skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think most of it can be explained by your very first sentence. Gmail is 15 years old. It has massive institutional inertia and clout. Hundreds of engineers (https://www.quora.com/How-large-is-the-Gmail-team), probably a similar number of PHBs. Some of those people have spent their entire professional lives working on Gmail. They are loath to admit it sucks. Understandably.

You don't just phase that sort of thing out in favor of some upstart that came along three years ago. You can't. A category 5 shitstorm would ensue. Few people have the stomach for that.

Fine you say, can't Inbox and Gmail at least co-exist? There again the answer is no. The usurper must eventually be vanquished. The situation is not long-term sustainable.
My problem with gmail and inbox is that the search feature is terrible. I routinely have to search for things that I setup like a to do list or a recent reply.. and I use a few keywords and nothing can’t find them.
To put a positive suggestion forward, Google could consider giving all services a "sunset guarantee

I'd honestly even settle with something like a program where users can choose to enroll in these programs in some sort of test phase. Maybe put some kind of marker in the name or even on the logo that clearly informs and denotes "this product might not last long, it might go into production, it may die after 3 years, you have been warned".

There's a word for this but for some reason it eludes me (and apparently eludes google as well). At least it'd soften the blow when they inevitably roll things up on one of these so designated services.
Are Indian engineers your favourite coolies that will do the dirty work of keeping your systems running after you've lost interest in them ?
The upside is that, now some smart cookie can make a web app that 'reinvents the inbox' and sell it to Google for millions. Time is of the essence!
I'm increasingly noticing comments aimed at marketing startups, tech stacks and political agendas on here. It used to be that people just shared their opinion, but at this point there is definitely an effort to sway information on hacker news and other websites by having different user accounts harp on the same opinions.
Enabling/disabling tabs via "Configure Inbox", or through Settings > Inbox > Categories does not effect the ability to snooze. The only thing it effects is whether emails are sorted into different tabs or not.
I just had to look this up. I'm amazed I have never come across this meaning of the word before and it was even used in Platoon supposedly?!

Previously I had only understood zip in the context of a zipper, the compression, fast, and the zip gun..
I was with you up until "handfull of indian engineers". No need.
Ok, since you asked. You've explained why 100% of 'pedantic try-hards' who reply to your technical posts, shouldn't. Now you want comments? You even have a conspiracy theory about their usernames. You were 'baited' into this article, now people who (I assume) don't like to read your whiny, abusive tone are 'censoring' you? I don't know why you ever comment on anything, since it sounds like, according to you, it's worse than a total waste of time. Except when you get to return the ill-feeling in a rant like that. Please do something you enjoy instead! Life's too short.
Devices like this (residual radiation aside) would probably be extremely handy when building infrastructure on planetary surfaces.
That's interesting! I assumed the name was because they tend to be held together with zip-ties.
Looking at the prices for the new iPhones, I don’t know what little people you mean.
I don't understand your suggestion. Where does the assumption, that each "step" directly maps to energy consumption of some physical machine? Does not that basically rest on the assumption, that no machine can run infinite Turing machine steps with finite energy?
Precisely. I can be as pissed at Google as they come, ready to pick up my pitchfork, but at the end of the month when I spent $120,000 on adwords and made $280,000 in profit as a return, I will gladly tattoo Google logo on my chest.

The scary part is they will sunset gmail eventually. I know from someone inside “L team” that founders hate how much headache gmail brings for such little return. Initially started at the boom of free email providers with fancy always-updating clock of how many extra megabytes you just got in last few seconds, fastforward today there is no money to be make in providing free email.

As they failed to secure sale for a reasonable amount and on fair conditions, expect eventually they will offer to keep paid accounts and auto forward anyone else to another provider for a year or so and then sunset gmail free only leaving gmail enterprise on.
This!

This is a huge deal.

Searching for stuff in my business inbox is important. If you can't trust search, then you have to manually walk through those emails.

And because Gmail 'clusters' threads together, it's often impossible to find something.

This has disrupted me on a few occasions.

If you can't trust your email ...

Gmail team: make 'search' by default more inclusive. Err on the side of including stuff. It's kornballs that you don't do this already.
With like 6 different apps, you can.
Yes if you buy "organic" milk in a glass bottle. Around here a gallon in a plastic jug at Kroger is about $2.00. Keep in mind milk is often priced as a "loss leader" to get people into the store..
I wonder how many electronics ship with this type of thing. The Macintosh is fairly famous[1], and the Amiga had signatures and a dog print[2].

1) http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000
I don't even try to understand Google anymore. They released "Hangouts Chat" not to be confused with Google Hangouts, which is not to be confused with their Allo, Duo, Voice, or Messenger apps. On the upside, they shut down Google Spaces and replaced Gmail Chat with Google Hangouts (not Hangouts Chat, that's different) and now they've canned Inbox and are keeping the Gmail app.

