7 ms·

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

73 points by daoudc 2y ago

temptemptemp111 2y ago
[dead]
roschdal 2y ago
Good luck competing with the Alphabet monopoly. See Peter Thiel books on the monopoly.
- byyoung3 2y ago
  seems like a possible 0 to -1 situation
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Are you trying to say you should not compete with a monopoly? That's a completely asinine take. You should try and avoid competition but taking on a failing monopoly like Google is a great thing to try and strive for.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Most attempts fail. The "good luck" is warranted.
- ninininino 2y ago
  Disruption is the way for David to defeat Goliath. See automobile startup taking on horse industry, or electricity taking on candles.
kevmo314 2y ago
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 "but if I had to guess" or similar. Sounds like the interviewer definitely came on strong but being able to ace the psychological part of an interview is often as important or more important than the actual solution.
- EGG_CREAM 2y ago
  That’s pretty dumb. I want to work with people who say “I don’t know.” Edit: to clarify, your advice is good, what you said isn’t dumb. That criteria is dumb, in my opinion. I don’t want my colleagues to spend a bunch of my time guessing on an answer I could easily lookup or find on a calculator.
  - kevmo314 2y ago
    I agree, but as a candidate you don't have much control over the interviewer you get.
    - EGG_CREAM 2y ago
      Sorry, edited my comment to clarify. Your advice is good, I just don’t like that that’s how so many interviews work.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    No, you want to work with people that say, "I don't know, but I think X is true, and here's how I'd find out if that's a correct assumption..."
    - EGG_CREAM 2y ago
      I really don’t, not when the question is something as simple as something I can type into a calculator.
      - keiferski 2y ago
        The purpose of that kind of question is not to get a piece of information, it's to evaluate how you go about solving problems that you don't know the answer to and/or don't have immediately obvious ways (like using a calculator) to find the solution.
        withinboredom 2y ago
crazygringo 2y ago
This user already submitted this same article yesterday and it was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850725 Rather than this clickbaity "Google rejected me" story about something that happened 15 years ago, here's a link to the actual project: https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl
- sowut 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    [flagged]
- localfirst 2y ago
  Someone who doesn't handle rejection well are often were not told no a lot growing up. I personally went through this phase and so I have a bit of sympathy for OP. Looking back at my younger self and this person I can't help but cringe. It was a long uphill battle to be okay with rejection and I still struggle with it but I can't change my natural emotional response but I can control how I react to rejection. I hope that OP will find his way without channelling his anger in ways that is counter-productive.
  - derefr 2y ago
    Given the 15 year gap between the events and this post about them, I'm pretty sure OP isn't still angry. They likely were just working on a search engine, and this old story came to mind, and they realized that it'd be perfect clickbait (maybe rage-bait?) to serve as lead-gen for the search-engine project. (Remember, someone building a search-engine is likely very, very familiar with SEO.)
    - daoudc 2y ago
      Spot on
eterm 2y ago
It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds. I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right. The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, saying if he wanted people to google that a "thousand Indians graduating in computer science every day" could google it. I tried to argue that I was looking to be employed for my problem solving skills and experience rather than rote knowledge, but he was really angry. He literally said to be verbatim, "Let me give you some interview advice, NEVER tell an interviewer you'd google something". He also made a mildly off-colour remark that if he "wanted someone just to google, [he] could hire one of thousands of fresh graduates coming out of India". It was an experience so bad that it inspired me to create a glassdoor account just to leave negative feedback, something I've never done before or since. The recruiter was absolutely pissed, and still doesn't provide me leads, which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area. But my point is that some people have absoultely atrocious interview manners. Interviews are a two-way street and I discovered that there was absoultely no way I'd want to work with them. (Even when I just thought they were a team lead rather than the CEO it was enough to put me off.)
- financltravsty 2y ago
  Name and shame -- they don't need any investment from the community.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Damn, if the founder/CEO was this obnoxious in the interview, can you imagine what it would be like to actually work there? The minute that he showed aggression or anger, I 100% would have just walked out. Life is too short for that nonsense.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  You have just described in plain words why tech interview processes are beyond f-ed up. Not every programmer is skilled to be an interviewer. Not every manager is skilled to be a hiring manager.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bko 2y ago
