skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google has been losing margin (hence profitability) in its search advertising business that powers everything it does fairly rapidly over the last 6 years. They have kept revenue/cash flow going/improving over that same period by putting more and more ads on their properties, dumping things which aren't making money, and trying really hard to push many of the moonshot projects into profitability. During the same 6 years Microsoft has been reporting growing margins on its search advertising business and Bing became profitable for the first time not too long ago.

The issue for Google is that while their search is good, Microsoft has crossed over into the "good enough" space (for the customers, advertisers) and the product (people using the service) are less and less likely to force switch the search engine default to Google. Worse, the back stop efforts that Google has been doing to protect revenue growth have caused many long time users to become dissatisfied with their user experience. Google's portal portfolio (News, Finance, G+, Pictures, and Blogger) and cloud offering (GCE) have not kept up with other offerings in the space they are losing share.

All of that summarizes to "web services are becoming commodities" and while profitable (as Bing has demonstrated) it's not going to continue to be profitable enough for Google to do that and any of the other projects that 90% of the other employees work on.

So first Google will start reporting down quarters because no matter how many ads they cram on a page it doesn't improve their RPM, then start cutting projects internally left and right to cut costs, and then they start cutting more of the benefits, and then they start downsizing groups to stay within the 'profitable' envelope, and like a main sequence star that has run out of hydrogen to burn, the collapse to white dwarf has begun. What Alphabet does at that point will be interesting, but their margins on the G business will only be sufficient to support the G business and not anything else. If they aren't making any money elsewhere then poof.

So when? Can't say, really it depends on them being able to pull out into a sustainable business model on the lower margins of commoditized search. Google seems to understand the threat to the business (given their moves, like Alphabet, changing CFOs Etc.). And they are really smart so if there is a way out they may be able to find it, and they have enough cash to "coast" for a long time (look how long Yahoo has coasted right?) But a lot of these things end up being additive, the shine goes off of working there, a lot of solid people leave and then you can lose the ability to change fast enough to avoid your fate.

Companies that pull it off (re-inventing themselves) are much rarer than companies that auger into the ground.
While I was getting similar inklings from his writing the real issue reveals itself throughout the article.

Detroit's recovery is hindered by government regulation at city, county, state, and federal levels. At the end they mention Detroit cannot get it MSAs redrawn until 2023!!! Really?

Throw in your concern, change is only happening because private corporations, individuals, and even the union, are losing money trying to jump start an area and having to do so because the regulatory structure is working against recovery.

Note to government, if you want to end blight you are going to have to vacate government debts against the property with regards to the new owner. Rules would have to be put in place to prevent obvious gaming of the system, but to saddle buyers with costs they didn't not incur only sabotages your stated goal.

tl;dr the regulatory structure is sabotaging Detroit's recovery, not the mortgage industry.
It's always frustrated me that Jersey/Guernsey/Isle of Man get away with reaping the benefits of being part of the UK (EU and EEC membership) whilst not actually being part of the UK, undermining our tax system, generally gaining from tax avoidance and evasion on the mainland.

These territories need to be given an ultimatum become part of the UK and implement UK tax laws or remain independent and be 100% responsible for their own affairs.

Edit: Amazon and Play.com used to operate out of Jersey to avoid VAT being charged on orders [1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAT-free_imports_from_the_Chan...
The quality of information you are conveying is often more important than the quality of writing. If you don't have anything to write about, then it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are.
Okay, but it should work in the reverse too. Just as there are ways to grind through the data and find non-obvious signals against an employee, there should be the same for signals in favor of an employee.

And there should be just as much incentive for big data techniques to help identify undervalued employees. For example, I'm sure you can find a separation between "vagrants who can code" and "vagrants who can't".

(An old-school example of such an insight would be early-GEICO's discovery that, "Hey, government employees have more reliable income than others'. So they're not as risky. We can use that!" So I heard.)
Interestingly, I got downvoted for my comment. Not sure why, since it's an observation that I'm sure more than one person has. Per your comment, it would seem to be a part of human psychology.
What a strange argument. The difference is that clojure is about as extensible a language as it's possible to have.

A macro system in a homoiconic language allows you to implement many types of semantic sugar or things that would be full-on 'language features' in other languages as a simple library. See core.async: https://github.com/clojure/core.async
I'm having the similar troubles with terminals that only allow chip and signature or terminals that have a chip slot but only allow swiping.

I've found that if you read carefully it will tell you whether to "insert" or "swipe" your card...old habits die hard.

This is what happens, I try Apple Pay, a lot of times it doesn't work. Pull my card out and insert it. Also doesn't work. Finally I swipe the damn thing and ta-da back to normal.