Huh?
Zipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper

ZIP Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code

Zip file format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_(file_format)

Convolution (zip) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_(computer_science)
I don't know where you're shopping. A gallon of milk this afternoon cost me $2.59.
I know of a 'top Brazilian designer' who was hired by Google and then quit because they just didn't get it.

I can actually see a shade of rationality in 'metrics driven design' i.e. 'picking the colour blue' on the web page. Small change in hue = difference. But beyond that - you need to trust your designers.

If they are set up with the right philosophy and don't let their aesthetic aspirations get out of hand ... you need them.
I have to agree with this. I have upgraded (or rather it upgraded for me a couple of weeks ago), and now everything I do is delayed by a couple of seconds. Archive an email? I can't close the tab otherwise the browser tells me I'm going to lose data. Send an email? Ditto. I wouldn't mind a better UI, but beside the added lag I don't find there's anything better or different than before.
Tabs were not something just introduced in the new UI, the have been in Gmail for 5 years. You can turn them off in settings, or drag and drop emails into different tabs to train it. Gmail has a very high degree of customization and available settings.
That about sums it up for me. Unsurprised disappointment.

Was great to have it. I'll miss it. I hope someone picks up where they left off. I'm unsure whether I'll be willing to pay for it if someone does.

Gmail is still fairly incredible overall, but it's simply par now rather than the revelation it once was.
Why did you create a throwaway account for this?
I don't think we particularly disagree overall- I completely agree with you in that most everyone appreciates feeling useful and helpful to the ones we care about.

It is just that I chafe at the word neediness. Speaking just for myself- If I were to suddenly succumb to the Bus Factor, I know all of my friends would be just fine. Sad, but fine. They don't 'need' me. (This is not a self-esteem issue- the same is true in reverse.) But this actually makes me feel good, in the sense that I have trust in them to carry on doing the things we all enjoy, even if something bad happens to any one of us. We still improve each other's lives while we're here! I feel that this is a healthy form of peer relationship. Compare that to a situation where someone genuinely 'needs' something about our relationship. At that point, it becomes more of a caretaker role, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't personally see it as nearly as comforting, in either direction.
What about futures contracts? I didn't see that mentioned at all and I thought that was the primary means that farmers used to remove uncertainty over what they would be paid for their harvest?

Update: this is discussed in another sub-thread on this page.
People who are not incorporated.
Why didn't the Imperials block their exhaust port during the Battle of Yavin?
I’d love to see that too, and it would definitely be unique!
I hate how it collapses the left menu bar (Inbox, Drafts, Sent etc) to icons only and then has a big lag to open the menu drawer and show the texts when you hover over it. Gmail was better when it was simpler.
This is really good for comparing different eras if game design. But damn, when will the gaming community realize they need something like GC?
Just FYI the situation is the same in Austria, and possibly other EU countries, w.r.t milk prices.
> For some careers, like academia/phd, there are almost monthly slam fests with tons of toxic comments about how developers are so much smarter and better.

That's quite the mischaracterization. Some of us happen to have research background and know very well how the phd daily grind goes. It's due to our personal experience and first-hand accounts of the whole academia/phd life and hardship that we do have and present negative opinion on the whole industry.

Just because opinions don't cast academia in a good light it doesn't mean they aren't accurate accounts of what academia life actually is.
I wish there were something in between Multiple Inboxes and tabs. I would like to make my own tabbed categories for my inbox.
Isn't that were US companies are outsourcing to? Why would Google use expensive Silicon Valley-engineers to do bugfixes on a product they'd rather cancel? Are you denying there's a price difference?
There are some breakthroughs but they are taken for granted. Differences with low hanging fruit aside. It isn't simply 'hey this slide I forgot to clean before vacation is growing something that is killing bacteria' level. Not to disparage the past groundbreaking work at all but what they had more accessible discoveries. While Salk is rightfully lauded for his role in producing the polio vaccine its manufacture was relatively simple in that it involved monkey kidney tissue grown three strains of viruses inactivated with formaldehyde. Not easy but straightforward in approach. Now the therapies are far more complex and involve things like gene sequencing and molecular biology.

