skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Will Alphabet buy Apple? (with the trillions it will make from Planetary Resources, which I assume will incorporate as well eventually). Apple even has a letter reserved for it - The A in Alphabet.
I'm sure more than none.

But there are also a lot of jobsworths who will do exactly what they're told, nothing more, and nothing less, irrespective of how much or how little sense it makes.

These people exist in all jobs, all fields. Some people simply do not have the capacity for lateral thought, and like being told what to do and doing exactly that.
Google Video, and Orkut, were complete failures and no longer exist. Successful products don't disappear without a trace. If they are closed by management when they otherwise might have succeeded, that is failure.

Reader was a failure according to Google itself, which closed it due to supposed lack of interest. Once again, if the decision to close it was an error by your criteria, then they failed.

The rest I would agree with.
We Mapped True Detective’s Wildly Implausible Road Trips
Alan Kay (2015) on Problem Finding [video]
The big problem with controlled fusion, as I understand it, isn't creating a net energy positive fusion reactor like this article implies. The physics is already there, we just need the engineering to catch-up.

The challenge is the materials that compose the reactor become brittle and highly radioactive far faster than usable. Controlled fusion as an energy source isn't just challenging because fusion is difficult, it's also challenging because materials don't handle neutron bombardment well.

I think where this advancement is going to really help is in the iteration phase due to lower build costs but I'm still waiting for a solution to the radioactive economic issues associated with the materials these reactors would be constructed from.
I think the implication about a moonshot is that nobody has been to the moon before the moonshot. The thing about Facebook's lunch is that lunch happens ever day at noon.
Great Article - I don't know if I am pro-choice anymore?
With all their existing products/acquisitions, Alphabet will soon run out of letters!
That is just more transparency into internal operations. Different divisions of Microsoft report separately, but a division taking a billion dollar write-off still impacts the share price.
Obviously, that's subjective.

I find it easier to think of it as a name change and the creation of a new subordinate entity within the old organization with its own CEO than to think of it as creating a new entity above Google, and transferring lots of functions from Google to the new superior entity, transferring all stock in Google to stock in the new superior entity, and changing the leadership of Google.
the faster the object, the more energy it has. How about collecting that energy? Your delta-V is my joules so to speak. The space junk is (and probably will be) mostly metal, and there probably some ways to collect the energy, like magnetic traps, etc... (the idea inspired by my Prius brake regeneration :)
can't wait to see the updated privacy terms
Google Is Now Alphabet, but It Doesn’t Own Alphabet.com
I love the fact that the change sets translate down to the dialect of the DB its going to.
For more great examples of "naughty" strings see the Twitter @glitchr_ account.
https://twitter.com/glitchr_
Ask HN: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?
In a recent HN post a dev asked for advice to work/live in the US and some commenters suggested trying other countries first. What if the situation is different. Let's say you are a developer and already have permanent residence status in the US, would you stay there or move to another country? Is there such thing as the best country for software developers?
http://abc.wtf -> http://bing.com
Yes?

They suffer from the gulf state problem where they make so much money from one thing that nothing else will ever be important enough to really be successful.
Killing Distractions: Mac Automator Style
Boosting solid-state memory by making tantalum oxide high-density devices
Show HN: Jumpy – A command-line jump utility (now with zsh completion)
It seems to me that their domain name (https://abc.xyz/), and maybe even the corporate name, was chosen to imitate Hooli XYZ.
Isn't 96% of Google profits from search ads only? They 've done a million ventures since then, still remain ad-funded.
CloudFlare's Middle Eastern Network Expansion
Google does not own https://www.alphabet.com/

Thought I'd link this to:

http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
the shoe maker wears the worst shoes
From his blog: "Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company."
I like your domain. Clever :)
thanks for the comment! yeah our website is still our pre-launch placeholder for testers so we'll start to work on something more product focussed
CSV to HTML 101 webmap
What makes you think they know better?
Although IQ is a debated subject there are many researches claiming that the ability to solve complex problems peaks at about 30 and remains like that until 64. Speed declines. I am good with that because I am not taking part at hackathons.
Sounds like a form of the ChargeBack system for IT. It makes bean counters happy, but spreads misery every place else.
Don't misunderstand me, it isn't dislike, its amazement. Some things really do well under multiple companies, think BASF or Siemans where the core that holds them is something common to all the sub-companies. But historically tech companies do not prosper in that model, and generally for a similar reason, there isn't anything in common between the companies except maybe there are smart and talented people working there.

The original Sun vision was that Sun Hardware would sell SPARC architecture machines running any OS, SunSoft would sell Solaris for any type of hardware, Sun Labs would license their innovative research rights to anyone who wanted to productize them. Except ...

