skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would hope the EU can see right through transparent moves like this, but I suspected this as well.
Did I miss something in the announcement? When people say that Google is "monolithic", they're saying that Google contains Youtube (#1 video site), search (#1 search), Android (#1 mobile OS), maps (#1 map site), Gmail (#1 email site?), and G+ (Facebook competitor). These companies appear to remain inside the Google corporation after the "restructuring", and so this doesn't ameliorate any of EU's concerns.

I think this is more about changing what Larry and Sergey do all day.
And so Google becomes Berkshire Hathaway.
Google (GOOGL) Will No Longer Exist – Say Hello to Alphabet
I can spec out a system like that in less than 1h, but let's say it takes 2h, ending up with a total hardware cost of ~$9k plus $200 to have it assembled. Are you really valuing your time at more than $2000 an hour?
Am I the only one who came away wondering why they didn't buy the domain alphabet.com?

The company that owns it, ascio.com, isn't even using it. Or perhaps they were a bit too greedy?
No, technically difficult. Otherwise, hackers are overrun by everyone else. Telegraph, ham radio, early computers were all technically difficult. Although new modes of communication are still coming - eg twitter, vine - they aren't technically difficult to use.
So I was excited, I have this very need and was going to load up a chat server. But there already is a site, great, and I'll use that (I'm into not reinventing the wheel) instead of investing my time (at more than $5/hour).

Sadly it's a landing page. I agree, it's not really an MVP, it's a landing page that should say "Coming soon". I have some leftover AOL "Under Construction" gifs I can send you.

After I go set my chat server up.....
Ask HN: Should I go back to school or continue working?
I’m caught in a weird place with a tough choice so it would be great to hear some feedback.

I’m a product manager at a mid-size software startup (not in SV) earning 110K. The money is good, but I do not find my work fulfilling and wish I had more time towards my projects. I’ve worked at large tech cos before and started a company previously which was acqui-hired (not for much). One of things I’ve built generates a small amount of revenue right now. If I had some time to dedicate to that, I might be able to grow the business.

I haven’t finished the last year of my degree and want to finish it. I’m 26 years old (no dependents) and don’t think it would be hard very hard to find a job after graduating.

In order to graduate, I will likely have to drain my savings. So when I do graduate, I’ll be around net zero after tuition + monthly expenses.

There are essentially two options that I can see:

1. Go to school full-time. Work on my side project(s). Graduate in a year. Find a job I find fulfilling or if projects are doing well, focus on that. This will leave me in a fairly tight spot financially if I can’t find a job afterwards.

2. Continue working and finish school part-time. Quit and find something better after I graduate. Ignore side projects.

I really want to go with the first option but think it might be silly financially. What if I can’t find a job? What if the market goes through a downturn? This may just be jitters.
They were absolutely pitched as huge ideas that would change everything we know about email and social networks. Bearing the scars of their public failures, Google started calling new projects moonshots to shape perception of the programs as chasing ideas, while preemptively deflecting any criticism of their readiness or desirability to large markets. They are not materially different from moonshots except in presentation.
Show HN: Building a JavaScript Recommendation Engine with Graph Theory
>Well fructose was a rarely part of the human diet

What an absolutely ridiculous statement.
So I guess A is Adsense.
Congrats! It's a new chapter for Google, an exciting beginning for Alphabet. It definitely broke PG's theory on the .com
"The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say."

It would be a huge step forward if this can be built, but there still would be a long way to go. To scale that to "electricity for everyone in the USA", you would need to build about 3,000 of these (or build much bigger ones). And that's for _current_ electricity use, not if everybody starts driving an electric car.

For comparison, a 1000MW nuclear reactor produces electricity for 690,000 _households_ (http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nu...), and US nuclear electricity generation is about a honderd times that (same page)
Search for "The Google Graveyard". Someone made a thing about all the stuff Google killed off.
They are. They're really well used in the education sector now too, for good reason.
I've always felt that was ho-hum, as zingers go, since the standards can be so high that the lowest rank is still pretty good in absolute terms. It's like saying, "You know what I call a bronze medal? Last place." Er ... a bronze medal is still very impressive.

If you want a clever anti-doctor zinger, I'd use something like, "You know what it's called when a really well-read expert diagnoses you wrongly on a hunch, gets it wrong, leaves you suffering for years, and never has their work reviewed? Medicine."
Although, if you are a Phd-student or postdoc, you really need to be first author on some papers if you want to make a further career in science, at least in the biomedical fields.