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 http://www.trump.de — found via Mwmbl -- Trump 2. https://itep.org/md/ 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 Tax Cuts Earlier this year, the Trump administration r… 3. https://is.gd/mUHYTg https://is.gd/mUHYTg — found via Mwmbl --- Trump embraces QAnon conspiracy because ‘they like me’ After skirting the issue for weeks, President Donald Trump offered an embrace Wednesday of the fri… 4. http://dict.cn/trump http://dict.cn/trump — found via Mwmbl -- trump是什么意思_trump在线翻译_英语_读音_用法_例句_海词词典 ``` Surely there are millions of results more relevant to the phrase 'Trump' than trump.de. The other links aren't better. A random article from 2017? Another one from 2020. A Chinese dictionary definition of 'Trump'? I get that search is hard, but what's going on here? You can try any phrase, and you just get weird results.
- skulk 2y ago
  > but what's going on here? I'm wondering the same thing. Google gives me _exactly_ what I want without me having to add keywords or cajole it. All of these other search engines give me such weird irrelevant results. If I search "python reverse string" on YaCy's demo peer, the third result is the ArchWiki page on ... MATLAB. I really wish I knew what to do to help the situation here because distributed p2p search engines seem so cool. But then again, Google wouldn't be so dominant if it were so easy.
  - derefr 2y ago
    > I'm wondering the same thing. Well, if you really want to know, you could try taking the HTTP responses for the page you expect to be highly ranked, and the page that's actually highly-ranked, and applying various common ranking heuristics to them, to figure out what the result-ranking algorithm is actually doing. For any search engine who hasn't had a bunch of competitive pressure forcing them to improve, the ranking algorithm is very likely something incredibly simple and standard — e.g. tf-idf across the whole HTTP-result corpus. So I'd guess that the results you tend to see in your tests, are because one of those "standard" algorithms ends up doing something dumb for the ranking pairs you care about.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
> 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 not true in the long term.
- daoudc 2y ago
  The curated items will stay the same, but we can't expect all queries to be curated.
financltravsty 2y ago
Search engines are dying. Information retrieval and recommendation engines are still mostly living in the dark ages from all the work that's been done in the last 50 years. Figure that problem out first (something novel and useful), then start marketing yourself. Right now you just gave us a story we've all lived (academic hazing) without any plan of action -- so 2010.
bentobean 2y ago
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.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  Israel is actively committing a genocide right now. How is doing business with them not support for that?
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    Does owning a business in the US mean you support the bad things the US has done?
    - superb_dev 2y ago
      No, but if that business does work for the US then you’re potentially supporting the bad things that they’re currently doing (like aiding and abetting a genocide in Palestine )
      - bentobean 2y ago
        On October 7, 2023, terrorists invaded Israel and killed 1,143 people. Among them - 767 civilians (36 children). Some of them were brutally raped. They then took 251 hostages. The officially stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. War is never pleasant or desirable. That said, Israel has every right to defend itself and to fight for the return of its people. Your position is that Israel should lay down and die. Any attempt to do otherwise is then disingenuously labeled as “genocide.” The argument you are making is ridiculous. Fortunately, most people recognize that.
        superb_dev 2y ago
swyx 2y ago
ah, Spite, the ultimate developer fuel.
- nwienert 2y ago
  Yep
- zer0zzz 2y ago
  Learning to count bits without a calculator can be learned, but spite… ahh, spite is a gift from the gods.
joatmon-snoo 2y ago
It's really easy to read this as "shitty interviewer runs off good candidate". It's also easy to read this as "interviewer hand-held a candidate through a problem".
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Interviewer hazes natural languages processing expert with embedded programming leetcode question... So, shitty interviewer is a given. There's nothing in there about the candidate. Anyway, I don't think this is the kind of attention the author would want. Nobody even talked about the search engine yet.
harles 2y ago
> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics. This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience. Also > At the time “Don’t be evil” still meant something. Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”. Seems really petty. It’s a shame because we could good big tech alternatives, but building something out of spite without much perspective is unlikely to create a good alternative.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Well we got Mono and eventually open source .NET from that, so it can work sometimes.
  - danogentili 2y ago
    And you call that a success story? :D
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      It's definitely one of those "be careful what you wish for" stories. :)
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Yeah I agree, it's not hard to see why he was rejected from his attitude here
  - zer0zzz 2y ago
    Seriously; we could good big tech alternatives if more people in this field could communicate clearly.
  - arandomusername 2y ago
foota 2y ago
It's at the bottom of the article, but note that this interview experience is from 15 years ago.
sowut 2y ago
[flagged]
zooq_ai 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  I've no idea what that refers to but you can't post like this to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we have to ban accounts that do it. We've already warned you recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40515896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40515896. If you want to keep posting here, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Imnimo 2y ago
