skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to some search results ... it's

> “Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the “device” to fade away. Over time, the computer itself — whatever its form factor — will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world”

https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/sundar-...
> if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile

Oh wow. Really??? Any experts in this field reading this? Would love to hear someone with pertinent authority tell us this isn't true. (Please don't be true)
I think you misread the story.
>> wouldn’t you trust them more than yourself

Nope.

>> versus using a bank

If my bank charged 25% of my balance every month, I'd very quickly choose the mattress. :-) But I do recognize that my needs are pretty uncommon.
Well, the US is #1 by GDP, China is #2 and Canada (the pushover) is #10. Saudi Arabia is #18, so going by the evidence, us alcohol enjoyers should consider staying out of countries with #28 rank GDP or less, as they could fall over for S. Arabia.

All based on one crude comparison between countries. But you don't see the USA arresting too many people for violating other country's laws.
Yes, they do literally say this. And that's literally what I said.

Yes, it's still marked as "Mixture". This is an example of where a different slant is given than what the facts.

"According to Snopes, it's somewhat true that none of 154 mass shootings in 2018 where committed by a black man, illegal alien, or woman."

"According to Snopes, it's somewhat true that Jews and Americans did not die in the Holocaust."
The culprit was a remote car starter that was left on.
"Again"? That seems to pre-suppose a counterfactual.

Counterfactuals can be cool, but you have to explore them, not pre-suppose them. Pre-supposing them is definitely not cool, which calls into question the ability of our interlocutor to recognize what is and (more pointedly) what is not.
The fbi has is own database. Of course having everyone’s dna will help them solve a few (one?) more crimes. At what cost?
Have you considered consulting? Where you have more control and leverage over your earnings? (Especially if you have a spouse whose health insurance you can use)

Or perhaps PMing (which in many scenarios can lead to better pay, and less prone to ageism, though arguably even more stressful than being a manager)

I’m mulling these potential paths myself, to climb the pay scale and fend off ageism.
Because there is a line when framing people never to be crossed ;) come on throw in a shoe print,a witness, fake signature. something extra
Company executives are often smart, and often know their business better than anyone else, but they're also biased. What comes out of a CEO's mouth is very likely to have more to do with what he or she wants _you_ to think than with what _they_ actually think. So taking CEO's grand theories with a grain of salt is in general a good idea for investors.

As to why margins matter... Bezos' quote talks about how valuations are multiples of cash flows. This is true, but multiples aren't constants. Basic investment theory suggests that the multiple should be an increasing function of the company's growth rate, its ratio of sales to assets, and its margins. So if you want to maximize your company's value you ought to be concerned with all of those things. Which isn't to say that trading lower margins for higher growth is a bad decision in Amazon's case, but it's not like it's an irrelevant number.
Google's seemingly endless new array of products with just as many being discontinued at any one time is an internet meme at this point. Often in threads when Google announced their latest hotness, potential customers are sarcastically guessing at how long until it is killed (some of those guesses ultimately turning out correct).

I've never worked at Google, but it looks like shambles from the outside. Kind of reminds me of a younger Microsoft back when three teams would create three competitive solutions to the same problem (although to Microsoft's credit they still support most of those to this day).

Google really needs to decide what it wants to be, what direction they're going in, and work together. I'm guessing there's some perverse incentives at play for some of this (e.g. promotions/bonuses for new stuff, nothing for updates to existing products, or other "boring" work).
When I first started using Linux day-to-day, Firefox, at least for me, was an absolute nightmare and didn't run well. I've switched to Vivaldi (Chromium-based, very power-user / I-never-want-to-move-my-hand-to-the-other-input-device friendly) for the moment, but I might just switch to Firefox again, I hadn't heard about the Multi-Account-Container feature, and that might just push me over the edge.
It means the article was the end result of a chain of actions that started with the hiring of a PR firm....
Please don't up the ante like that, even if another comment was provocative. It just leads to war, which we want to avoid.
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency is pretty much gone. Some guard services survive as part of Securitias. But at one time they were a big deal. Not so much in the West, but in major American cities. Willie Sutton, the bank robber, wrote of the Pinkertons "they were as powerful as the cops, and much better organized".

That was their real power. They had national reach, good communications, and record keeping. Until the FBI got their act together in the 1940s, nobody else in the US did. Law enforcement was very local. Only a Pinkerton could order "so and is on a train to Chicago. Have him followed when he leaves the station."

By the 1960s, they were no longer really necessary, and mostly became a rent-a-cop service.
I'm pretty confident that this is Google's long-term strategy and why I think chromeos will become popular in future.
Interesting timing on this related article: https://angel.co/blog/why-you-should-join-a-regulated-startu...

