in the comments section to the linked article.

<comment><USER17> Man, I do love those few brief moments when the internet holds an actual debate. Too bad these poor people had to go through all the trouble for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > They want to make 4/20 an annual drug raid event.

So just make it like Halloween. Have the kids dress in police uniforms and go door to door with the actual officers searching every single house in the county. Have the adults give out marijuana-shaped candy. Say "pot or arrest" as you knock on the house. Have a competition at the end and declare the kid with the weightiest bag of "pot" the winner and give him/her a medal. Go all the way. It's good publicity you're after, not actual police work, after all.

</comment><comment><USER19> "As the law sees it, an officer can't be recklessly indifferent to truth if he was never trained about, told about, or took the time to learn the truth in the first place."

It's unfortunate that police are the only ones allowed to use the "ignorantia juris" defense.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice, but going to a gun show and running guns across the border to Mexico does not seem to gather the same attention from law enforcement.

[http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-j...](http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal- justice/firearms-trafficking-u-s-mexico-border)

[http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- world/world/article24...](http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- world/world/article24746863.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is a good follow up to previous discussions of this case

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I think you've got to be a reptiloid to defend "federal judges" and the police. Of all the people in the world they're the least vulnerable from huma perspective. We should probably check whether Orin Kerr has scales for skin.

Or exists.

<comment><USER20> What exactly do you mean by 'reptiloid'?

<comment> guard-of-terra A person that we can't even begin to understand.

Philip Dick had an empathy test to detect androids - they did not show compassion towards cute animals in trouble. We have a similar problem here, if a person chooses to side with federal judges and the police versus public, we have an alarming creature on our hands.

<comment><USER21> Most people side with law enforcement at least some of the time, and many support the legal system and war on drugs on general principle.

If that point of view is incomprehensible to you, then perhaps you're the one who needs a Voight-Kampff test.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will the Last One to Leave GrandCentral Please Turn Out the Lights? - <AUTHOR> http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/01/26/will-the-last-one-to-leave-grandcentral-please-turn-out-the-lights/#comments

<comment><USER2> Assuming the comment claiming to be from David Pogue is actually from Pogue, this whole blog post seems to be 100% speculation.

<comment><USER3> from what i understand from an employee-friend, the pogue comment is correct and they are preparing for the release of grandcentral 2.0, which would make this article completely false speculation.

<comment><USER4> Glad to hear it. I switched to GrandCentral as my main contact number back when Google bought them since I figured they'd be around for a while, but have been rather concerned with the downtime/SSL expirations/domain screwups. If 2.0's coming soon I think I can hold off to see what's in store - most of the time the service works as advertised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Grand Central isn't going anywhere...everyone saw Google pruning their offerings now they are expecting full scale cuts.

Relax people Google still makes money, lots of it. They are just being a responsible company looking out for their future.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is mere speculation. However, It would help if someone from Google said something about Grandcentral's future considering the service has gone nowhere in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hm, seems to be up now.

I'm thinking this is pure fud.</comment>


Forget Hacking, Thieves Are Stealing Bitcoins at Gunpoint - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/forget-hacking-thieves-are-stealing-bitcoins-at-gunpoint <comment><USER2> Not surprising. What's interesting though is how the kinds of individuals who would use a gun (rather than hack) are now finding it worth their time to try to steal the coin. It's a another reason to not have Bitcoin... well, more precisely, a good reason not to MARKET that you have Bitcoin at some location without security. If you intend to do direct trading for cash, I'm sure you can still do it online and "from a safe distance".</comment>