skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you already have a gmail account, you will soon have a G+ account.

But what is the penetration of Gmail? 200 million users? Every one of them could fully embrace Google+ and they still wouldn't have 1/4 of the userbase of Facebook.

For this reason I think point #4 should have been listed:

4. Android - Nearly every Android phone owner ends up with a Google account and, we can expect, in the near future that will also mean having the Google+ app prominently positioned and well integrated. At 500k handsets a day this growth rate alone will give Google+ a huge leg up.
Bloomberg terminal is a classic example of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
so they added padding to everything?
Funny, I always read it as "x" and "excess". The pluralization never registered.
Probably because it adds nothing to the discussion of the article at hand.
Interesting that they're adding additional details of the person you're conversing with to the right above the ads. I wonder what that means for Rapportive.
It mostly depends on your definition of 'higher level' (since all of these languages are Turing Complete languages). I've heard interpreted languages referred to as higher level because of things like dynamic typing (also being typesafe) and their variety of built in data structures and methods that create a greater level of abstraction for the programmer. I think the 'higher level' term is used often to refer to observed levels of abstraction even if it's not technically accurate.
I use a variant of your approach, apt proxy for the OS and since we run VmWare Infrastructure, have a separate filesystem for each version of the app and just "mount --read-only" the current version on /opt/appname.
(i'm replying so i get notified of an answer; good question!)
There's a lot more white space in the new design - enough vertical space is lost for about seven conversation entries. Not sure I like this change for that reason...
I'll say one thing about Circles... Google doesn't really have any social users yet.

Facebook, to implement Circles as it exists in Google now, will have to retrain their users. Not an easy feat.

The concept of a quick pivot to add new features or markets is silly. If your users expect you to do it the old way, you'll face a long uphill battle.
Exactly right.

Replacing the logo itself took all of about 30 minutes (receive new picture, digitally retouch, overlay onto background image, resize, play around with transparency, save to png.)

Also, bear in mind, the 400 hours is 400 man-hours, which is a cumulative number based on the number of people involved. If you've never done business with government, let me assure you, it was a lot more people than necessary.
From personal experience I can confirm that this is exactly how it works when governments try to do things. There's such a compulsive need to negate risk that everything is all about the process instead of the results - and inevitably this leads to huge amounts of wasted time and money while people try to decide the right thing to do.
“Ten Rules for Maker Businesses” by Wired’s Chris Anderson
A quick look at rollApp, which puts your desktop apps in the cloud
Exactly! If they had done this before killing off Shake, I bet we'd still have a half decent competitor to Nuke in the high end compositing space, instead of nothing.

Instead, Apple killed Shake and let big studios buy the source code from them so they could continue to use it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)#History
I've been sitting on this complaint for a while now. It is really, really starting to annoy me that comments on a webpage rely on JavaScript hosted by some other website.

I use NoScript for a reason. I temporarily whitelist pages which I (after a quick glance), deem trustworthy. I have been known to whitelist Disqus on occasion, but I'd rather not. In this particular case there were a whole slew of external domains that were blacklisted, there's just no way I am going to enable them one by one to see which ones are needed for a few user comments to load.

I know, it's my loss. But I suspect that website owners would have an interest in showing off all the good comments their users post. I'm probably a minority, but using NoScript instead of all the adblockers out there makes me feel like I'm a "friendly user" to website owners. I will see their ad's as long as they don't depend on external JavaScript. There might be a tiny niche market here (ad-network with reliable stats hosted without external dependencies), but I wonder if it'd be worth going after.

On a tangent: I'm just waiting for the day when GitHub will hit me with something nasty, since I have them fully whitelisted.

Maybe I should have written a blog entry instead.
"For a social network, MySpace was incredibly introverted"

Not sure I agree with this. In my experience there was a lot more friending of strangers on MySpace. It was sleazier.
That great. I've got so many questions.
I can't speak for the whole economy, but when I was making $4.75 and the minimum wage increased from $4.25 -> $4.75, it had an effect on my morale (when i saw no increase).
If any of you would be kind enough to spare me an invite too I'd be most grateful satansgeekATgmailDOTcom Thanks!
I feel like this is pretty non sequitur. He seems to imply that above some magic number of transistors intelligence will simply manifest itself. Intelligence is more than just computational power.
Time and time again we see Google make the same mistakes. They are tone-deaf as to why Facebook is successful.

Sure, circles will get plenty of usage in the Bay Area, where the people who built it probably felt if only they could build this one extra feature then people would come flocking to them away from Facebook. But this misses the point.

Nobody on Facebook, other than techno-geeks, have been clamoring for this. Are you the type of person who would consider deleting your Facebook account? You're probably also the type of person that will be interested in Circles. But, you also are the type of person that, unlike 99.99% of the rest of the population, can comprehend having a social life without Facebook being the glue.

