skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Increased usage would likely lead to more UX improvements, but people don't want to use something not as slick as Word and Pages. Chicken and egg.
Or we'd select for masochists.
Knowing how to find out which side the fuel cap is is very much not mostly useless if you hire regularly; it saves considerable time and effort knowing you can just look at the gauge as you pull into the fuel station.
From 2013 ( 2 years since Steve passed away ) - 2016, the Ive era. We had

TouchBar Macbook Pro

Trach Can Mac Pro

12"Macbook

>Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.

I guess Jeff Williams will at least being saying No to certain things, in terms of reliability and cost. But Steves cares about the user experience more than anything else. Which is something I am not sure Jeff is any good at, but if the Apple Watch was something he has his hands on, than I have lots of faith in him.

It is nice to read I am not the only one complaining about the new Apple TV Siri Remote. I much prefer the old remote, it was so simple and intuitive.
My solution to this problem was to buy a £1.50 3.5mm extension cable so I can practically turn around in my seat several times without worrying. But this probably is neater.
> What would be the revenue model for their search then?

I read OP's proposal as separating Google search business (search + search ads) from its third-party ad business (e.g. AdSense).
> Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think.

This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results?

It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iteration recently came out of patent protection - it could just be copy'pastad. Why aren't all the big companies Doing Search?
Knowing human nature, if we all had to share those warlike conditions, maybe we'd just endure sucking for everyone to keep the war effort going.
Bridges, buildings and power plants are not schools. We don't allow companies to place ads in schools for good reasons. Why should we train people to use their products for free?
Yes.
Dependent typed tell you that the vector you pass along the matrix to a matrix-vector-multiply has to be one with not just the right datatype, but also the right size. It could also suggest (postfix w.r.t. the container type) operators with better performance for the container's known size (range).
Or, depending on previous conditionals, filter postfix operators you apply to a field of a datastructure, if that field is constrained by the condition branching on another field in the datastructure. I.e., applying a specific operator to a conditional sum type that's no longer a sum type if another variable / field is restricted beyond it's datatype (a range of integers, an enum value, a theoretical utf-8 string previously restricted to ASCII, etc.).
My best guess is a GDPR popup klutzing the system
Flaw could have allowed hackers to take over any Instagram account in 10 minutes
I don't think this would help our social fabric, which the article says Google is "tearing apart." Why do we need to break Google's monopoly on search again? Which they don't actually have.
>the better move is to find a way to kill the advertising business model that google relies on. If there's no advertising there's not as much need for all this data collection.

What would be the alternative ad-free business model for Google to pay for its datacenters? Paid subscriptions?

I've been performing google searches for 20 years. In an alternate past universe... if I was paying $9.99/month for paywall access to their ad-free search engine, Google Inc would have more sensitive data collection about me -- not less. Google would have decades of my (sometimes embarassing) search history specifically tied to my paid account.

Ads can reduce privacy but they can also increase privacy by making explicit logins optional. (In other words, the anonymous google searches I did at the office during work are uncorrelated with the searches I do at home or at school. Without explicit Google account logins, the searches I do on my smartphone at Starbucks can be uncorrelated with the searches I do on the desktop at home.)

I don't like ads but the alternative ad-free revenue model is worse: Google Inc having my credit-card payment info (which means my real identity) and all my private search queries tied to it.
That pre-supposes that the problem is money - state and local revenues have been growing at 6%+ CAGR since the 1970’s, well in excess of inflation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-general-rev...
What's the advantage of that compared to poisoning people with regular poisons or diseases?
The browser was great for sites that were optimized for it. ESPN at my fingertips...that was Amazing.
> Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail.

I'm not quite sure about that. 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. [1]. That's quite an insane number.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...
I just went and looked at habitability standards, there's no way to get energy efficiency out of that mechanism, at best you could make landlords install ceiling fans.

And the only example I can think of for the latter was for asbestos. If being as horrible as asbestos is the bar you have to clear, regulation isn't a viable option and we're stuck with market solutions.
Same reason I won’t ever touch a Touchbar if you’ll pardon the pun. For some reason I trained my left hand ring finger to rest on Esc key.
Huawei Plans Extensive Layoffs in the U.S.
Right, but if at the start of the day you've got no €20s but 4x€10 in your till, that could be change for 4 customers with €20s - or a single customer with a €50.