Nobody really wanted to run their OS software on Sun hardware because SunSoft had an inside track on what was coming out. Sunsoft couldn't really make Solaris on x86 just as powerful as it was on SPARC because it would undercut Sun's HW arm, and Sun Labs? They could never really license a technology to a Sun competitor without the other two companies vetoing it. The whole reason FirstPerson was created (the shell company that was developing Oak which became Java) was to keep the politics and other constraints off what could be done with the software. And when the group told Sun it was going to ship first on "Chicago" (aka Windows 95), Scott McNealy blew a gasket.

Pretty much everyone I've talked to about that decision in depth thought it was a net negative for Sun and that had we had a chance to do it again, they would do something different. And since Eric was right in the middle of that, I would have expected him to advise Larry and Sergei that it wasn't the best choice. And maybe he did, and maybe they have a scheme that will avoid the problems Sun had. I'm surprised though that they chose that route.
To be the person who owns alphabet.com right now...
Agree with the first 3 paragraphs so much, well put.
cough gv.com cough

This is not venture capital.
>> small, separate entities makes it easier to tackle new opportunities (which start small) that wouldn't move the needle for Google - as per Christensen.

They would still need to move the needle for alphabet.
AFAICT, it's not really there yet. I could barely make it work within the scope of the framework I was using.
ToneTag allows mobile payments using sound (tone) or NFC (tag)
Jogging Is an in Sport (1968)
Here's the paper (no paywall):

http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3540

Interesting that the liquid blanket is the same as in the molten-salt thorium reactors (lithium beryllium fluoride (FLiBe)).
Unfortunately, no. I will however pass your remarks to our people in charge of this application process.
Show HN: We provide world-class designers to startups
We know how hard hiring designers is, so we've done the work for you and built a 30+ world-class designers from around the world to either work full time or as many hours you need as if they were your employees.

What do you guys think? Could this be any helpful for startups?

Check out our work at http://lcdd.co and http://lcdd.co/lcdd.pdf
> and the leftover capital loss just keeps on rolling over perpetually until you die?

Pretty much. I have a $10K capital loss from a bad investment over 10 years ago. I simply keep rolling it forward until I have a capital gain to offset it.
Ha -- the Sun planets experience was the first thing that occurred to me as well. In my experience, the planets model was a total, unequivocal failure at Sun -- and the answer to the question of whether those companies could stand on their own was actually "no" for all of them (SME, SMCC and SunSoft all needed one another; the value came from what they delivered together). And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction: unbundling the compilers from the operating system and separately monetizing them. But at least SunSoft, SMCC and SME came to realize that they had shared interests -- in stark contrast to JavaSoft which actually thought it was a separate company (never mind the unending welfare checks from SMI). Sun was a company prone to tribal warfare; as it turns out, dividing the company into tribal homelands did nothing for national unity.

In terms of what's happening here with Google/Alphabet, I imagine that there is some desire to see if some of these companies can make it independently while still being able to make transfer payments to support those that can't. The problem, of course, is that this builds much more explicit resentment from those that are profit-centers towards those that are cost-centers. It will be interesting to see how this works out, but hard to see how this is a stable state; it seems that shareholders will demand that businesses be spun out entirely -- or that the whole thing will have the fate of Google+ and be quietly folded up three years from now...
Hyves in NL had the 'circles' thing before Facebook even existed, let alone before Google went public with G+.
Denver, is very white and male, yes (Men-ver is a good name). The diversity is something i miss as well. Though the bro-y-ness of it is missing to me. I get more beer snob and hipster these days. SF is more 'don't arrest me, my dad is a lawyer'-bro-y than Denver is.
You're quite right. It's not. This is the correct abstract:

---snip---

Charge ordering in metals is a fundamental instability of the electron sea, occurring in a host of materials and often linked to other collective ground states such as superconductivity. What is difficult to parse, however, is whether the charge order originates among the itinerant electrons or whether it arises from the ionic lattice. Here we employ high-resolution X-ray diffraction, combined with high-pressure and low-temperature techniques and theoretical modelling, to trace the evolution of the ordering wavevector Q in charge and spin density wave systems at the approach to both thermal and quantum phase transitions. The non-monotonic behaviour of Q with pressure and the limiting sinusoidal form of the density wave point to the dominant role of the itinerant instability in the vicinity of the critical points, with little influence from the lattice. Fluctuations rather than disorder seem to disrupt coherence.

---snip---

So. What does this mean in English? Also, can I downvote my own posts?
It seems as though Google (Alphabet) is splitting its business divisions into:

1) Google - a company comprised of reliably profitable products that run at massive scale (search, video, mobile, mail etc), and they know that Sundar Pichai can manage this

2) Everything else - these are high risk ventures with possibly enormous pay-offs. This is a breeding ground for positive black swans which Google are keen to expose themselves too.