I like this interview question. It's perfectly solvable without a calculator as the interviewer said. It doesn't rely on having memorized some weird binary tree inversion algorithm. It tests the ability to take facts that you already know (e.g. 2^8 or 2^10) and use them to solve a problem that might appear out of reach at first glance.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I don't really find it even that offensive question. Then again my schooling was more network engineering. Powers of two are pretty natural part of software engineering. And as such having to do some simple math of them seem more like easy soft ball starting question. Now if powers of 3 or 5 or 6 or 7 were asked... Eff them...
dmitrygr 2y ago
Assuming the quotes are accurate, interviewer was indeed being a bit of a dick, but being able to tell approx how many bits a number needs is something I'd expect any programmer to be able to do, and I would also give negative feedback to someone who could not do that in an interview.
nothrowaways 2y ago
[flagged]
- bowsamic 2y ago
  There's such a thing as righteous hate
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yashasolutions 2y ago
Competition is good. We need diverse search product again. Kagi is great but more options would be good too. OP's product is clearly at a very early stage. OP's post is also pretty opinionated. Hard to say which impact on product it will have - but as long we have more options for search engines, this will be one out of many options.
derefr 2y ago
> 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-policy headers; 2. captures the spidering process losslessly, as e.g. HAR transcript files; 3. packs those HAR transcript files, a few million at a time, into tar.xz.tar files (i.e. grab a "chunk" of N HAR files; group them into subdirs by request Host header; archive each subdir, and compress those archives independently; then archive all the compressed archives without compression) — and then uploads these semi-random-access archives to a CDN or private BitTorrent tracker (or any other data delivery system that enables clients to only retrieve the blocks/byte-ranges of files they're interested in); 4. generate a TOC for the semi-random-access files, as a stream of tuples (signed archive URL, chunk byte-range, hostname, compressed URL-list); push these to a managed reliable message queue on an IaaS, publishing each entry to both an all-hostnames topic, and a per-hostname topic. (I say an IaaS, as this allows consumers to set up their own consumer-groups on these topics within their own IaaS project, and then pay the costs of message retention in these consumer-groups themselves.) 5. Also buffer these TOC-entry streams into files (e.g. Parquet files), one archive series per topic; and host these alongside the HAR archives. Prune TOC topic stream entries if (entries are at least N days old AND the entries have been successfully "offlined" into a hosted TOC-stream archive.) --- This "web-spidering-firehose data-lake as-a-Service" architecture, would enable pretty much anyone to build whatever arbitrary search index they want downstream of it, containing as much or as little of the web as they want — where each consumer only needs to do as much work as is required to fetch and parse the HARs of the domains they've decided they care about indexing something under. This architecture would also be "temporal" (akin to a temporal RDBMS table) — as a consumer of this service, you wouldn't see "the current version" of a scraped URL, but rather all previous attempts to scrape that URL, and what happened each time. (This would mean that no website could ever censor the dataset retroactively by adding a robots.txt "Disallow *" after scrapes have already happened. Their robots.txt config would prevent further scraping, but previous scraping would be retained.) And in fact, in this architecture, the HTTP interaction to retrieve /robots.txt for a domain, would produce a HAR transcript that would get archived like any other. Domains restricted from crawling by robots.txt, would still get regular HAR transcripts recorded of the result of checking that their /robots.txt still restricts crawling. (Reducing over these /robots.txt HAR transcripts is how a consumer-indexer would determine whether they should currently be showing/hiding a domain in their built index.)
daemonologist 2y ago
Page appears to have been taken down, but is available on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240702162540/https://daoudclarke.net/search%20engines/2024/07/02/google-rejected-me https://web.archive.org/web/20240702162540/https://daoudclar...
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Looks like OP got called out for this being a thinly-veiled attempt to get free marketing/SEO[1] for their business and suddenly the gig was up[2]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859051 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859389
daoudc 2y ago
I took the page down as it was attracting the wrong sort of attention. As some commenters surmised, the goal was to promote the search engine, but it wasn't working out that way...
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
When I try to use the provided URL, I get this: Sorry this page does not exist =( Alternative: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4652446581392&w=-V-8V9bl07F3JL04ZjrptOMD-qpI3ecz https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4652446581392&w=-V-8V9bl07...
Lockal 2y ago
Not sure how "need a few more to get 56, well 6 would be enough. So 26 bits?" is a solution. If he remembers that max signed int is ~2 billion, than easier to divide 4 billion by 2. 2b/1b/500m/250m/127m/64m - got 6 divisions, 32-6=26. If you think that max int is irrelevant to the position - it is so relevant, I can't even describe, this number is everywhere, from database design to js-wasm (limited by 32-bit), from deep-learning (where some libraries still limited to 32-bit buffers) to networking (hello ipv4)
jerryjose 2y ago
After giving about 3000 job opportunities world wide , our agency is still giving out Jobs and Business loans worldwide. if you need a job or financial aid kindly contact us now via email : shalomagency247@outlook.com Thanks.