And a policy of "no €50s" is simpler and clearer than a policy of "€50s accepted only if we have at least 2 €20s in the till" which means customers won't know if they can pay until they reach the till.

The reasons a small business might not keep a large float of €20s in their till is probably obvious!
The 19-year-old was in fact charged, pled guilty and "Bound over to be of good behaviour for Twelve Months".
Is it a picture of before or after the government betrayed and mutilated him in a homophobic witch-hunt?

Thanks for helping win that war.. shame about your sexuality tho
People here love to quote that, but they rarely mention the very next sentence:

“Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

Left to their own devices, people tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator-type news. I wish the moderators here (since we have them) would do a better job of keeping such “Off-Topic” stuff off the front page.
I don't see how this could reduce Google's "Monopoly".

Searching with an API is the same as searching from the browser. how the results are going to be sorted: garbage will be garbage, and should be demoted both in the API and HTML version. And of course, downloading the index is out of question.

I think that a better way to improve competition would be reducing cloud computing costs (bandwidth in particular). But of course, regulators in USA would say that it is communism or something... Sigh.
In Java at least, you can write your own Charset implementation then the language will support it normally. This uses the byte raw access I'm ranting about to work
Which is strange, because Microsoft hasn't kept the same icons all along, and will change things again.

I first learned AtariWriter as a kid. Then at school something on the Apple II. In high school they were all proud to be teaching us WordPerfect 5 for DOS - the same as industry was using. By college everybody had switch to Microsoft word. Microsoft then did a major change to create the ribbon UI. I expect this trend to continue.
Missing from initial story: “Two seconds later you move the headphone cable out of the way and go on with life”

I think they missed a “This is an advert” header?

Also, that looks like quite a box. Look forwards to buying a new one when you forget about it, stand up (or shift position) and shear off the connector in the socket (this has happened to me before, and was a cheap cable replacement).
Gotta say my experience is very varying with long-tail type queries, I usually try DuckDuckGo and if that fails I search Google. They find very different things, DDG tends to be less filtered in terms of spam sites and fake news, but it also finds results of dubious copyright nature, for example.
It boggles my mind that modern fast food restaurants don't have a clear board above the multi-receptacle trash area telling you which bin each single-use item they serve goes into.

I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?
> No, it hasn't

This was a 2 minute search of Google Scholar:

^1 "...the mainstream press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs... only a narrow band of liberal thought is supported by the press"

^2 "Our results show a strong liberal bias"

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim_Kuypers/publication...

[2] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/4/1191/192...
VSCode is anything, but "native".
PageRank was an innovation at the time but modern search engines require training models on lots of query logs to get good performance. Its expensive to make a really good search engine.
I don't understand why we are talking about this. Google is far from the first "monopoly" that I would like to see broken up.

My guess is that Google's not lobbying effectively.
I wonder what Mark Carney would have said if you'd asked him in 1990 whether shops were going to go away because people would be buying (practically) everything on a phone in people's pocket which could communicate with literally every else's phone in their pocket anywhere in the world instantly? And what about cryptocurrencies. People are rubbish at predicting the future.

Whether or not people's virtual cash valuation is going to continue to be represented by numbers on bits of paper and metal as opposed to numbers on computer databases seems like a yet more subtle idea to fail to fully grasp at the moment.
Pohl's Law: "Nothing is so good that someone somewhere won’t hate it."
I agree. We shouldn't teach free software either. Teach the principals behind it and the software is a detail.
That's OK. Mallory knows who you are.
And when it all came down to it, it didn’t matter. Chrome didn’t become dominant on the desktop because of government intervention and Safari didn’t become important because of DOJ either.

Apple and Google competed. Government intervention is rarely the right answer. A bunch of people who are both beholden to lobbyists and ignorant to technology won’t produce the outcome people think it will.

Besides, the last thing anyone should want is more government power. Given the choice between trusting the government - that has the power to take away my liberty and my money - with more power or trusting private corporations, I have much more to fear about government.
Google is a profit-seeking corporation that needs to expand into China to generate more money and bends the knee as much as it can to make inroads there. Far from being a source of truth they follow all Chinese censorship laws (why, because they would be blocked from operating there and unable to make money off of the Chinese). China likes everything about Google other than the fact that it is not a domestic corporation.