To borrow Nassim Taleb's nomenclature, Google is splitting into mediocristan (1) (bounded variance - existing products [like YouTube] are predictably profitable) and extremistan (2) (Calico - if a major breakthrough in combating aging related diseases is made it will be both unpredictable and hugely materially beneficial)

>> We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well.

This sounds like the business restructuring will allow Sergey and Larry to apply just as much capital as they see fit to the extremistani business divisions. In other words they would like to control their exposure to possible consequential rare events in a simple fashion: by controlling a very simple set of parameters - i.e. how much cash each business division gets.
Dudeism+-+Ordination+by+the+Religion+of+The+Big+Lebowski
So considering the consensus of opinion among the comments that "just because the private company is 10x higher value than its public-traded counterpart, where those public counterparts are still trading at 20+x earnings", Pier88 decides to buy into the public firm and has returned ~9% in 6 months, but...

with a similar size of capital and knowing that the market will correct the private firms valuation over time, a shrewder investor would wait for the Ubers and AirBnBs to go public and short their shares or buy bear options, thereby giving returns far in excess of what ~9% will give.

I bet that for every Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price and other "don't miss out on this unicorn" fund, there is a Carl Icahn laughing until it hurts, because he is loading up on bear positions for the over-valued private company and will cash in like many did when FB flopped on IPO.
What is the "jogging" of today? Gluten free diets? I could see it become mainstream once science has studied it more extensively, but today if you don't have coeliac disease and decide to go gluten-free, you're labeled as nuts right away.
Interesting idea. However, I doubt it can work, because for it to work, you have to be close to the debris. (You're probably facing some kind of inverse-square-law here.) But you don't want to get very close to space debris that can close on you at those kinds of speeds (I believe the GP from me meant 10K km/sec, rather than 10 km/sec.) It's going to be really hard to guarantee a miss and still get close enough to collect energy...
> Are you going to say that the fruits of said automated labor do not belong entirely to their owners (or people that created it/bought it/etc)?

No. Why would I? That's silly.

> Or we live in a society where only a portion/percentage of said labor

Not only is this a false dichotomy, but it's also missing my point: that the purpose of automation is to eliminate the need for labor, and that by pursuing automation of tasks that few (if any) people actually want to do as hobbies or "labors of love", OP's suggestion is actually feasible.

It sounds like you're trying to pin me to some communal Marxist philosphy (never mind that I personally subscribe to philosophies that can power most of Europe by wiring the corpse of Karl Marx to a dynamo in his grave). The idea of a post-labor society is actually quite compatible with capitalism; if you have a machine that makes chairs and I have a machine that makes tables, there's nothing stopping us from trading, say, a table for four chairs, or a chair-making machine for a table-making machine, or selling our tables and chairs for money and using that money to buy, say, couches.
Here's the core question, is this a permanent or temporary problem?

I remember back in the early years of the web (mid to late '90s) and one of the most important factors in designing websites was realizing that users don't scroll. They just didn't, and if your site design relied on that fact then you'd be screwed. But users learned to scroll, and now scrolling is perhaps the most important and most universal method of interacting with the web. In another 10 years will the hamburger menu become so well known and universally relied upon that not doing it will hurt your usability? Or are there fundamental reasons why it will never be good?
Yeah, not sure what they were thinking. I was ready to make a switch and Google wasn't necessarily my top choice, so I just went with a competitor.
For some reason, people really do like to try the internal market approach. It's not only on IT, companies do that with legal, accounting, any kind of creative sector (like marketing), engineering... I'm yet to see somebody try that with top management - might be a nice experiment.

Internal markets are a really nice and well tested way to gather all the flexibility and agility of a corporate environment, while losing none of the risks, transaction costs and antagonism of a real market. It's a sure way to move your company forward!

But, rants apart, I read the article as Google creating something similar to Lucent Labs, not as separating bureaucratic divisions.
I thought it was meant to be reminiscent of yellow pages, or the phrase "From A to Z". After all, Google is a directory service.
You would be way late on that. Even he dropped Snoop Lion.
Google Shares Spike 6% After ‘Alphabet’ Restructuring
I see. I wasn't entirely clear on it, and I guess the source I got it from wasn't either.
Show HN: Run Elixir code in your browser
صباغ بالكويت 55050048 صباغ شاطر ورخيص
Pretty ironic that hours after posting this, Google announced it split up under a new umbrella company called Alphabet, and it doesn't own alphabet.com .

Although I guess Google is above the rules that startups have to play by. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
Not sure I should really just give you all of my best ideas, but people will probably ignore this anyway.

Distributed artificial general intelligence app, probably something like using deep learning with a virtually embodied agent.

A digital circuit IP or maybe separate USB dongle that does path tracing in hardware, maybe based on procedural generation from a built-in Forth.

Various business and government ideas built on Ethereum, promoted with the intention of displacing existing more centralized institutions with decentralized ones.