73 points by daoudc 2y ago

temptemptemp111 2y ago

[dead]

roschdal 2y ago

Good luck competing with the Alphabet monopoly. See Peter Thiel books on the monopoly.

byyoung3 2y ago
seems like a possible 0 to -1 situation
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Are you trying to say you should not compete with a monopoly? That's a completely asinine take. You should try and avoid competition but taking on a failing monopoly like Google is a great thing to try and strive for.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Most attempts fail. The "good luck" is warranted.
ninininino 2y ago
Disruption is the way for David to defeat Goliath. See automobile startup taking on horse industry, or electricity taking on candles.

kevmo314 2y ago

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 "but if I had to guess" or similar. Sounds like the interviewer definitely came on strong but being able to ace the psychological part of an interview is often as important or more important than the actual solution.

EGG_CREAM 2y ago
That’s pretty dumb. I want to work with people who say “I don’t know.” Edit: to clarify, your advice is good, what you said isn’t dumb. That criteria is dumb, in my opinion. I don’t want my colleagues to spend a bunch of my time guessing on an answer I could easily lookup or find on a calculator.
- kevmo314 2y ago
  I agree, but as a candidate you don't have much control over the interviewer you get.
  - EGG_CREAM 2y ago
    Sorry, edited my comment to clarify. Your advice is good, I just don’t like that that’s how so many interviews work.
- keiferski 2y ago
  No, you want to work with people that say, "I don't know, but I think X is true, and here's how I'd find out if that's a correct assumption..."
  - EGG_CREAM 2y ago
    I really don’t, not when the question is something as simple as something I can type into a calculator.
    - keiferski 2y ago
      The purpose of that kind of question is not to get a piece of information, it's to evaluate how you go about solving problems that you don't know the answer to and/or don't have immediately obvious ways (like using a calculator) to find the solution.
      - withinboredom 2y ago

crazygringo 2y ago

This user already submitted this same article yesterday and it was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850725 Rather than this clickbaity "Google rejected me" story about something that happened 15 years ago, here's a link to the actual project: https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl

