From the perspective of someone encountering the site: how does it help? Why should I use your site instead of just emailing them? Or using Scribd? Or putting it on my network shared drive?

Let's say you want to share a PDF with some HN readers in a comment, you can quickly upload the document and share the view link with others. No registration, sign in and all the other stuff.

You could have the document on your server. But believe it or not, several people do not have servers to host documents they may want to share publicly.

I think if you wanted to quickly share a ppt or pdf without much control over the document, then Doxela is much faster to achieve your goal. It's like what Scribd would be if they wanted to do a lite.scribd.com.

Most PDFs I want to share are taken from an online source, so I'd just link to that source.

When it isn't, it's usually a document that I'm sharing with a couple people (I would email it).

I don't remember the last time that I needed to share a document publicly that I didn't just find online. Since this is such a rare occasion, I probably wouldn't remember this site and just use something more general like dropbox.

I don't really see much advantage of this over dropbox. Actually, I prefer my pdf reader over google's since the find feature works better.

Sorry. Maybe I'm not the target of your app though.

Oh, also, it didn't work for me using safari.

One more thing: The text you see after a file is deleted has a grammar mistake: "Your document succesfully deleted."

Thanks Frazzydee for all the feedback. All taken into consideration. And thanks for catching the grammatical error.

No problem..I actually felt really guilty after writing that for having nothing but negative things to say :(

Wish you all the best with it!

Was it via this product?

http://www.ailive.net/liveAI.html

In programming AI players for various games, I've found that stupid algorithms with excellently-tuned parameters beat smart algorithms with decently-tuned parameters.

Any examples or intuition about why?

I don't know, but I could imagine overfitting could have something to do with it. Also simpler models are probably more robust.

Similar: Perhaps make downvoting power -- as opposed to upvoting power -- proportional to age/karma? That would empower experienced (indoctrinated?) members to discourage the undesired content, without too heavily influencing the discussion.

But the next question is: Who has the deeper pockets with which to throw more money to the content providers?

In Microsoft v. Google? They'll both run out of upside long before they run out of money, that is to say, both can spend amounts of money unbounded by the actual quantity they have as other bounds kick in first.

Just looked up the latest balance sheets. GOOG has $12 billion in cash, MSFT $6 billion. And GOOG had positive cash flow in their last quarterly, MSFT was negative.

Dupe of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443

Yes.

One thing I noticed is that searches no longer require that all words in the query be present in the search results. Adding a + before a word is now required to ensure that it's present in results. That frequently results in me having to do 2-3 searches to find something that could previously be found with one.

Another annoying snag is that if you search for "A B", google will also search for "AB" (eliminating the space). This affects a lot of searches with acronyms and technical terms. For example, if you're looking for info on MIT's RAs, the top search results for "ra mit" or "mit ra" are related to "ramit" or "mitra".

This seems to be an optimization for their average user, but is really inconvenient for people searching for system errors, mathematical/cs theory terms, or other queries where acronyms are common.

I have noticed this too and find it very irritating. I expect ALL words to be present. Why did they change this?

I have no idea why they changed this, I noticed it recently and I can't figure it why.

User testing must have somehow played a role, I hate to blame non-technical users but... still I can't believe anyone gets better results when the keywords are optional.

The odd thing is I remember switching from AltaVista to google, before google you always had to discount the first bunch of results, but google was just so amazingly accurate. And yet now I find myself skipping the top results in a google search.

I remember when google bombing first started, it didn't bother me much, but then google tried to counter it and I could swear searches got a bit worse. And recently they've gotten even worse.

It's a shame this seems to be destiny of all truly great things.

Even with the +, google makes some interesting "interpretations". I notice when I search on one of the BSDs (e.g. OpenBSD) it seems to pick pages that just have BSD on it.

Plus, google's handling of punctuation (e.g. f-script) is a pain since (even with the +) it will do weird substitutions and consider blanks good enough.

Since I started using more advanced search features regularly I have gotten significantly better results. Things like +"my search term", -free, -download, -cracked tend to heavily limit the spamming of results, and if I want something specific using tricks like inurl:keyword and site:siteToSearch tend to make what I want just jump out on the first page.

Also the - minus comes handy to exclude similar terms or phrases. Yeah, this feel just like Altavista.

Thanks for the tip of the + !!

Despite all the downmodding, jpwagner's suggestion is on the money. What would most benefit the development of a tool like this is extensive understanding of how the target audience reacts to and applies it.

Lest we forget that COBOL and SQL were originally designed to be accessible to non-developer business-y types. One wonders how much UX testing they underwent.

They seem to have mostly avoided that, actually. There's no Firefox logo on their site, for example.

The url shown in google is a gross violation.

Mozilla could easily sue them for that alone.

This is what "Trademark" is all about, for once: preventing consumers from being misled.

This, incidentally, reads like a business how-not-to.

But also like a "how it is really done..."

Clearly you have never worked for a big company :)

To me it reads like the current operating guide for just about every politician I've ever met ;)