A backyard exchange website where people can rent out or share their backyards for tiny house 'parking' and/or high-tech gardening like aeroponics or aquaponics, or whatever they want besides being a big waste of space collecting dog crap.

A deep underwater research living facility for testing closed eco-systems for space/the moon/mars.

Mesh and optogenetic BCIs explicitly for human enhancement.

Robots based on mulitlayered-multibraided electroactive-polymer muscles with anatomical mimicry.

A unification of computer science, programming, and math. Or, a metalanguage and representation tying together classical programming and mathematical notation with interactive and/or visual programming, with the common part reused in all types of informations systems.

Simple, low-priced home aeroponics systems sold in grocery stores, with plastic supports enabling sweet potatoes to grow.

A new operating system for virtual reality.

A small, lightweight hot-rod electric skid-steer with heads-up-display using ultracapacitors and high friction to enable very high-speed cornering and acceleration.

A house, fully paid for, for every person or family I could afford.
From the SEC form making this official, here are the separate companies under Alphabet Inc:

Google, Calico, Nest, Fiber, Ventures, Capital, X.

Looks like Search / ads, YouTube, Maps, Apps, and Android will stay under Google Inc.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001288776150...
I don't know if you're labelled as "nuts" right away but you are sometimes assumed to be prone to the latest dietary trends. As this article points out jogging actually did have measurable, real health benefits. It's not clear if going GF if you don't suffer celiac does. BTW my child suffers from celiac at I've gone GF with her for extended periods of time. Turns out going GF usually also means dramatically dropping your intake of salt and sugars (processed pastas, breads, desserts etc) so I believe that many people really _do_ feel better. Of course with the widestream acceptance of GF there are now many straight up substitutes/replacements so that benefit will likely disappear.
An alternative model is Samsung (and several other Korean chaebols), where upper management decided that the individual companies would be hurt by trying to act in the interests of other Samsung companies, and should act in the market on their own - e.g. how Samsung's components (touchscreens, SoCs) are sold to Apple, their mobile division's great competitor. This kind of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose strategy is enabled by the high level of autonomy lower-level groups have.
18y/o black male critically wounded in Ferguson on anniversary of shooting
I would go with plan #2.

At the very minimum, you could do one more semester that way. Save a little more and spend a little less.

There is no guarantee (or not even good probability) that you would exceed 100k in your new job after graduation.

You can literally go back to school anytime, but if you get caught in a downturn (economy - btw -which most of my analyst friends strongly predict), you could be in a very different situation.

Trust your instincts and go with the second.
Eijah here. Just finished up defcon and traveling all day today. Be glad to do an AMA tomorrow to answer all your questions. Will upload the MIT open source Demoncrypt code to git tomorrow (sorry didn't sleep much this weekend). In the meantime you can contact me directly @demon_saw or eijah at demonsaw dot com.
Related to my response to another one of your comments, this would be a VERY Samsung move; I don't know if they'll do it, though. Depends if they see their infrastructure hardware more as a competitive advantage for their internet-services business or as a marketable product in itself.
Amazon said it would begin collecting sales taxes within 60 days and create 2,500 jobs in Texas and invest $200 million in the state by 2014.

By 2016?
Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled
You forgot Chrome - #1 web browser
This occurs even on Enterprise with Cortana and Bing disabled via the UI and via GPOs.
The article seems to imply that a cashmere pullover would be inappropriate for jogging.

Cashmere or merino are both fantastic textiles for athletic wear.
I really don't understand the whole "hate," in particular on the internet, for people who eat Gluten free food. Who really cares? It doesn't harm you or I if someone chooses to avoid Gluten, it doesn't hurt the environment, it doesn't cause a public health issue, and so on and so fourth.

But people get really upset about the oddest stuff that have no impact on them (e.g. others playing the lottery, vegetarians, how others dress, their games console of choice, their phone maker, etc). None of it matters, people could do well by just minding their own business more.

As to Gluten, I myself won't be doing a Gluten free diet, but people who wish to more power to you and as a positive spin it might make foods more accessible for people with coeliac.
Google X as a whole is going to become an Alphabet subsidiary; presumably if that takes off it will get spun off into its own Alphabet company.

A more focused company that's moving to the top level of this hierarchy is Nest.
> this builds much more explicit resentment from those that are profit-centers towards those that are cost-centers

An additional bit of trouble, coming from the way Google's current profits are made, is that the profit centers are mainly perceived as less glamorous than the cost centers, which seems likely to only add to the resentment. It becomes much more explicit then, that the people doing the various bits of gruntwork needed to keep AdSense working (hugely profitable, but full of jobs like "sales" and "click-fraud arms race") are funding the people getting on the news for drones (not profitable, but cool). Not impossible to manage, and I'm sure they've thought about it, but does seem challenging.