sowut 2y ago
[flagged]
- bowsamic 2y ago
  [flagged]
localfirst 2y ago
Someone who doesn't handle rejection well are often were not told no a lot growing up. I personally went through this phase and so I have a bit of sympathy for OP. Looking back at my younger self and this person I can't help but cringe. It was a long uphill battle to be okay with rejection and I still struggle with it but I can't change my natural emotional response but I can control how I react to rejection. I hope that OP will find his way without channelling his anger in ways that is counter-productive.
- derefr 2y ago
  Given the 15 year gap between the events and this post about them, I'm pretty sure OP isn't still angry. They likely were just working on a search engine, and this old story came to mind, and they realized that it'd be perfect clickbait (maybe rage-bait?) to serve as lead-gen for the search-engine project. (Remember, someone building a search-engine is likely very, very familiar with SEO.)
  - daoudc 2y ago
    Spot on

eterm 2y ago

It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds. I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right. The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, saying if he wanted people to google that a "thousand Indians graduating in computer science every day" could google it. I tried to argue that I was looking to be employed for my problem solving skills and experience rather than rote knowledge, but he was really angry. He literally said to be verbatim, "Let me give you some interview advice, NEVER tell an interviewer you'd google something". He also made a mildly off-colour remark that if he "wanted someone just to google, [he] could hire one of thousands of fresh graduates coming out of India". It was an experience so bad that it inspired me to create a glassdoor account just to leave negative feedback, something I've never done before or since. The recruiter was absolutely pissed, and still doesn't provide me leads, which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area. But my point is that some people have absoultely atrocious interview manners. Interviews are a two-way street and I discovered that there was absoultely no way I'd want to work with them. (Even when I just thought they were a team lead rather than the CEO it was enough to put me off.)

financltravsty 2y ago
Name and shame -- they don't need any investment from the community.
JohnFen 2y ago
Damn, if the founder/CEO was this obnoxious in the interview, can you imagine what it would be like to actually work there? The minute that he showed aggression or anger, I 100% would have just walked out. Life is too short for that nonsense.
nine_zeros 2y ago
You have just described in plain words why tech interview processes are beyond f-ed up. Not every programmer is skilled to be an interviewer. Not every manager is skilled to be a hiring manager.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bko 2y ago

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 http://www.trump.de — found via Mwmbl -- Trump 2. https://itep.org/md/ 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 Tax Cuts Earlier this year, the Trump administration r… 3. https://is.gd/mUHYTg https://is.gd/mUHYTg — found via Mwmbl --- Trump embraces QAnon conspiracy because ‘they like me’ After skirting the issue for weeks, President Donald Trump offered an embrace Wednesday of the fri… 4. http://dict.cn/trump http://dict.cn/trump — found via Mwmbl -- trump是什么意思_trump在线翻译_英语_读音_用法_例句_海词词典 ``` Surely there are millions of results more relevant to the phrase 'Trump' than trump.de. The other links aren't better. A random article from 2017? Another one from 2020. A Chinese dictionary definition of 'Trump'? I get that search is hard, but what's going on here? You can try any phrase, and you just get weird results.

skulk 2y ago
> but what's going on here? I'm wondering the same thing. Google gives me _exactly_ what I want without me having to add keywords or cajole it. All of these other search engines give me such weird irrelevant results. If I search "python reverse string" on YaCy's demo peer, the third result is the ArchWiki page on ... MATLAB. I really wish I knew what to do to help the situation here because distributed p2p search engines seem so cool. But then again, Google wouldn't be so dominant if it were so easy.
- derefr 2y ago
  > I'm wondering the same thing. Well, if you really want to know, you could try taking the HTTP responses for the page you expect to be highly ranked, and the page that's actually highly-ranked, and applying various common ranking heuristics to them, to figure out what the result-ranking algorithm is actually doing. For any search engine who hasn't had a bunch of competitive pressure forcing them to improve, the ranking algorithm is very likely something incredibly simple and standard — e.g. tf-idf across the whole HTTP-result corpus. So I'd guess that the results you tend to see in your tests, are because one of those "standard" algorithms ends up doing something dumb for the ranking pairs you care about.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