The monster author lists seem to be most common in physics though, where you have these large collaborative projects, like the LHC. I guess that makes it a bit different, and that it therefore is acceptable for a Phd student or a postdoc to be listed in the author list of these papers, and not necessarily be first author.
I wonder if, besides the obviously healthy restructuring, this is also to anticipate on future anti trust issues. It seems like they're getting one step ahead like this.
hey there. Founder of Late Labs here. We could have avoided the double tax problem if we didn't try and keep a small piece of the equity for the company.

Would have to play it like AngelList did for investment (they never actually handled any money or helped with negotiation). Our idea was to keep a very small portion of the equity from each deal to create a big pool of high risk early stage equity... which ended up being our downfall.

Bountysource looks like it can avoid that because they only act as a marketplace for introductions. Make sense?
"so this doesn't ameliorate any of EU's concerns"

The announcement seems deliberately vague. You're right in that it doesn't specifically address the EU concerns, but it creates a structure where that's easier to do.
The Home Office has been tightening up skilled visa's for about three years now. It used to be easy to do, but is becoming very difficult.

But, I can see the other side of the coin - there's no way you can claim that skills are in shortage when you consider that you're hiring pool is the whole of the EU.

All too often people claim they can't get "skilled workers" and what they mean is that they only want the fully finished article and won't invest in training or development for existing employees. Putting in career paths and development for employees is good for retention and doesn't have to be that costly.
Exactly. And the more people will say NO, the bigger salaries will go to those who say YES.
It looks like Szilard always had moral qualms about atomic bombs (http://www.dannen.com/chronbio.html).

The "military head" of the Manhattan Project, General Groves appeared to have really disliked Szilard: Groves wanted to have Szilard "interned for the duration of the war" as "an enemy alien" (http://www.doug-long.com/szilard.htm)

I'll bet that Szilard's iconoclasm and reaction to authority means that his contributions get downplayed. Can't have a non-team-player elevated to hero status, now can we?
Reader was the top web application in its market for almost a decade. I'd like to have that kind of failure.
Show HN: Low – totally silent video chat
well we got blindsided by Yahoo! when they released Livetext while we were still in stealth with a buggy MVP (in fact, TechCrunch broke the story the same day we submitted to the App Store)

pro: we don't have the validate the concept anymore

con: now we're playing catch-up with an Internet giant

anyway, guess there's some solace in having the only alternative on iOS for video texting without sound, and we still think our minimalist design is pretty cool

help us keep morale up by checking it out, thanks!
> finance is a zero-sum game

It's not, because new money is always entering the system from the real economy.

For example, there is not a fixed amount of money invested in the stock market that the players just trade among themselves in a zero-sum game. Under normal economic conditions, people make money in some other non-finance industry and invest it in stocks, increasing the total pool.
Growth Hacking – 300,000 Unique Visitors in a Day with Reddit – Podcast
S3 is already supposed to be AZ-tolerant. In the US Standard region, they say your data is actually replicated across multiple geographic locations in Virginia and the Pacific Northwest. That's probably true—your data may be highly durable—but availability incidents can apparently span both geographic regions.
Oldest joke in med school:

Old surgeon to young one:

- Jim, amputate the left foot.

- Jim - the left!

- Jim - the foot!
I've seen a lot of people dismissing this as insignificant. It's not when you realize that while Dorsey is a billionaire, the majority of his wealth is illiquid (tied up in Twitter and Square). He's clearly sold Twitter stock to get liquidity at various points and should not be faulted for that because it's logical. A quick scan of his sales (which are infrequent compared to other insiders) leads me to believe this was non-trivial portion of his liquid net worth.
>Didn't work for whatever reason.

The online platforms check for it so its a cat & mouse game.
Although what often happens is that now divisions compete against either in suboptimal ways. Search and Maps are separate? Great, until Search decides maps are really cool and starts building their own version, again. It takes a strong hand at the top to prevent division heads from viewing their peers as rivals.
Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO
I would imagine he sold a lot of stock to pay for taxes after the Twitter IPO.
I think in this case it just means the new slimmed-down Google won't include X, Calico, Wing, etc...
> just like a good doctor should be able to judge the reliability of information coming from the patient.

Exactly! A good doctor must be able to read people well; their communication style, presuppositions, personality, and this will help the doctor determine if someone is exaggerating their symptoms, understating their pain, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, medical schools simply do not select for someone with this skillset, and this is not a new problem: "For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers." Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/nyregion/30medschools.html
Build Your Own Server Monitoring System Using M2X
Because if they have a Mars facility that can't easily be nuked, they can threaten to nuke everyone on Earth using their terrestrial stockpiles, and you can't threaten them back. MAD breaks down into madness.
Taken together, Feynman's "bending over backwards" and the "principle of charity" constitute a philosophy along the lines of "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". It's recently become fashionable to blame this principle for some sort of percieved flaw in the Web, but I wonder if a world where web browsers failed to render a entire page on so much as a misplaced </p> would really have been better. After all, it would be a shame if we lived in a world where people only listened to your opinions if you formatted them a certain way, wouldn't it?
Wave was supposed to completely blow away email.