> In a recent talk at Columbia University, entrepreneur Steve Blank, along with Bradley Tusk, Uber's first head of policy, and Evan Burfield, author of Regulatory Hacking, discussed how some of the most exciting unicorns of the last 10 years have been launched in heavily regulated markets—and why they think that trend will only accelerate.

> ...

> Tusk—who'd made a career in New York politics working for Chuck Schumer and Michael Bloomberg—was experienced with these regulators. He leveraged his knowledge of NYC politics, along with Uber's massive user base, in what he gleefully described as “a vicious f$&@ing campaign” to flip the city council and halt regulation blocking Uber.
Seems like it would be pretty difficult to define a vision for such a large company with so many diverse products. Still I'd be interested to know what employees there think.
Beats was already profitable when they bought it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2018/03/08...

Beats Music was also the foundation of Apple Music which is also gaining subscribers like crazy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/careypurcell/2018/05/15/with-50...
Among the FAANGs (btw I think Microsoft deserves to be included there now) I find Google to be at the bottom in terms of vision. It's morphed into the conservative, big co they were once fighting. It's kind of sad.
New Photos of iPhone SE 2 with Glass Back: Is a Launch Imminent?
I meant because it suggests an eventual end to the world of insanity, when all the emperors realize they don't have any clothes
Why can't the rate requirements be consistent city-wide and still have similar effect? Or, if the concern is really a flooded supply, have an incubation period that doesn't favor incumbents? Surely it's clear that a law favoring the more popular company based on demand alone is actually worse for drivers and consumers by reducing choice for both of them.
I think your point here is right on. We're seeing this thread devolve into a war between two opposing perspectives: either (a) "real" news organizations are objective and better sources than Huffington Post or Buzzfeed, or (b) all sources are biased and the other side just doesn't want to recognize that.

This seems like a false dichotomy to me. Surely there will always be some bias, and it will affect all the editorial decisions made by an organization and change the way topics are reported by journalists. However, just because bias can't be entirely eliminated, doesn't mean that there aren't objective standards of what constitutes minimally fair reporting. There are such standards; clearly discussing and defending these standards is an important goal.

It's for this reason that we can say that Reuters is a better, more objective source of news than the Huffington Post. And the latter is a better, more objective source of news than Breitbart. We can take such a position, and encourage others to seek out sources like Reuters, without taking the extreme position that Reuters is this fully unbiased magical source of objective news. Of course it isn't, but it doesn't have to be.
Microsoft was in the smart phone market years before the iPhone was introduced. It was a failure of execution not vision.

By the time the Zune came out, the iPhone/iPod Touch were right around the corner.
Is this a bit similar to what Microsoft went through in the early 2000s?
you want ideas people will use, or ideas that people will pay for?
No, I think it's actually pretty spot on.

A flat earth makes sense if you only spent 5 minutes thinking about it and have no background in or exposure to basic science.

Similar to this blog post. It makes sense if you read it, think about it for 5 minutes, and have no background in the advertising industry or the dynamics of effective/efficient advertising.

Not to mention that advertising and content recommendation engines for a paid service are each wildly different in their underlying dynamics and economics. But who cares about nuance anyway.
Spotify reportedly in “advanced stages” of acquiring podcast company for $230M
Well most recently it was for a service for knife sharpening called knifeaid. You mail in your knives and they sharpen them for a flat fee, comparable to what I pay now to drive to a sharpener.

I can only assume cause I've posted stuff about me cooking and have searched knife sharpening in the past. Not that hard to target really.
That's not the issue. The TWA has been created specifically on the request of app creators (including me).

The problem is that users find PWA very difficult to install. Like massively hard. They are used to the "app Store installation model" - they search for stuff, they click install, they check for permissions and then apps are available in their dock.

This model breaks down in a PWA "add to homescreen" kind of experience. In fact, it is hard to explain what a "homescreen" is in vernacular languages.