Facebook is cool. Facebook gets people laid and lets you participate in more debauchery online once you have stumbled home drunk from the bar. It doesn't feel like a hospital room or a bathroom, it feels like a party.

If Google wants a chance to usurp Facebook's dominance, it needs to do so under a different brand. Repeat after me: the Google brand will never be as cool as Facebook.

More importantly though, it needs to figure out what Facebook is missing. No, Circles are not what Facebook is missing. There's certainly something that Facebook is missing, that the cool kids would want, but odds are whatever it is wouldn't pass the smell test of the type of things Google would consider building.

Imagine you are at a party. It's fun, the music is good, there is booze, and the people are good looking. What's missing? Google's response would be: "The music is hard to hear, we should upgrade the speakers." Facebook's response would be: "cocaine."

The reason Facebook has come up to where they are, after all, stems from the big brass balls they've had for pushing up against the standards of privacy and even decency held by society today, something Google has never and will never be able to (or should want to) do in return. This is why Google will keep fumbling around trying to "out-innovate" Facebook, and will fail again and again in spectacular ways. It's sad, but endearing.
Those job titles are set by the government and specify what pay is going to be. My job title at my current company is Computer Analyst, yet I am a computer programmer. The gov't contract we have mandates that specific title.
I've already had my fill of "idea guys". Somehow, almost every one seems to think that merely coming up with a cool idea while drunk one night automatically entitles them to 50% of the profits (after YOU build and ship it).

A successful startup requires all aspects of a business:

- leadership

- sales

- marketing

- market research

- competitor research

- product research

- product development

- product shipping & deployment

- contacts in key areas related to your business

- strategic planning

- financial management

- employee management

- investor management

- lots and lots and lots and lots of paperwork

- and of course a million other little things you discover along the way

Some of this can be learned as you go, but the most likely startups to succeed have a large portion of these areas covered by the founders, at least in the book learning sense.

So whenever I'm approached by an idea guy, my questions usually go like this:

- "Great idea. So who else is doing it?" (red flag for "nobody")

- "Who is going to buy this?" (red flag for "everybody")

- "How do you know that [group x] is going to buy it?" (I'm looking for something better than a hunch)

- "How much starting capital do you have?" (got to at least have ramen money)

- "Who have you spoken to about funding?" (red flag for "nobody", unless they are bootstrapping with their own money and have enough for 6 months of runway and a plan for after that)

- "Are you going to do this full time?" (If not, this conversation is over)

- "What skills are you bringing to the table?" (Must have at least half of the list above, or have other interested co-founders who fill many of the gaps)

So if you're looking for a technical co-founder, make sure you're bringing a business to the table, not just an idea.
Agreed. You also have to think about who can approve the hours booked. So you would need to have some sort of hook into the HR / Org database which determines each users entitlements. It gets very very complicated! Technically, the problem is nothing new. The difficulty lies in designing the system and getting it to work correctly with an organizations existing business processes and systems.
I went from Apps domain to gmail and it worked fine.
The other trump card: Chrome. Bake the Google bar in and Facebook is in a world of hurt.
They have a "dense" theme, too that's more like regular Gmail.
Did you see that there's a separate "Dense" version of the new theme, which reduces the white space back to around its previous level?
That's called the people widget, and they added that a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2589119

Rapportive responded quite well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2613101
Ask HN: Has that black line always been up there ^^^?
Is this a Neu-Googlification of HN?
Probably hardcoded, not in the DB.

In case it isn't clear, MTGox wasn't exactly what you'd call a professional operation.
Release of DataCatalogs.org to map open data around the world
Wow, definitely keeping as my new theme. I had to disable the "Right-sided chat" lab feature but works great other than that.
I'm happy to see Google taking as much care and pride in the visual engineering that goes into their products as they do the back-end.
I would love an invite too. hiram333(at)gmail.com Thanks!!
Love it, could you make middle/shift click or some other way to bring up the + homepage in a new tab?
I just can't get past the black bar. After years of it being white, black just feels imposing.
Just a few tweaks and a general tidy up. We'll barely notice it after a week or so of use.
I really like the new apps and search interface, but the use of red is really bugging me. Surely this is basic UI that urgent things are made red like alerts etc. I fail to see why the 'compose mail' and 'create' calendar event buttons need to be a glaring red?
I'm a pretty huge fan of all the new Google designs. Plus, gmail, the top bar, fonts.... They've kept things minimalistic while making things just feel cleaner and crisper. Whoever is leading this redesign is doing a fantastic job.
It`s the best of times and the worst of times for blogs thanks to Twitter and Facebook
I'd say it's not that they don't want to be in the pro apps business per se, so much as they don't want to be a software contractor for big studios, which is what most pro app companies inevitably become. Apple wanted to make big changes, but mostly, big studios / production houses don't want big changes.