I almost wish Apple would use geofencing to let us know if the retailer supports Apple Pay or not so I can quickly abort the mission ahead of time.
No, he means having Windows 10 without Cortana.

Regarding integration - what is integrating so deeply, that it needs special handling? Google Now runs entirely with public API.
It is not a problem for Windows ROMs because SoC/board specific initialisation is done by UEFI on Windows phones and Windows NT kernel has a stable binary API for drivers.
It's OK to see a language that has certain strengths but also some weaknesses due to the nature of the strengths.

It's sad to see a language that has certain strengths but also some painful weaknesses for no good reason except that it's v.1. So far the best I've heard is something like "We understand there's a problem for certain users, and we don't rule out adding generic types some time later, but it's hard and our priorities are different". It is indeed not easy to do well (though Java has somehow managed to find a satisfactory solution).

Well, I'll wait a few more years.
I tried Tesla’s Autopilot, and this is what it did to me
I've met a lot of people with your attitude both in open source and in industry, young people and old people alike. You want to keep your head down and hack? That's another way of saying things like, "I just don't want to deal with office politics." Unfortunately, the world is not set up to make you happy. Politics is just the reality of being human, and people who acknowledge that humans are political will end up getting more work done than people in denial.

Politics isn't a dirty word, it's just the reality of having more than one person on the planet.
There is Ionide, an atom based plugin for F#, which should work on nix and BSD.
> as well as contact ISPs on your behalf if there are systemic issues

That is awesome: So if I just continuously stream Netflix, I get free monitoring and incident response? Thank you! :)

More seriously, it's great that it works out this way. Most end users have no ability to identify the cause of problems much less do anything about them, and even technical users rarely have the time or resources (unless it's their job).
New-Age Bullshit Generator
> Go has the null pointer (nil). I consider it a shame whenever a new language, tabula rasa, chooses to re-implement this unnecessary bug-inducing feature.

I agree that all points in the article are very debatable. But this one I'm yet to see the counter-argument.
> A good example of what you're talking about is a wife quitting her job and staying home with the kids, even though she knows that it would make her miserable.

> To you, that's a curtailment of ambition, compromise, and selflessness. To me, that's the beginning of the end. She will make herself miserable and then, she will make everyone else miserable around her.

Adding to this, I'm transgender, and my experiences with talking to other members of the trans community line up with this perfectly.

A lot of trans people are in similar situations. A good many of us don't realize it until later in life -- or if we do realize it earlier, we run headfirst into denial and don't accept it until later in life. As such, many trans people are already married when they accept being trans. Sadly, one of the most common responses to this acceptance is to say "well, I'm already married and my spouse is straight, so I'll just keep it a secret and resign myself to living with the dysphoria and never transitioning". Or they do try to come out, but their spouse reacts poorly, so they back up and lie through their teeth, saying "sorry, it was just a phase, it's passed now", and they go right back in the closet.

It doesn't work. Ever. What happens is that a) the dysphoria not only doesn't go away but often gets worse, and b) they come to resent their spouse for keeping them in the closet and preventing them from transitioning. So their marriage completely deteriorates over time, and they wind up coming out and transitioning years afterwards anyway. That's a good way to guarantee not just a divorce but a very bitter, resentful divorce that will guarantee no chance of them even remaining friends afterwards. Expect lots of recriminations of "What do you mean you've been keeping this secret from me all these years?" vs. "I sacrificed everything to make you happy!". Both parties will ultimately walk away from the marriage knowing that they wasted years, if not decades, of their lives.

And this is why the trans community has such a high suicide rate (well, half of it: the other half is that the people who did know young often have parents who are unsupportive to the point of abusiveness).

If they refused to sublimate their ambitions and make themselves miserable for their spouse's sake, things would have never gotten that bad. Maybe they'd somehow stay together after transition, or maybe they'd realize their goals are incompatible and amicably split up before they could waste too much time in an unhappy situation.
Brazilian PodCast about Open Source World – Opencast
overall information about the world of free technologies.

episode 57: main subject NEWS of the Week

audio only [Brazilian Portuguese]
codec: mp3

fonte: http://tecnologiaaberta.com.br/2015/12/opencast-57-libera-geral-e-obituario/#comment-2837
Just released such tool: https://github.com/inikulin/publish-please
All of your examples (maybe with the exception of Plays4Sure) were consumer flops. Silverlight could never beat Flash and wasn't highly adopted. Surface/Windows RT was lambasted by the media and confused customers. Plays4Sure was moved into Certified for Vista then eventually killed off when services that were using it were also killed off. Meanwhile, there's been more than a few services and products that lived well after their prime, Silverlight really being one of them. The fact that XP was supported for 13(!) years in a tech world is crazy.