The TWA is a massive jump in usability - publishers can now work using web technologies and users can still get the same experience. This is what will unlock web use on mobile phones.
For the sake of the employees and for the sake of the rest of us, I believe that Sundar Pichai is not CEO material at all. He should go or be pushed out, and Larry Page and Sergei Brin (or one of them) should take a stronger role and have a deeper engagement on many matters. Google has been doing well financially, but it has lost its soul (the one it had in its very initial years) and seems to be going around aimlessly as far as doing good things and doing the right things are concerned.
Thanks you for this empathic and balanced response. I'm quite tired of the narrative that the police are all assholes, as the ones that do act like assholes I've met has mostly been because they've been screwed by someone treating them like shit. Or as you've said, from the insanity that has been the training we've been giving them.
Japan is definitely harming its own citizens since they have to pay high price for about everything compared to the standards of about every other country out there. When something is too expensive you dont buy it anymore and it reduces internal growth.
His Geeks Bearing Gifts is a more detailed, written treatment of the same material: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... . It's also a more affordable alternative to Computer Lib/Dream Machines if you want to send him some money.
that's also how I read it, but that doesn't mean it makes sense: if they had in that time and place set a high ethical standard of not participating in strikebreaking, they might indeed not have survived as a company, so their survival was the result of their lower ethical standards...
Having read the article, only 54% of Googlers view their compensation is better than what they could get from another company. I find it surprising. Who else pays more than Google does? Can only think of Facebook, but even then not sure.
I had thought Apple's smartphone market share peaked in the 20% range. I stand corrected.
Ask HN: What city would you move to for software/startup scene outside of SF?
I am curious what city you all think has a good startup scene, and is good for software developers.

Just throw a name out there, rather than analyze the semantics of the question:)
First of all, where's the evidence of these supposed high-entry monopolies? Seems more like a thought experiment to me.

Secondly, you're only looking at the negative consequences for some workers. You're not looking at the benefit to all workers, who pay lower prices as result of cheaper labor from abroad.

Suppose workers had been guaranteed their jobs for life because of protectionist policies. This is called mercantilism. Everybody pays more for everyone else's labor and nobody can benefit from comparative advantage. As a result, everyone is poorer. This has been known for centuries and it has been accepted by economists across the political spectrum. Yet politically, protectionism never ceases to lose appeal.
Previously (374 comments from 10 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18968940
Related: interviews with Daniel Ellsberg who leaked The Pentagon Papers about cold-war nuclear strategy and military politics. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvq2Qc-bxroT2xV7b9pOB...

Spoiler alert: Dr. Strangelove and its nemisis, Fail-Safe, were historically-accurate documentaries.
I'm figuring that a typical taxi driver might make $30/hour and in that hour drive about 20 miles. At 30 mpg and $3.00/gallon gasoline that's about $2 for gas. Figure that a typical car costs $20K and lasts for 200,000 miles, so 20 miles = 1/10,000 of the car = ~$2 in depreciation. Maybe another $1/hour in maintenance - that'd imply about $2K/year, which seems high, but this is higher mileage than a family car anyway. Total about $5/hour, which would be around 1/6 labor costs; not quite 10x, but around that ballpark.

Switch to electric vehicles (which are suddenly feasible with the car-service, never-have-to-park model!) and centralize maintenance across a whole fleet of cars and you can shave a bunch off gas & maintenance, though your depreciation would probably go up unless battery packs became dirt cheap.
Yeah they had that but this is different, more interactive and something you can decide to use while your phone is ringing. Google voice currently does not have a call screening feature like the one on the pixel.
In both cases they went from being run by a CEO who had experience as an engineer to someone with more of a business background
I've often said that the real bias of media isn't so much left or right but towards sensationalism. If it bleeds it leads is a a cliche for a reason.

It is also true that if people didn't buy it/click on it then the media would publish fewer sensationalist stories.
The general logic is that larger players have more economies of scale so making regs apply to all makes it even harder on the small guys.
If he had only said he was going to make semen taste like ice cream.
$190M missing after crypto exchange Quadriga CEO dies
Good idea. We handled that so well with race, we should start right away.
It's definitely a strange idea especially the first time you hear it. I don't know if I like it for domain names.
Google's Achilles heel is search and ad revenue (80%). Which is sad because they've been trying to diversify and find another major source of income for 20 years now. If a better search engine comes along and people switch over, then google won't be able to maintain its empire and it could fold, or how would you like to pay $10 a month for a GMail and Google Maps combo access package? It could happen a lot easier and quicker than most people think.
I wonder the same thing. Maybe people just worry about regulations and public opinion?
We certainly should take into context something like that, yes. For me, that particular thing didn't happen--I was never quite so far to the right wing as to think racial slurs were anything but unacceptable--but I was a shitty libertarian know-it-all. I've never been shitty enough to out and deadname trans people like Milo fucking Yiannopoulos, and I've never been shitty enough to cape up for bad-science racists like Charles Murray, but I've been shitty. I said things that made people mad (because they made me feel superior) and hurt people (because they intellectually made sense, because I was so rational and also had never had a hard day in my life).

Then I grew up, then I realized I was being shitty, and I stopped. And since I have made a point of standing up for the right things, instead, while not ducking that I too have been shitty.

That's more context, and that context, eventually and with hard work, does balance the scales.

It just isn't that complicated.
> One of these values is "Respect the User".