We have a hepatitis C cure for one and there are other more subtle advances. We have a HPV vaccine although its rollout was sadly more limited than it should have been out of prudishness. Another more subtle example involves pediatric surgery. Before congenital heart problems were always inoperable because infants were too small to operate on. Now it is possible to do surgeries in the womb.
I think that makes you a coder :)
Compartmentalization. Even psychopaths can do it. This is why even the people who work for a company like Facebook and are on HN won't admit to themselves what they're really helping grow.
The SQL bit is also good. Basically somebody needs to bring capability ideology (highly related to magic pointer types in Rust, btw) to relational data organization to limit access patterns (no arbitrary joins) which will both allow for more modularity and perhaps distributed DBs that actually scale.
I'm sure they could support all new services for a decade if they wanted to. But that's a costly commitment to make, to the point that exploratory projects like Inbox might never make it out of planning in the first place.
In 25 years we can look back who has had a greater impact on society - the people awarded a McArthur grant or the people awarded an Emergent Ventures grant. My money would be on Phil Baran and Carolyn Bertozzi, not Jordan Peterson and Nakamoto Satoshi. Nota bene: John McArthur was a financier himself.
You can do it bit by bit. Start by switching to Firefox on desktop and mobile (if you're an Android user). Install Firefox Multi-Account Containers to sandbox Google and other surveillance capitalism products. Switch to another provider for your email, contacts and calendars. I chose Fastmail - it's adequate. The best thing I can say about it is that it has a suite comparable to Google mail, calendar and contacts and there's no evidence it's tracking me. I use Thunderbird on the desktop and the Fastmail app on mobile. I've moved all my contacts into Fastmail.

Use hooktube (and Hooktube Redirector) on desktop and mobile and NewPipe on mobile. Favour apps from F-Droid. Install uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile.

My next moves are to get my calendars out of Google (my wife and I have several calendars we've shared for years) and into Fastmail. I need to get a couple of years' worth of photos out of Google Photos and back into Flickr. (They probably have a brighter future now that they've been rescued from oblivion by Smugmug - though Ipernity is probably another decent option for a classic Flickr experience.) `rclone` will probably be a lifesaver there.

I need to find a solution for hosted files and docs; I've not found Nextcloud to be convincing. I use B2 for offsite backups. I've yet to install a pi-hole, though I already have a pi doing DHCP and name resolution for my home network. I often use sshuttle if I want to become opaque to my ISP. I have a PIA VPN account but it's consistently terrible - could be my ISP mucking with the traffic.

It's going to be a multi-month project. I look at what I've done and have yet to do to evade constant casual surveillance and I strike myself as sounding like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist - but I'm not. I'm just a rational citizen, attempting to recover for myself some of the human rights I took for granted a decade ago.
I think C dominates because it's a language many embedded guys, who often are EE's not CS graduates, can get their head around. Also C compilers were some of the most common for embedded platforms going back a few decades. Up until IoT became a buzzword, the embedded world was sort of insular and you had a lot of guys who got their start in the 80s or before. Sure, there's Forth, but that pretty much died out decades ago.

C is also deterministic, unlike, say, Python, where you don't have a compiler to catch type errors and things can blow up unexpectedly at run time.
Not a Zune, but consider a Blackberry 9900 - there are some on eBay for around $40 [1], they take micro SD expandable storage, appear as USB drives so they don't need sync software, have a standard headphone socket, have wifi and bluetooth and touchscreen as well as physical keyboard, and the hardware and build quality is "high end business device from ~2011".

Software is nothing special, but shuffle play artist/album/song/playlist it can do.

[1] e.g. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mint-Used-BlackBerry-Bold-9900-Unlo...
The whole 3d printed gun scare boggled my mind. Making a single fire weapon with some pipe is so easy nearly anyone could do it. Getting the ammunition would be the hardest part were I live. Using a 3d printer take a lot more skill and effort.
The "s" page had a bunch of month-old stuff. The "z" page was more recent news. I just rechecked and it's mostly the same way (though we're already in a different news cycle). When I check previously, 4 out the first 5 links were negative. Now, it's 3 out of 6. (Different news cycle)

https://screenshots.firefox.com/c8bGMXUBBHMFkqga/www.google....

vs

https://screenshots.firefox.com/UeE3uvdbOyBrvvKT/www.google....
Not to be confused with a zip tie gun, a device indispensable to anyone doing major cable routing work. It tightens the zip tie the perfect amount and then cuts off the excess tail.

https://www.ebay.com/bhp/zip-tie-gun
Everyone always rallies around the Zune HD like it was unfairly treated by the market. I had one and no, it was overall not a good move by Microsoft.

The Zune HD was a decent music player, don't get me wrong. Well designed, easy to plug and play, good battery, etc. But it released at the same price point as the iPod Touch (iTouch as some called it) and looked like and was advertised as a competitor. Even had the same general design.

Yet MS did not have the foresight to make the Zune app friendly. Zune HD had app "support" (e.g. calculator app that took 5+ seconds to load, barren app store if it even had one). iPod Touch exploded (everyone in my high school got one for Christmas in 2008/2009!) because of the apps. For Apple, the music was a solved problem and not something worth talking about in length. Being able to have a music player that had Wi-Fi and could play games was a genius idea back when no one had smartphones or most people didn't want to spend the money on one. MS just felt like it was catching up and it showed all the way through the Windows Phones.