Plus was intended to eat Facebook's lunch.

They were both huge moonshots.
Depends on the user group and the context you're designing for. Only so-called "novice users" struggle with right click. Intermediate to advanced users are well versed in it. The former user group is dwindling by the day.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/feature-richness-and-user-en...

This also falls under the "myth of the stupid user." http://infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/articles/themyth...

Be very careful about conflating the two issues. Usability studies have shown that users struggle with inappropriately labelled hamburger menus. Usability studies have also shown that users of intermediate to advanced skill do not struggle with right click. One is an issue regarding appropriate labelling and visual affordance, and the other is one of system and hardware affordances.
Just a stray observation, but now Microsoft and Google are both run by Indian born CEOs.
Another Mudd Alum here. I remember being hugely inspired by Christina Alvarado's Intro CS class for 1st-year students. Teaching is really engaging, there aren't any dull moments in the classroom. A typical lecture class consists of explanations interspersed with short interactive quizzes. At end of every semester, the profs at Mudd are all open to getting student feedback to iterate on the curriculum to be better.
> My question is, what does "slimmed down" Google mean?

It looks like they're taking all the experimental research stuff out of Google and making them direct subsidiaries of Alphabet instead, particularly projects that aren't directly related to the Internet.

The article talked about Life Sciences and Calico, and I have to wonder if other stuff like the self-driving cars are going to become direct Alphabet subsidiaries as well (then again, maybe not: I assume the self-driving cars are tied closely to Google Maps).
Here’s How HTC and Samsung’s Fingerprint Scanner Was Hacked
I wondered if the reorg would have any impact on the stock price. Given this joke, now I really wonder.

Are we sure it isn't April 1st? Are we sure this press release isn't a hoax?

This is so wild I'm having trouble believing any of it.
>> Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.

Is this supposed to say Sundar? Kind of an awkward mistake to make.
I think of it as the 'menu of last resort', that should never be a primary navigation element. In that sense it works just fine.

I might also refer to it as the 'vent', since it seems to heat up after a few months of not restarting my browser.
I assumed that was either in the guidelines or just general convention, to be honest.
I think it just means the Google division will no longer contain the parts that have been spun off. There may be others but from the announcement that looks like: Life Sciences, Calico, Ventures and Capital, and X lab. Later on in the announcement they call Google "slightly slimmed down" which seems like a bit of an understatement.

Presumably they hope that something outside of the new google division will blow up and make the divisions a bit less lopsided.
I can read your age
Because version numbers can be handled automatically, descriptions can't.

Say, you have app v.20150701 running in production. Today you deployed new version and it ran migration script against production DB. Two days later you discovered a critical issue in your new version and are forced to roll back to the old app. Now, your 20150710 app opens the database and notices that it has 20150811-oh-we-did-something-to-the-db.sql migration applied. Can it use the database or should it fail/downgrade the DB? How do you tell if all you have is a timestamp and description?

IMO this is more important than solving branch merges because it helps me when my production system is down and there's pressure to bring it back online ASAP. Merging branches can be done offline in the cozy comfort of my development environment.

PS. Of course, the above scenario might be more or less relevant depending on your development and deployment workflows.
Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube
You can achieve it very easily if you don't have profits.

E.g. you can open a web application selling $10 for $5 today and I guarantee you it's gonna be a huge success.
https://www.google.com/search?q=abc.xyz

No Alphabet there.
Less employees is how I interpret it. Lay-offs.

I have no reason to suspect this, that's just how I usually interpret wording like that.
Android Certifi-Gate remote access security hole exploited
Math.random might do quite well?
The reality is most customers are not affected, and overall service uptime is highest anywhere around.

Unfortunately it's really impossible to say in this case, since they don't release numbers. Informally everyone I know with S3 buckets in US-Default had issues this morning.

As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

What you say about multiple AZs is true for EC2, but many other AWS services (especially EBS-backed ones) tend to go down across the entire region. If you're serious about availability, you really need to be in multiple regions.
lol

Reminds me of a story I once heard.