The language here bothers me to the core. User? That's the same term drug dealers use to describe their "customers", who are nearly all captive to them or others who peddle the same thing. Does it get the point across? Sure. However, there are better ways to word this sentence, such as "respect the people who use our services" or "respect your customers", though the last one ought to read as "handle product with care".
> Add yet another /* TODO */ in your codebase and call it a day. JK :-).

Then you could track it with http://srcoftruth.com/
The media suffers from the same problem as the people who watch it, they're inseparable as a system. The problem is that everything has to fit in to the stories you already have running in your head. Nobody hits this limitation harder than people with new ideas and the capability to do new things. In the case of this victim, the new thing was GMO diagnostic tools, and the story that was already running in everybody's heads (if you permit me the liberty of guessing) was "nerds and women are fundamentally opposed on a metaphysical level."

This has a very practical takeaway for HN: if you ever find yourself pitching or selling, the question you need to be asking is, "how has my audience already thought of this idea."
In my career at least it’s never been true that the pay or pressure have been lower as an engineer vs a manager.
Larry and Sergey have pretty much semi retired with about $50 billion each. Short of Alphabets share price plumetting, why would they come back now if they haven't already?
I've read somewhere that Sundar's biggest achievement (and rise in power structure) relates to the saving of day by using practical business sense.

Back in around circa 2006, Microsoft one day suddenly decided to remove Google search and replace it with Bing on their default browser, IE (which was still number one back then). This threatened Google's revenues to a considerable extent as online search is one of the major source of their income.

At that time, it was Sundar Pichai who was in the forefront of managing some quick OEM contracts with Dell, HP, etc., so that Google toolbar was installed by default on all their computers. Google toolbar ensured that users were shown a confirmation dialog and were given the option to make Google search the default again! This later ensured Sundar's rise in power and respect that ultimately made him CEO one day.

One can of course argue that Google is such a superior engine compared to Bing that the users would have visited google.com anyway (which will also result in that option to make it default). However, its also true that most users will not take the pain of changing their setup if it already works! So who knows, if Sundar's intervention hadn't happened at that time, maybe Bing and Google would be on an equal footing today!

EDIT

Source: Straight from the horse's mouth (Jeff Nelson, Chromebook inventor and former Google employee): https://www.quora.com/What-did-Sundar-Pichai-do-that-his-pee...
Sure, and you can do that without personal attacks.
with that kind of logic then you should increase VAT 3 or 4 fold and things would be even better for everyone?
This seems like a dilemma between a superior strategy, but only if executed with discipline.

In reality the majority of businesses which run on large margins get lazy, allocate capital ineffectively, and underinvest in R&D.

Thin margins force you be lean. Thick margins afford you the opportunity (and risk) not to be.
I’m only referring to “industrialized”/“developed” countries like the US, Japan, Western Europe, etc.

https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share
Lot of SV based companies compensate quite generously. The competition for good talent in SV is immense. When there's money on the table, companies _will_ fork it up.
Watch a document get vandalized in realtime. Fun.
Many smaller companies do. If you can lead and multiply the existing staff you can earn more. The downside is that you have limited runway and might have to hop around.
I've reported for years to EMs who didn't code, and they were just pointy-haired bosses: coming up with ways to manipulate people to make progress quicker, writing performance reviews mostly based on other people's input (why, then, couldn't those people write the reviews themselves?), not understanding engineering realities like some tasks being unknown, demanding ironclad estimates, judging based on appearance rather than substance (or a mix of substance and appearance), and so on. They were just overhead.

The managers I respected were all TLs who were the most important engineer on the project.

Going back to your point, the TL would be the best person to evaluate the engineers who work under them. 1:1s, growth discussions, etc should all be conducted with someone who knows your work intimately, which means the TL. Which means the TL is a manager.

There's still room for EMs to be more technical or more people/coordination-oriented. A technical EM would take responsibility for a smaller area (backend) and go deep technically into it, having the most impact as an individual contributor, knowing all the code, being able to debug any part of the system, being the go to person for everything in that area. Everyone in the backend would report to him.

An EM can also decide to be focused more on people/coordination. They'd take responsibility for a bigger area (backend, frontend, iOS and Android) and go wide rather than deep. If you ask them how to debug an iOS app that crashes in the background, they may not be the best person for that.

But in both cases, they're managers, not TLs.
The electric furnaces that dominate the modern US steel industry sort of are like bitcoin miners that can be turned on and off. They often only run during times when electricity is cheaper.

Not entirely of course, but the ratio of labor to productivity is really large, they don't engage a lot of workers to begin with. Look at how much larger the electricity costs are than labor:

https://www.steelonthenet.com/cost-eaf.html