Avid probably couldn't make a radically different Media Composer even if they wanted. The risk of alienating current customers is too great, and the resources required to maintain multiple products targeted to the same market are too many.
Well, reduces it to about 25% more than previous level...
> "But what is the penetration of Gmail? 200 million users? Every one of them could fully embrace Google+ and they still wouldn't have 1/4 of the userbase of Facebook."

Network effects and critical mass. It's hard to launch a brand new social network because people have a high impedance to creating an account on anything.

If 200 million people created a G+ account, how many non GMail users will follow simply because their GMail-toting friends are on this newfangled thing?

Facebook launched from an initial pool of users that's far smaller (just Harvard) - IMO Google's way of breaking the chicken and egg user-signup problem is pretty awesome.
do you take your computer in the boat?
It always seemed self-evident to me that to attain something like human intelligence, machines would have to share human human visual and auditory senses and be bootstrapped to a point where some great influx of knowledge could take place.

We now have that body of knowledge, audio, visual, and instantaneous worldwide communications.

I have to agree with Kurzweil that, surely machines that broadly exceed humans cannot be far away, though it may be their poetry will leave something to be desired.
Specifically, the portion where they rebut significant attacks on the internal character of the company by pointing out that their bottom line is great. Is that's all they're about? The bottom line?

The entire thing reads like PR-speak. Why even bother with such a non-response.
Google's blog post actually mentions that they are both a preview for the actual new/yet unreleased theme, that will expand and contract dynamically according to screen real estate.
Really disliking the red, it stands out way too much and implies urgency. Seems like a really bad UX choice to me?
HP Says Apple Is Not TouchPad’s Target
You could use the search function before asking this, I must have seen about 10 posts about this today... Actually, someone died and it's to show some respect : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712469
Wow, sounds a lot like our university's tech overhaul, especially the single signon stuff.
Agreed. And according to Steven Levy[1]'s Wired article[2], it's Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the original Apple Macintosh team.

[1] Who wrote In the Plex.

[2] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...
Building a time-keeping system for large city like NYC is many,many times more work than building web-framework like Django. It's not a technically complicated problem, but it has a different kind of complexity. That complexity comes complex business requirements, which have to be analyzed and implemented piece-by-piece.
Let`s step up the war of releases between Facebook, Google et al. the only winner is the consumer!
The man behind that would be Andy Hertzfeld: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-design-andy-her...
Really liking the work. I'm really looking forward to what they have in store for Reader.
Because Google is too proud to use the simple AJAX API that Facebook provides to do so.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&#...
Done. Not terribly sure why I'm getting downvoted here. But atleast one other person likes it :)
Do payroll slips issued by the system to part-time workers have the option to translate the statement of worker's rights mandated by NY city law on the back of the slip into Mandarin Chinese? No? "Did you even read the bid document? It was right there on page 487 where it said 'The system must be fully compliant with NYC labor law.'"

There are literally a hundred thousand requirements like that one.
beat me to the link by a few seconds :)
I actually preferred that since it made the URL easy to remember and easy to link. gmail's spam protection is extremely good.
Well, that and the 500k. And whatever anyone else was able to sql inject.
Absolutely. The man hours can easily pile up when you do a conf call with a half dozen folks where majority of them are on mute 90% of the time.

I recently did contract work for an agency and had instances where a simple spacing or image resizing took days of work because the client or the agency would understand and then forget that I must crop and/or resize images for them all to be of one size.
i've been seeing "Already invited? We've temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon" for 16 hours now !!!
Google+ Potential Future Features & Tweaks
This bugs me too. Further, it seems part of a wider change that you see in Honeycomb where all unnecessary lines and background colors are removed. It makes things look very plain and unstructured, it's hard to tell where one thing starts and another ends and there are very few visual cues about interactions you can have with the elements.

I think they're trying to fight against the "Apple is simple and easy, Google is complicated and hard" feeling. But it's not just an equation of how many lines and colors you have. At some point removing things increases complexity if it makes your brain work to understand what is on the page.
Is that why your mom uses Facebook? Because it's so extreme, debauched, and envelope-pushing?
The real answer is "anything but Django." Django is a great framework, but not for GAE.

I've used tipfy.org
another dick bar :(
Can I just ask something on an unrelated note, since you've been down this road: what are the costs of a Limited Company, in the long run? I've read that when tax time arrives, it's nearly impossible for a non-accountant to do, and so it'll cost a minimum of £400 for even the smallest company. Not a crazy amount, of course, but it'd put a dent in the profits of a young startup or side project. What's your experience been like?
Apple used the Shake team to build Motion, an application which a much larger user base.
I'm inclined to disagree. They're using the color sparingly to call attention to the most important parts of the interface. Coloring compose with the standard gray for the other buttons would mean it is lost in the interface and difficult to see. I like it quite a bit.
Google+ Tips:  www.qp-tips.com
removed the comic sans
I don't know any domainer in that position.