As I mentioned, both the original Zune and Zune HD lines are good devices but were hampered by MS' slow execution and lack of vision of what people wanted.

Can't comment on the actual Zune subscription service. Never used that.
They still scan your Gmails though? I'd think the information they gather this way would still be worth something even if they don't "personalize" their own ads with it.
plesiosaurs and pterosaurs aren't currently considered dinosaurs.
After being a keen Google user in the late 2000s to mid 2010s, I’ve been in on a process of extracting them from my life now their true creepy colours are on display.

YouTube => Deleted

Google plus => Deleted

Gmail => Deleted, switched to Soverin [0], works great, less than $4 per month for 25gb email hosting

Drive => Deleted, moved to iCloud

Docs => Deleted, use iWork for docs and Bear [1] for text

Search => Duck Duck Go, getting better all the time

Chrome => Safari, excellent battery life, good tracking protection

Google Photos => Deleted, moved to Apple photos

Next project is to move my website off of Google Analytics.

I’d love to fully switch to Apple Maps as it’s getting better but don’t know if I fully trust it yet. Google Maps is the gold standard.

[0] https://www.soverin.net

[1] https://bear.app
Just to add to your comment, the earliest usage of "Zip gun" the OED lists is 1950. The earliest usage of "zip" as a slur is listed in 1968 (and this usage presumably originated during the Vietnam war).
Is there a need for the default behavior? It feels like browsers should just switch this to the default for all external links with target=_blank.
An underappreciated contributor to the earlier farmland price bubble is Michael Burry of the Big Short fame. After he made his name, one of his first public recommendations was to buy farmland. A bubble ensued. Whether Burry was reading the fundamentals and simply publicizing them I don't know, but many people followed his lead.
> this app which seemingly is a couple of UITableViews contained in a UITabBarController

Is it even that? The Facebook app’s UI is sufficiently different than the standard system controls that it seems to me that they might be completely custom.
Report:Fed Prosecutors Weighing Criminal Chrgs Against Former Obama WH Counsel
Facebook is all Objective-C++, if I recall correctly.
iOS has app thinning, which does essentially the same thing. However this only reduces the app size a bit, since most of the actual size comes from the app binary which is shared across devices.
It's very irresponsible of you to tell children that they should share personal data about themselves on the Internet.
Same here. It's like it refuses to remove the [X new] flag until I've seen something multiple times and the whole UI feels sluggish and unresponsive.
Just so I'm clear, given that the PRC doesn't represent Taiwan or exercise any sovereignty over it, do you also believe that it should renounce its claims to Taiwan?
“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.”

This.

I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's his full time job) in my area. He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.

The problem is that these vegetables, which don't have to be shipped any distance and don't have the overhead of a grocery store, are still more expensive than the equivalent groceries in the local Safeway. The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.

I grew up on a 300 acre cattle farm. Fifty years ago a family could make a living on a 300 acre, well situated east coast farm. Not any more. You'd have trouble just paying for gas, groceries, and medical care. Forget paying down a mortgage or god forbid buying new farm equipment. The only way to even stay on the farm, is to either walk into a situation where everything - land, house, barn, equipment, everything - is already paid for. Or to get a full time job in town and farm on the weekends. That's what my dad did. And it's what my sister and brother-in-law do now.

We have a situation where we've harnessed economies of scale so much that we have only a small handful of corporations producing our food. They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.

So what happens if someone figures out how to weaponize that against us? What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China? Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.
It also has something like 18000 classes in it, many of which are not used. While it may do many things, most of the app is just bloat.
Show HN: Directory-based routes in Express, using Mode
> It is contractually you aren't supposed to, due to terms & conditions.

I have never signed a contract with Facebook. Does that mean I’m free to reverse engineer it?
Ask HN: Commercial WiFi thermometers with custom API endpoint?
Looking for battery-powered, WiFi-enabled thermometers that can be placed in a fridge or freezer that can send data to a custom endpoint (i.e. my server and not the cloud platform of the manufacturer).
Also acceptable would be a device that sends to the manufacturer's cloud, so long as one can easily forward data to one's own endpoint.

The irony is that these aren't too hard to build with a raspberry pi, but I'd like a commercial hardware solution. All of the ones I can find seem oriented around using the manufacturer's cloud for monitoring etc. Looking for more of a white label solution.

Any thoughts are very much appreciated.
A bit unrelated but it made me surprisingly happy to see that my very small hometown Vänersborg was mentioned in the article. Now I feel like going to our local museum to get some more information about the mentioned gun.