But really, what do you want a company to do when it has a failing product that isn't getting traction? It's unreasonable to keep it on life support for years for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Edit: Also, Silverlight was updated yesterday to address https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms15-12...
Looks like the engineers made this decision:

"If you consider the amount of information that changes on a daily, or even weekly basis on a site like wework.com, it is actually quite wasteful to have a server process each and every request that comes through."

A better solution for a marketing site is to use a CMS (doesn't really matter which - Wordpress, Rails, etc) and then use a CDN like Cloudflare to proxy static pages and speed things up. It's fast, efficient, and flexible.

The solution wework used optimizes for performance but reduces flexibility. I'd bet the marketing team at wework wishes that they didn't have to redeploy the entire site every time they wanted to change some text.
Fair enough. Civil suits currently depend on government. I find it hard to read comments about resorting to government without considering alternatives. I don't like government intrusion into personal matters. But it is nice to have a more-or-less neutral arbiter for disputes.
Left for the same reasons - it was interferring with my photography. Around the same time, other services like Smugmug and Zenfolio got better (I think Smugmug is now a little more up to date than ZF's look, but not originally).

Flickr decided for a long time to not prioritize the best photo display possible and limited photo size and wouldn't offer things like black backgrounds.

And now I may get an infinite less number views, I don't have to deal with the comments, and photography is no longer associated with gamification (when do I post this for the most views to hit explore, etc).

Flickr has a bit of a "look" to what is popular, and while I'm big on good photo processing and the history of the dark room, what makes it today is often too processed, too HDR, and so on, and playing the "game" is not something I'm interested in.

In the early days of Flickr, people DID look more at all the photos in groups they posted to, and that was pretty great.

Getting more people into photography is great though - just shouldn't be about numbers.
R/ReactJS reaches same audience stats of r/AngularJS
Dude, we had not even started. I personally recall, that IT serving РБМК1500 nuclear breeder had nothing to do with Wintel and programming was on some sort of cyrillic Assembler. I knew one of the actual programmers in Vysaginas.
What area are you in that you are worried about airborne nicotine building up to fatal levels? If there is that little airflow, you should be more worried about suffocation.
Quaive – an open source Plone-based (Python) social intranet solution
Ask HN: A holiday favor, please?
Sometimes, I feel very fortunate that my life is what it is. Sometimes, I take for granted what I have.

I read this story about a girl who lost her family and wants Christmas cards from all over the world.

HN is diverse, could we help her? Can anyone take a few moments and send her a card from where you are located?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/09/us/girl-arson-christmas-cards-feat/index.html?eref=rss_latest
You've hit the nail entirely on the head.

Re: the reasons vendors never push code upstream, have you read http://lwn.net/Articles/662147/?
Linux Foundation and Microsoft: A Great Start to a Great Partnership
Staring at your phone screen can make you temporarily 'deaf'
Yahoo's stake in Alibaba is by far the most valuable part of Yahoo. The "tax shenanigan" itself is worth more than Yahoo's core business! If she can't get excited about the majority of shareholder value she needs to step down ASAP.
Well, the British Overseas Territories have a similar relationship with the UK

(Also the Channel Islands are not fully within the EU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey#Relationship_with_the_E... )

I can only imagine their current relationship with the UK is with their (UK) accord.
I also use spacemacs (GUI mostly), and would love to speed up the launch time when working from the terminal.

Spacemacs recommends[0] using `emacs-mac-port` via homebrew on OSX, but warns of the "strange"[1] emacs server behavior:

"""
Note that the emacs-mac-port server behaves differently than the regular Emacs server. Details can be found on the emacs-mac-port README[1].
"""

Has anyone taken the time to figure out a workaround to make this work in the traditional emacs manner?

[0] https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs#os-x
[1] https://github.com/railwaycat/emacs-mac-port/blob/master/REA...
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Live Writer Is Now Open Source
You're going blind. Read again. Also click thru to the study, it references many other studies in that paragraph.
Is Jersey really powerful enough to create a tax haven? Or is it that powerful people in foreign governments purposefully let Jersey exist so that they can benefit from its existence?

Basically, what I'm questioning is whether the tax haven is Jersey's doing at all. Of course they are complicit but I don't think that it's up to them to decide to be a tax haven.
Sir Walter Scott, I believe, said that literature was a good staff but a bad crutch.
I agree it's less flexible but another benefit is that it's very easy to secure in contrast to a full CMS.
Did you have a chance to look at Kotlin?

It manages to be pretty FP-friendly without being FP-front-and-center and keeping intreoperability with Java as easy as possible, and staying pretty simple.

But yes, you need to rethink the design from the start. I wish it would have been done differently, less C-like, but it hadn't.
You do know that nicotine is addictive? Why would you take them up?