A company does not need to be a monopoly to face Anti-trust measures made in the public interest. In the 90s you could have run Linux on a PC, installed Netscape on a PC, or bought a Mac, but Microsoft was still treated as a monopolist. The same with IBM in the 70s. There were at least five to ten other major suppliers of mainframes, but IBM was so dominant in the market that they were aggressively regulated for anti-trust.

Google is not the victim of misinformation. Everyone is just starting to understand how important they are as the de facto gateway to information (regardless of choice) and mulling over the implications of it dominating add revenue, search, etc.
SEO spam, and poor quality content I would guess. Google has bolted on a ton of ML over the last ten years to fight it.
This is common knowledge at least in the UK (in my experience).
Something I've been wanting to write but will quite honestly never have time is a lightweight replacement for WordPress where all editing happens locally in an Electron app and a static site is published/rsynched to a web server with backups stored in a git or hg repo. The big nut to crack, in my mind, is to support multiple distributed content editors at once, which is why I was thinking that the publish action is really pushing to Git and invoking an API on the web server to do a `git fetch` or equivalent. Does anyone know of a project that does what I'm describing? ImportDoc sort of does this but with a reliance on Google Docs it's not 100% portable.
The effect of this on Alphabet's revenue would be nil.

The majority of Google's Revenue comes from Google, Youtube, Gmail and Play. They make so much $ because they have the biggest network effect of advertisers-eyeballs in the world along with Facebook. That. Is. Unbreakable. Even more than a social network's network effect, because the friction to switch budgets and people in a company is higher than a guy telling their best friends to download an app.

And then, YT is a network effect. And then, Play/Android is also a network effect. And then there's the branding. But presumably every big company has the latter. Still, what a brand. Everyone knows what Google or Android is. Every. Single. Human.

Finally, because they make all this money, they can pay to be the default on the other half of the devices, Apple's devices, to use Google as default. Last time I checked, $5B a year.

Hence, this article is so bad.

I don't even care about Google, just saying.

edit: did I mention Chrome? They've got chrome too, with the googleverse as default.
They don't let you disable their spying on Windows 10, why would they treat Office any differently?

I remember when a weather app using your GPS to automatically change to your current location was controversial. Now we willingly subject ourselves to corporate spying at the OS level.
> In a statement published after this article's publication, the GSA blamed the Galileo outage on "a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure."

I wonder what this could mean?
Running a search engine is pretty expensive. $0.80 per 1000 queries doesn't seem orders of magnitude off the actual running costs.

For comparison, that works out to ~$15 per year for the average users search volume.

If you can't make $15 per user per year on search, you have bigger problems...
AI-based photo restoration: defects removal, inpainting, colorization
30-50 years ago people still used shillings!
it's a fair point worth debating. Should we as a society bankroll the marketing for companies? Imagine how people would recoil at the thought of cigarette companies having access to schools in that way.

I don't know that I fully agree with the premise, but it does have merit.
Agreed here- was very excited about this book, bought it as soon as I heard of it. Then I opened it, and it was intense. I joined a study group set up by I can't remember exactly who but was fairly "famous" in C++ circles, and while I got through the first few chapters, it was really difficult, and also, really hard to find a use for.

Its one of the few books that are sitting on my shelf waiting for the day I give it another go, but I really doubt that day is coming.
> People are just different, have different backgrounds, different experience, different skills.

Yes, and if these things make you perform ten times better than your colleagues then you're a 10x. We don't judge people by their hypothetical potential (well actually we do, for a short while), but by their current performances.

It'd say it's more disrespectful/harmful to say that everyone is a Bach, a Rembrandt or an Einstein. It's not just a matter of studying and working, everyone hits a wall a some point, some way earlier than others. Your will to be better isn't enough.

Labels are not harmful as long as they're factual. My light bulb is less bright than the sun, I'm not as good as a painter as Rembrandt, that's the human condition and we have to accept these things. Saying they're harmful and that everyone can become anything they want is a fairytale.
Agreed. That has actually been publicly suggested, and supported, by a retired general:

" Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get."

in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

Edit: corrected "general's number of stars"
Not only is he an important historical figure, but England owes him a great debt (and reparation). Previously they'd only "pardoned" him; this is a stronger gesture.
Also - just the amount of people who would game the system afterwards all the search results would be utterly useless.
This is interesting to me because when I worked at car2go a few years ago something similar happened.

