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Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

daoudclarke.net

111–120 of 151 posts

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#112

I sympathize with some of what the author has to say. That said, Google's choice to do business with Israel does not represent "support for genocide." It is also within their prerogative to dismiss employees who protest company policy. Naive / biased statements such of these cause me to lend less credence to author's other points.

Israel is actively committing a genocide right now. How is doing business with them not support for that?

Does owning a business in the US mean you support the bad things the US has done?

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#113

> you who ranks the search results The actual link from it says the rankings are, like everywhere else: > To train a learning to rank model. No matter how many queries are manually curated, most user queries will be organic because of the natural diversity of user queries. Curation is still important for these results since it impacts the machine learning model that will be trained on the curated rankings. so this no…

The curated items will stay the same, but we can't expect all queries to be curated.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#114
post #11

Whenever I hear about alternative search engines, I try out a few famous people hoping to see Wikipedia entries towards the top. And almost always I see nonsense. For instance, if you search for 'Trump', the top links are ``` 1. http://www.trump.de — found via Mwmbl -- Trump 2. https://itep.org/md/ — found via Mwmbl -- Trump Tax Proposals Would Provide Richest One Percent in Maryland with 69.7 Percent of the State’s…

Yeah the ranking algorithm is just wrong right now. I'm working on it.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you aren't capable of differientating between an interview and real work. This isn't an exercise to see if you can figure out how many bits it takes to store a number. It is a test to see how you approach a problem, if you can break it down (2^10 = 1024, 2^10*2^10 = 2^20 = 1m), and arrive at a solution. It's a simple problem that doesn't require you to be a math wizard.

I come to the interview to get a real job not to please the smart "gotcha!" recruiter.

Those aren't gotcha questions.

And part of a real job involves solving real problems. In an interview, you have a very limited time, so you have to come up with questions that test the candidate's ability to solve problems within a certain timeframe.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#116
post #101

> It’s you who chooses what sites we crawl Yeah, but you still reserve the right to not crawl sites (or to remove them from your index), yes? So there's still the opportunity to do evil. I'm still waiting for a "raw" search spidering provider. One that: 1. runs a web-spidering cluster — one that's only smart enough to know what robots.txt is, to know how to follow links in HTML pages, and to obey response caching-pol…

Yes, we veto sites to prevent spam.

I'm not sure you would like the results of what you suggest - if you are really going to crawl everything indiscriminately, you will end up with a lot of rubbish. Just check out Common Crawl if you want to get an idea of what it would look like.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#117
post #5

I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…

I always remember this old blog post: https://aneccodeal.blogspot.com/2014/02/interviewing-for-anx...

I haven't done a whiteboarding interview for a while, but I remember them vividly. Hot flashes, sweating, stomach churning, anytime I'd be asked a question I am definitely capable of answering, my brain would shut down and refuse to start back up again. The most apt thing I could compare it to is stage fright. Even something like simply multiplying 2's would seem impossible to me in that state of mind.

Aside from seeking professional help for dealing with anxiety, I'd recommend programmers with anxiety to avoid whiteboarding interviews [1] or at the very least let it be known ahead of time that you get stage fright.

[1] https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you read that reply as hostile or just saying "hostile in general" but I can promise there was a smile on my face and it wasn't "hostile" at all. The mental calculations is a pointless exercise. Math is so incredibly different than big-system software, and it is more about working memory than anything else, and solving arbitrary math problems won't get you that feedback.

I didn’t mean literally hostile. More like, “if this candidate would rather get into an argument or simply not complete the challenge we’ve presented them with, then they’re not going to be a good employee.” Companies want to hire people that do things, not question everything, regardless of whether those things ought to be questioned. You’re being hired to achieve business objectives, full stop.

It depends. If you are more R&D, then questioning everything is exactly what you want. If you want random code in production that "works" then yeah, you probably want a doer.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come to the interview to get a real job not to please the smart "gotcha!" recruiter.

Those aren't gotcha questions. And part of a real job involves solving real problems. In an interview, you have a very limited time, so you have to come up with questions that test the candidate's ability to solve problems within a certain timeframe.

Except the problem is (which I didn't state but pointed out) is that this isn't really a "problem." It's just math. That's it. If you want to know if I know how to multiply two numbers together, you might as well just ask me if I know what 2*2 is and move on to the next question.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#120
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree with your characterization that it is empty rhetoric. In fact, it is actually using the word and meaning correctly within a rational context. Most people today are not properly taught to correctly recognize evil. Often as a result of this, they become evil themselves when they falsely justify evil acts which are unjustifiable. There really isn't much ideology, or hyperbole to this. From a non-ideological…

> Evil is any act that does not promote the long-term beneficial growth of self or others. How long-term? What sort of clairvoyance is necessary for that? Which others? Those who hold stock in Google do well, it helps them to grow does it not? They employ about 100,000 people directly, and many more indirectly who benefit economically because Google facilitates business transactions they couldn't otherwise make. > wi…

> How long-term ...

If you are interested in the answers to these questions, I'd kindly refer you to the original treatise I mentioned. It will cover these answers and more in far better detail.

You would be mistaken to think that employment, stock valuation, and that business transactions couldn't occur otherwise, are necessarily good things or in fact actually true. It would be an over generalization and other fallacies. They get their money for operations regardless through preferential loans. Stock valuation is very much floated on option structures which are just another indirection.

https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Evil-Force-Ivan-Ilyin/dp/1...