"And jokingly I told the surgeon that I will mark my arm with 'THIS ARM' before the surgery and she said 'Yes, please do this'"
Developer: From Good to Great
Ask HN: What's your biggest pain point when registering a new domain?
I'm working on a side project to simplify domain registration out of my own frustration
and I wanted to hear from the HN community what do you think about the current state of domain registration?
Is there something better out there besides GoDaddy? Something simple with great UI where I can register a domain
and have everything done in under a minute? Something that is a pleasure to work with?
Is that something you would pay for it?
Hooli XYZ is a reference to the HBO show Silicon Valley. It has no relation to Google (other than that Hooli is basically a fictional parody of Google). Looks like some developer added that to this press release as an easter egg.
That is so frustrating. And it's not just you talking out of your ass, you had your vaccine records there for them to see and they refused.
http://killedgoogleproducts.silk.co/
How Engineers Want to Work with Product Managers
Once again, xkcd explains all.

https://xkcd.com/277/
> They were both huge moonshots.

Unfortunately, they used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket) for the rockets.
> As long as you build your application to be AZ-tolerant, you won't run into problems.

This is a total crock. On the 31st of July, our ec2 instances across 2 availability zones were shutdown without warning. I waited 3 hours not being able to do anything. So far I've only got info from first level support and it's been "escalated".
I had similar problem as a kid, just couldn't remember the words for left and right until someone finally told me "L for left hand".
Called a "mega menu" FYI.
When does this all roll under the sheinhardt wig company?
The arguments are not meaningfully different. For each individual, their perception is indistinguishable (to them) from reality. It could be trivially changed:

"I use a flat map to navigate. I perceive no difference between the map and reality. Therefore reality is like the map."

For things that are very strongly one-sided you almost certainly aren't going to make an argument that convinces yourself, but if it's not at least as good as the arguments used by people that disagree with you, you are doing yourself an intellectual disservice.
According to what I can find it doesn't use a blob under Chrome. Perhaps it's using a browser whitelist?
> Each technologist has a choice whether or not to work on these systems. The answer should always be NO.

Technologists is not a politically or economically homogenous group. You can find engineers who would like to work on anti-satellite weapons for all kinds of reasons: economic, political, patriotic, religious, economic or simply for its cool factor. Also, technologists are not universally pacifists or proponents of space exploration or progress in general (even though majority of them may be).
Ai sorry, I thought it was the pre-press version of the paper.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037257
I'm glad to know I'm not alone in being shocked by Flightcar's service. I've also had a recent horrible experience with Flightcar, and unfortunately must also recommend users steer clear.

I've only seen this level of tone-deafness from startups that are about to die or startups that are about to raise big. Given they are still expanding aggressively into new cities I'd assume it's the latter and they're pushing a lemon onto VCs.
Right, this is the real reason this is happening. Anticipating and staying 1 step ahead.
This is a common problem in medicine. As some one who regularly prescribes xray to patients (in Orthopedic Surgery) we have very strict instructions to the radiology technicians to perform the imaging of the side that is mentioned in the orders. Due to a variety of reasons. But we sometimes do make mistakes.

But like the author describes doing the same mistake is the OR and performing a surgery is a disaster of several magnitudes. One of the common problem is that many times senior consultants have limited contact with the patients and their sole focus is doing surgeries. Usually residents and the younger docs are involved in the preoperative care of the patient.
A fusion reactor able to produce net electricity at all would be a massive breakthrough. I don't think the size matters much at all. Once anything is working, progress on scaling it up is likely to come quickly. The hard part is getting to the point where it works at all.

The first nuclear power plant attached to a grid was only 6MW. The first "full-scale" plant, according to Wikipedia and the BBC, had four reactors producing only 60MW each.
> As in all things design, I suppose a balance needs to be found, but I personally don't find anything wrong with a hamburger menu per se.

It's not about balance, cluttering or abuses, it's all about engagement. Ultimately design decisions must be data-driven. If using other nav patterns you increase user engagement (and consequently revenue for the company) the hamburger should be replaced. So, A/B test it, and you will learn which is the correct choice: hamburger, tabs, segmented control, etc
I've always wondered why we don't see more of the studio model (like Pixar) in tech companies. Especially ones focused on innovation -- Thomas Edison didn't just invent a single product, and that trend still influences how GE operates today. It's a bit of a stretch, but with some fuzziness around the boundaries, the idea of an over-arching studio seems to mostly describe YCombinator too.
> A simple dot tattooed somewhere inconspicuous on the hand (make it look like a liver spot) would be enough to solve the problem.

I have the same issue as the doctor and this wouldn't help me. I know which hand I write with. (My right). I always know which hand is my right but I still can't tell right or left for directions. It gets flipped during processing like dyslexia.