They updated the app sign-up process with a step where you had to take a photograph of your driver's license with your phone, and then take a photo of yourself (to confirm that the license you were signing up with was indeed yourself). These two photographs were not checked manually but were "analyzed" but a facial recognition thing. They did this to streamline the sign up process and get people access to the vehicles with an active membership quicker.

But, when this feature was introduced it was almost immediately abused by a network of fraudsters that had stolen driver's license and stolen credit cards. They used GIS (google image search) to find photos of similar faces to the faces that were on their stolen driver's licenses and uploaded a photo of that face with their phone.

I discovered this when tracking unusual car activity and investigating the new accounts that were driving them and seeing the weird staged headshots of US Senators and other professionally taken photographs that populate GIS results as the submitted "selfie" photo's that were supposed to confirm the new member's identity.

BTW, much like the article mentions, our European counterparts were surprised with this abuse and "hacking" of the system and said they never experienced it over there while running this feature for months before us.
That's true for normal rental car companies, which are often very picky about damages. With car2go and DriveNow, they don't usually charge for damages anymore. It would be impossible to track. You're paying for the repair with the per-minute costs.

A few years ago, they even stopped asking customers at the start of the rental whether there were any “new” damages with the car, since it's impossible to verify that with dozens of damages, and people would just press “No”. So now these cars all have small damages that nobody cares about, which accumulate until they get repaired.
CrateDB and Apache Superset for Open Source Data Warehousing and Visualization
The ad business would pay the search business for ad placement. The search business would also be free to auction ad space to other providers.
That's why we invented pair programming. As long as you have an even number of them, you are fine :)
If you started a business would you be okay with giving up all of the IP you invested in creating?
A large bank will give you one but I'm guessing the smaller branches don't bother holding £50 notes given that no one uses them for retail banking at least
I've had the same experience with DDG, which I use as my primary search engine. If I'm looking for a specific e.g. scientific paper or a recent news article, it doesn't have it. I run the search through Google. That's purely an indexing problem.

On the other hand, if I have a health-related search, I run it through Google. DDG has the proper content. It's just that it priorities the blog spam. That's an algorithm problem.

Relieving the former, as the author's proposal would do, makes DDG more competitive. As a second-order effect, it would also let DDG priorities resources towards the second problem, making them more competitive still.
A lot of buried carbon is digested by anaerobic bacteria, which produce Methane (also a greenhouse gas), so there's that.
A bit off-topic: last time I tried to use a 50 GBP note in London I got strange looks and it was refused. Apparently anything beyond a 20 GBP note is seen as "too high". A worrying turn of events…
I'm of two minds here: Google's whole reason for ascending to where they are is the PageRank algorithm which is why Google was created in order to monetize. I see this in similar veins to Apple and iOS: would we support calls for Apple to be forced to allow iOS to be installed on non-Apple hardware? If not, then why would we insist on Google giving up it's reason for being, it's reason a lot of us use it to find relevant information?

Then again, the concentration of power in a handful of operators likely threatens the open internet.
Wanamaker's Store, List of “Firsts”
A list of websites and their content is really not useful at all. Anyone can get this themselves with some really simple programming.

The actual hard part is when it comes to ranking and sorting the data in any useful way, and doing it within like 100ms. Plus various other issues like spam protection etc. This is where Google excels (at least in my opinion).
> the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating

Although rules do move from one camp to the other. For instance, people (myself included) find this article fascinating because it makes conscious a rule that English-speakers use unconsciously

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...
Since there is nothing available but speculation, I'm going to put my money on a network issue.
Are you suggesting that we should discard criticism of google because Russia and China is anti google? China does not like Trump either, so should we not criticize trump because of China?

And I don't even get why you say China and Russia is anti Google. They are anti-information more than anti-google. If google allows them to control what information people get they will have no problem with Google. They are further anti-west and are concerned that Google will play ball with western governments to give them access to Chinese and Russian data. Maybe I am missing what you mean by them being anti Google.
Agreed, I think the disconnect here might be that the author has no idea how malware works or what malware really is.