You don't? By the look of your website's About Page you do:

My Current Job(s):

Working on my own startup - Still looking for a name, but I am working on a customer reviews startup.

Writer at MO.com - I interview entrepreneurs. I've done ~80 interviews as of February 2011 including some big names like Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Aaron Wall (SEOBook) and David Hauser (Grasshopper.com).

Domain Investor (or Domainer) - I buy, sell, and develop domain names.

I now see why you are so adamant in your defense of domain squatters.
WikiLeaks' Brilliant Mastercard Commercial Parody [video]
anyone else has the top bar in white even with the new theme ?
IIRC lensing won't produce the red shift observed.
Its only been up for about a day.
Well, here's one thing that happened the other night:

http://circlehack.com

Edit: This is the circles UI implemented for Facebook friend lists. Three FB engineers put it together the night Google+ launched.
Based on feedback, I've added comments and a submit feature. Send me those corporate mumbo jumbo posts :)
Due to my current job, I've had to become familiar with my country's export restrictions on some tech. I've since thought it would be great fun to start a string of projects with the goal of meeting those requirements that make them export-restricted. If nothing else, I know they are (at least mildly) challenging goals, and concrete specs to meet so that I know I've accomplished the goals.
Everybody should give the people behind Mt. Gox a break. These guys make real banks look good - no small feat!
This might have been true when Facebook was young and (somewhat) exclusive. But now when I think of Facebook I think of my dad looking up his old high school friends to see who's gotten fat, or my aunt posting baby pictures, or some guy I don't know posting links to youtube videos I don't care about.

"Cool" is the last thing that comes to my mind when I think of Facebook.
black bars are becoming popular...there`s another company that added one recently
When I look at history I don't see people that expected incorrect rates of growth, I see people that predicted incorrect directions of growth.

When nuclear power was new people predicted the future would be shaped by massive amounts of clean/cheap power. When air travel was new we predicted that everyone would fly everywhere.

The singularity is our version of the fusion powered car, or the personal jetpack.
Sounds like you need to defriend some people
thank you, truly enjoyed it :)
The generation that matters isn't my mom's or my own for that matter. It's my younger brother's. And, yes.
Sega is a bad example because they are (and especially were) a very incompetent company.
I love the new design theme. Clean, minimal, elegant. Well done Google.
It's just spaced out more, I don't see anything removed.

I hope I can change the vertical line density back.
Looks like they took some of the design ideas from their mobile version and migrated them into the main one. Square(er) buttons being one example.
The main reason* I bought a Nexus S today is because I'm hoping this trend bleeds into Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

*that, and because Sprint isn't getting the Pre 3.
There are plenty of available domains, I dug up 26,000 short, pronounceable (<5 letters) ones a couple months ago. A single namespace has ~63^37 possibilities, that's plenty big.

And yet, based on your own website's About Page you yourself can't even find a name for your customer reviews start-up.

Do you not see the hypocrisy in your own arguments?

Not in his, but I sure as hell can see them in yours. Oh, the hypocrisy.
After reloading the page it became dark-grey.
need an invite. please help signuplinks@gmail.com
It's closer, but it still increases the screen real-estate used by some elements significantly - for example, the line item for each email displayed in the inbox has grown from 23px tall to 29px tall in the redesign. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I prefer higher information density.
that seems a little excessive even at 63 million...I'd bet if you gave a YC startup $1 million, they'd be able to do the project in 1 year.
Interesting, looks just like Cyberlink's PowerDirector.
Pool Party: Google Has Their Own Secret Photo-Sharing App Too — Built By Slide
G+'s Circles are a killer feature and they alone make me hope G+ takes off. Circles solve some very entrenched problems in social networking. So I really hope Facebook is working on a quality response to that.
Yes, the non-dense one is even worse :)
I'm seriously excited for this app. Google is playing all its cards right now, and so far they've all been trumps.
Here’s how you can get an invite to Google+ right now
So sorry to hear this. RIP, Mr. Morris.
The article doesn't say much beyond the speculation already running rampant in the blogosphere. "Apple doesn't care about the pros", "They are a hardware company so they just want to sell boxes" and so forth.

What I think the article did miss is the recent FAQ announcement by Apple detailing where they intend to take the software from here. I'm not a video editor, nor do I play one on TV, so I can't speak to how that addresses the wants of the pro audience, but they are at least making an attempt to explain how they will be incorporating pro needs into future patches. How that turns out, is a completely different question.