My roommate did it a few times now he gets sick if he doesn't vape. The thing doesn't even vet you high! Its literally pure evil, there are much more interesting substances to use.
Calls for rigor are unproductive, I think. The unfortunate reality is that an experiment with the rigor you want would be prohibitively expensive. The big differences in productivity I suspect are going to be in larger projects over longer periods of time. You also can't figure anything out from small sample sizes, so you would need to take four large teams, split them randomly into two groups of two, and have each time solve the same large problem over a long period of time.

Unfortunately, since we can't afford the rigor, we have to make do with anecdotes and less powerful studies.
Green threads explained
I suspect the City gains a lot of benefits from having a few tax havens a short flight away.
To get rid of XUL of course, which is a big reason the memo says it's being canceled. (Might be the biggest reason, since it's mentioned first, but the memo wanders around and is pretty vague on exactly what the problems are)
Sorry to clarify - they benefit from the UKs EEC and EU membership, not that Jersey is a member of either the EEC, EEA or EU [1].

[1] - https://www.gov.je/Government/JerseyWorld/InternationalAffai...
Maybe they rename Yahoo "Aabaco" and the spin-off, Yahoo.
Can you give an example? I don't understand.
It's on-boarding process needs to consist of entering an email address/password for account creation only and or a social sign in option.

After going through a frustrating sign up with many screens and processes I was able to use Cortana. There I realized if it's not built into the phone it's going to be hard to delight users and or compete with each devices' built in assistant. I use Siri daily and she is useful when driving to control what Apple Music plays and other quick requests/actions.

I'm looking forward to trying Facebook's assistant .. hopefully it gives Siri a run for it's money and more!
Congrats to the Periscope team, well deserved!
Cogent Takes Deutsche Telekom to Court Over Interconnection
"these people really didn't do anything to warrant the unreasonable amount of gain they have or will have"

It sounds like you're dismissing the innovations around bitcoin over a broader grievance against speculation.

A few more points on this:

1) They risked their money. I agree that sometimes a very high return seems unfair/unwarranted (again, true of speculation in general).

2) Many people holding a lot of bitcoin (e.g. the Winklevii) are working very hard towards bitcoin's success. They believe in the technology. If that turns them into billionaires, I don't see that as any more unreasonable than Facebook billionaires. Aside from those who are working hard, with any technology/startup there are usually some "passive" investors that hit pay dirt. Would you cap Mark Zuckerberg's upside since there must have been some people invested in, or employed by, Facebook that really didn't do anything, yet made quite a bit of money? Who's going to decide what's reasonable?

3) Let the market decide. There are competing alternatives, let's see what happens. If enough people are outraged by the thought of a few bitcoin speculators making billions, then perhaps that could kill it. I'm guessing that kind of broad dislike for speculators would lead to less speculative ventures, which doesn't sound good for innovation.
The Cost and Complexity of Cgo
Uber was never declared illegal gambling by multiple US attorney generals. They fight corrupt local politics, not well tested gambling laws. The only reason the execs aren't in jail already is because they have very well connected investors (which helps Uber as well!).

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/sports/football/draftkings...
For long term storage, you really need to be careful with the crypto because it will be broken eventually. Consider the recent announcement from the NSA with respect to elliptic curves. Bitcoin uses elliptic curves.
Finding the ghosts in my machines via DHCP troubleshooting
It's also a perfect example of the limitations of that approach - core.async had to make serious compromises in its interface because it was 'just a library': expressions with <!'s and other calls can't just be pulled into functions or for-comprehensions like normal code. That's not to say it's poorly-done, or not useful - it is well done and useful, and those compromises are in line with clojure's goal of integrating well with host vms. It's just an example of how builtins can be "simpler" sometimes. https://github.com/clojure/core.async/wiki/Go-Block-Best-Pra...
>You're going blind. Read again. Also click thru to the study, it references many other studies in that paragraph.

It should be really easy to highlight those parts then.
Applying the Wadsworth constant often helps as well.
When Ethical Hacking Can't Compete
Exactly. The same people who balk at running alternative OSes on a phone would be running Linux Mint on the desktop.

I'd love to see more open competition on mobile, but it's a tough market to crack.
It's trying to sell itself as a better solution to Google's existing problems[1]. That's the keyword (no pun intended).

Just so happens that some developers at-large perceive an overlap, correct or incorrect, between their problems and Google's problems. So they use the language, and they're happy with it.

Go is not trying to sell itself as a better general solution. It was built within the context of Google's problems.

[1] https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
Yeah, you can do this in C if you do stack switching with a little bit of assembly. It's kind of doing a custom runtime environment for C. Not many other languages can do this.