> 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 not true in the long term.

daoudc 2y ago
The curated items will stay the same, but we can't expect all queries to be curated.

financltravsty 2y ago

Search engines are dying. Information retrieval and recommendation engines are still mostly living in the dark ages from all the work that's been done in the last 50 years. Figure that problem out first (something novel and useful), then start marketing yourself. Right now you just gave us a story we've all lived (academic hazing) without any plan of action -- so 2010.

bentobean 2y ago

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.

superb_dev 2y ago
Israel is actively committing a genocide right now. How is doing business with them not support for that?
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  Does owning a business in the US mean you support the bad things the US has done?
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    No, but if that business does work for the US then you’re potentially supporting the bad things that they’re currently doing (like aiding and abetting a genocide in Palestine )
    - bentobean 2y ago
      On October 7, 2023, terrorists invaded Israel and killed 1,143 people. Among them - 767 civilians (36 children). Some of them were brutally raped. They then took 251 hostages. The officially stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. War is never pleasant or desirable. That said, Israel has every right to defend itself and to fight for the return of its people. Your position is that Israel should lay down and die. Any attempt to do otherwise is then disingenuously labeled as “genocide.” The argument you are making is ridiculous. Fortunately, most people recognize that.
      - superb_dev 2y ago

swyx 2y ago

ah, Spite, the ultimate developer fuel.

nwienert 2y ago
Yep
zer0zzz 2y ago
Learning to count bits without a calculator can be learned, but spite… ahh, spite is a gift from the gods.

joatmon-snoo 2y ago

It's really easy to read this as "shitty interviewer runs off good candidate". It's also easy to read this as "interviewer hand-held a candidate through a problem".

marcosdumay 2y ago
Interviewer hazes natural languages processing expert with embedded programming leetcode question... So, shitty interviewer is a given. There's nothing in there about the candidate. Anyway, I don't think this is the kind of attention the author would want. Nobody even talked about the search engine yet.

harles 2y ago

> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics. This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience. Also > At the time “Don’t be evil” still meant something. Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”. Seems really petty. It’s a shame because we could good big tech alternatives, but building something out of spite without much perspective is unlikely to create a good alternative.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Well we got Mono and eventually open source .NET from that, so it can work sometimes.
- danogentili 2y ago
  And you call that a success story? :D
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    It's definitely one of those "be careful what you wish for" stories. :)
bowsamic 2y ago
Yeah I agree, it's not hard to see why he was rejected from his attitude here
- zer0zzz 2y ago
  Seriously; we could good big tech alternatives if more people in this field could communicate clearly.
- arandomusername 2y ago

foota 2y ago

It's at the bottom of the article, but note that this interview experience is from 15 years ago.

sowut 2y ago

[flagged]

zooq_ai 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
I've no idea what that refers to but you can't post like this to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we have to ban accounts that do it. We've already warned you recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40515896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40515896. If you want to keep posting here, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules!

deleted 2y ago

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Imnimo 2y ago

I like this interview question. It's perfectly solvable without a calculator as the interviewer said. It doesn't rely on having memorized some weird binary tree inversion algorithm. It tests the ability to take facts that you already know (e.g. 2^8 or 2^10) and use them to solve a problem that might appear out of reach at first glance.