> They facilitate business transactions they couldn't otherwise make.

It sounds like you may have drunk their kool-aid. This is almost verbatim what their marketing department puts out. They lie often, and recently were caught in some of those lies. Not just to customers, but to the US Government as well. For example, they have claimed that pagerank and Authoritative Score are not collected or used, but their leaked internal API documentation shows otherwise.

The stock market isn't a good example for you, because Valuation is transitory, and what drives the company is in fact the debt that they hold and their preferential treatment by banks which print money from nothing. The advertising market sector withered and died when google took over (funded by government grant).

Regarding business transactions that they couldn't otherwise make, compared to what? If google left the market, there would be a vacuum because they are a monopoly and they got there through Lax antitrust oversight, and deceptive business practices. For there to be winners, there had to be losers.

Prior to Google; Radio, Newspapers, and Magazines, largely thrived on ad revenue which is now no longer available. They all have to kiss the ring.

There is also a fair argument that google actively engages in enabling ad-fraud on a much greater scale than previous structures. They claim otherwise, but they've also removed metrics to ensure no one else can contradict them. Uber cut their entire ad spend in 2016 amid controversy (origin of ads), and they found the metrics didn't line up with their actual sales following that change.

> The moment your species fertility rate dropped below replacement ...

The fertility rate is a lagging indicator. There is nothing rational that proves that it will continue to go down once it gets below a threshold. Generally there are reasons why it reduces from the norm, and when those reasons are addressed then the rate would no longer be depressed and it would go back up.

> Fussing about Google and whether or not making you watch bad advertisements

I don't recall mentioning anything about youtube. I'm more concerned with real harms.

> Just what evil acts are they committing exactly

To adequately answer this rationally, I'd need to reference a few books from subject matter experts which are not common knowledge today at a bare minimum to keep this response to a sufficiently short length. I'll reference them at the bottom.

The short gist is, both as kids (developmentally), and in times of isolation or extreme duress (torture), the mind enters a vulnerable hypnotic state where permanent changes can be induced, sometimes very subtly (without your knowledge).

This has been proven in the 50s through a structured approach of distorting reflected appraisal, and other methods, the former is the distortion of the biological mechanism all humanity uses to pass culture to our offspring.

Google structures their results and other aspects of their services to use this mechanism to induce bias for their own short-term gain. It largely happens below a conscious threshold, and there is little if any defense if you don't know about it.

To the uneducated (in this area) this sounds on its face fantastical to most people largely because media has associatively primed us to think of these things like the silly trances we see in movies, but it is real and rational science backed from the 1950s (POWs and torture). This has not been refuted, and its known that rational thought is the first thing to go in these torture structures (which need not be physical).

Additionally, there is an uncanny valley where psychological reversals happen when you think someone is trying to manipulate you. Its an irrational emotional response and adaptive. Anything that we might view as a communication of meaning is open to distorted reflected appraisal, it is a hard-wired vulnerability.

When distorted reflected appraisal is not consistent (and it never can be, unlike actual reflected appraisal), weird things happen to people's psychology.

Some people disassociate (more like zombies/automata), others become psychotic (and potentially violent), only a few people have higher tolerances and seem to be unaffected (but they are still somewhat changed, hollowed out).

Google is using this mechanism for their gain, and enabling businesses to do the same through their platforms (pay for play). In addition to this, they also are removing history (not segmenting spam from legitimate material; removing it all), they lie, and they also make weapons (anything a weapon depends on is part of that weapon system). All of these things are evil because they all promote outcomes of stagnation or destruction.

> figurative extinction... How might it happen for real?

Our society is past ecological overshoot. A review of Malthus law of population shows technology can allow overcoming ecological limits to growth, but its primary dependency is organization, and rational thought.

If people are subtly induced into either of the two states mentioned (through mental coercion), its just a matter of time before systems fall into ruin and fail, and many of the feedback system's in place (including our perception) fail, or encourage brittle changes which induce more failures.

Sieving purchasing power in the economy for example makes the general person's life so dystopian that you end up with something like the plot of "In Time".

People will cease having children because it costs too much. When the exposure to torture systems becomes so great, and life so insufferable, some will seek to end their own lifes, or their childrens (as happened in the 1500/1600s regarding the natives under Pizarro iirc), some will become psychotic in their madness and act out violently against innocents before being killed themselves, some will simply wither and eventually die.

This is documented historically in a book called "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", in the chapters of the effects of the Spanish Inquisition, and the expansion to South America.

Inevitably, all paths lead to what? (slavery, then death, which is destruction). Meeting the definition.

The world is the culmination of aggregate action. Evil acts beget more evil acts, and we are at a point in society and technological development where corrective counter organization can no longer occur. Evil overflows, and unfortunately, the lessons learned by East Germany's Stasi were put to horrifying use by all other supposedly democratic governments without the knowledge (or education) of those they claim to represent.

References:

Dr. Robert Epstein (Editor in Chief at Psychology TOday) has a good talk on what google is doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GE3HoJMEMw

Robert Lifton "Thought Reform, Psychology of Totalism" (in depth PoW stories of Mao during Korean Conflict).

John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" (includes both the details of this subject under Mao and Nazi torture)

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