Ekaros 2y ago
I don't really find it even that offensive question. Then again my schooling was more network engineering. Powers of two are pretty natural part of software engineering. And as such having to do some simple math of them seem more like easy soft ball starting question. Now if powers of 3 or 5 or 6 or 7 were asked... Eff them...

dmitrygr 2y ago

Assuming the quotes are accurate, interviewer was indeed being a bit of a dick, but being able to tell approx how many bits a number needs is something I'd expect any programmer to be able to do, and I would also give negative feedback to someone who could not do that in an interview.

nothrowaways 2y ago

[flagged]

bowsamic 2y ago
There's such a thing as righteous hate

deleted 2y ago

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yashasolutions 2y ago

Competition is good. We need diverse search product again. Kagi is great but more options would be good too. OP's product is clearly at a very early stage. OP's post is also pretty opinionated. Hard to say which impact on product it will have - but as long we have more options for search engines, this will be one out of many options.

derefr 2y ago

> 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-policy headers; 2. captures the spidering process losslessly, as e.g. HAR transcript files; 3. packs those HAR transcript files, a few million at a time, into tar.xz.tar files (i.e. grab a "chunk" of N HAR files; group them into subdirs by request Host header; archive each subdir, and compress those archives independently; then archive all the compressed archives without compression) — and then uploads these semi-random-access archives to a CDN or private BitTorrent tracker (or any other data delivery system that enables clients to only retrieve the blocks/byte-ranges of files they're interested in); 4. generate a TOC for the semi-random-access files, as a stream of tuples (signed archive URL, chunk byte-range, hostname, compressed URL-list); push these to a managed reliable message queue on an IaaS, publishing each entry to both an all-hostnames topic, and a per-hostname topic. (I say an IaaS, as this allows consumers to set up their own consumer-groups on these topics within their own IaaS project, and then pay the costs of message retention in these consumer-groups themselves.) 5. Also buffer these TOC-entry streams into files (e.g. Parquet files), one archive series per topic; and host these alongside the HAR archives. Prune TOC topic stream entries if (entries are at least N days old AND the entries have been successfully "offlined" into a hosted TOC-stream archive.) --- This "web-spidering-firehose data-lake as-a-Service" architecture, would enable pretty much anyone to build whatever arbitrary search index they want downstream of it, containing as much or as little of the web as they want — where each consumer only needs to do as much work as is required to fetch and parse the HARs of the domains they've decided they care about indexing something under. This architecture would also be "temporal" (akin to a temporal RDBMS table) — as a consumer of this service, you wouldn't see "the current version" of a scraped URL, but rather all previous attempts to scrape that URL, and what happened each time. (This would mean that no website could ever censor the dataset retroactively by adding a robots.txt "Disallow *" after scrapes have already happened. Their robots.txt config would prevent further scraping, but previous scraping would be retained.) And in fact, in this architecture, the HTTP interaction to retrieve /robots.txt for a domain, would produce a HAR transcript that would get archived like any other. Domains restricted from crawling by robots.txt, would still get regular HAR transcripts recorded of the result of checking that their /robots.txt still restricts crawling. (Reducing over these /robots.txt HAR transcripts is how a consumer-indexer would determine whether they should currently be showing/hiding a domain in their built index.)

daemonologist 2y ago

Page appears to have been taken down, but is available on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240702162540/https://daoudclarke.net/search%20engines/2024/07/02/google-rejected-me https://web.archive.org/web/20240702162540/https://daoudclar...

ryandrake 2y ago
Looks like OP got called out for this being a thinly-veiled attempt to get free marketing/SEO[1] for their business and suddenly the gig was up[2]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859051 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859389

daoudc 2y ago

I took the page down as it was attracting the wrong sort of attention. As some commenters surmised, the goal was to promote the search engine, but it wasn't working out that way...

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

When I try to use the provided URL, I get this: Sorry this page does not exist =( Alternative: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4652446581392&w=-V-8V9bl07F3JL04ZjrptOMD-qpI3ecz https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4652446581392&w=-V-8V9bl07...

Lockal 2y ago

Not sure how "need a few more to get 56, well 6 would be enough. So 26 bits?" is a solution. If he remembers that max signed int is ~2 billion, than easier to divide 4 billion by 2. 2b/1b/500m/250m/127m/64m - got 6 divisions, 32-6=26. If you think that max int is irrelevant to the position - it is so relevant, I can't even describe, this number is everywhere, from database design to js-wasm (limited by 32-bit), from deep-learning (where some libraries still limited to 32-bit buffers) to networking (hello ipv4)

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