skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your disrespectful and patronizing tone is disappointing, but it would be more understandable if it were founded in a deep understanding. Many things whose possibility is now obvious were not obvious at the time; many things that are now being tried will fail.

To pick apart your post:

* "main area of expertise" is not the same thing as "main source of income".

* RankDex or for that matter HITS, is not the same thing as a search engine that you would actually use in preference to AltaVista; 1998 Google was already better than AV for the things that were in its index. Baidu didn't exist as a company until 2000.

* "just a matter of resources and monetizing" is hindsight bias. Hotmail was so sure Gmail was an April Fool's joke that they issued a response press release in which they offered more space than Gmail. The fact that Gmail was capable of offering two orders of magnitude more machine resources was, in large part, a result of internal infrastructural innovations at Google that weren't copied at other companies for many years. Of course, some people dismissed it as a "PR stunt".

* Where2 had a downloadable C++ desktop maps application and an idea about doing it browser-side when Google bought them. Gmail and Google Maps popularized AJAX, which had been previously considered impractical, despite our efforts at KnowNow.

* By "many parts of the world" do you mean a few apartment blocks in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tokyo? I don't really think Kansas City is comparable in either density or wealth.

* I don't care what's innovative about Android (which, you forgot to mention, started as a separate company, like Where2). I care that I don't have to sign my first-born child away to Apple to program my smartphone. I'd care a lot more if Google had actually achieved what they set out to achieve with Android.

* If you're equating SquirrelFish (pre-Extreme) to the first release of V8, you're living in a fantasy world. There was an order of magnitude difference. Apple and Mozilla closed the gap substantially in the next few months because (a) V8 showed it was possible; (b) V8 showed how it was possible; and (c) V8 made it necessary.

* I meant MapReduce, which is another of those things that's obvious in hindsight, but was actually far from obvious, and which underpins nearly every data-heavy startup today.

* "Would have put out if" is Monday-morning quarterbacking, just like your hindsight bias on the other items. And there are plenty of companies with more money than Google that don't have robot cars on the road.

We'll see what happens with the robot cars and balloon internet. I think there's a substantial chance they'll fall far short of hopes, just like Wave (which I notice you didn't mention), but that's the way it is when you try things that may not be possible.

I'm not actually all that positive about Google, but I think that if you want to understand them, you need to understand what they value. You can do that without thinking, yourself, that it's awesome.
Scala Traits: linearization, initialization and more
Top 5 Demo Day Cliches
Dropbox revert to previous versions has saved my ass multiple times when something goes wrong in Xcode that I can't undo.
Since I'm stuck using an old computer I made a small script that turns Dropbox on every few hours and kills it after 10 minutes. I don't sync data all the time so this solution works well for me and I save system resources.
Incompetent? No way. The US Government is the biggest, best bully in the game. They have perfected it to a new degree.
What is proportionate? I think it is the way the news and the web in general works. Wikipedia has extremely disproportionate pages about notorious things (that are not noise, obviously).

I am happy that journalists can amplify the voice of Google Reader users like me instead of talking about Justin Bieber.
Wikipedia has to pass a fine line of trying not to involve itself in politics, unless it's a clear threat to it's ability to it's job, and it's not clear that surveillance (even on such a broad scale) prevents it building an encyclopaedia.
My computer comes to a halt on boot because of the Dropbox client. I hate it.
For some reason SugarSync does not do this kind of thing, so there has to be a way to do it in a smarter way.

Why can't Dropbox remember the state of the files in your dropbox folder, and upon login, grab state of the files on the Dropbox server and do a simple comparison, without re-calculating hashes for the files on your computer?
> The extra redundancy doesn't hurt...

... unless you're running on batteries.
Austrian journalist tells me: Bolivia did not give
permission to have Morales' plane searched, but airport
policeman allowed to walk through

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) 12:00 PM July 3, 2013

"Walk through?" If it turns out snowden was hiding in a cupboard millenium falcon style I might actually die laughing.
Right, except it wasn't done well in this case. The game is great, the UI not so much. Some menus require the arrow keys to navigate, some +-, others hjkl.

It's been a while since I last played, but there is a "Designation" menu which orders your dwarves to perform specific tasks. You want them to build a staircase where there was some rock before? Awesome, they'll do it. You want them to build a staircase after you already mined the block? No can do. No warning, no error message, simply nothing happens. You need to go through the other menus, build a staircase and move it there.
Web Framework Benchmarks Round 6
Europe must get tough with the US over NSA spying revelations
Basic Assembler Debugging with GDB
What hitting the front page of HN does to a new website
I'm not surprised, considering how corrupt politicians are everywhere (including the EU) and how useful PRISM must be for threatening/blackmailing them into submission.
On the Empire of the Ants
Union ballots are well regulated and usually even put incredibly unfair restrictions on the unions. They achieve this result in a very simple way:

Their members want it.
This conversation between the plane and a (tower) operator, seems more like when the plane is just about to land in Austria.
Xcode has built-in git support which you should use.
How we'll resurrect extinct species : Youtube video
Qt 4.8.5 Released
I do use git. But I often develop on two machines: a laptop and a Mac Pro. Which means I am often in the middle of something when I have to just pick up the laptop and go. "In the middle of something" means that just pushing commits over doesn't cut it. I can (and do) rsync stuff over, but that is annoying and very error-prone (it's too easy to sync stuff the other way around and lose work).

I guess you could say Dropbox gives me finer sync granularity than git does.

Dropbox seems like a perfect solution: have a single place where you keep code, develop on two machines, just pick up your laptop and leave whenever you want, without worrying about sync.
So, we need a per application battery usage indicator? Surely this application exists.
Wait. When asked if you would build it in Today's Google, your answer would be no, because Google is clearly uninterested in this project at the moment. :). I mean really, if Google is uninterested, it's Google who effectively said No isn't it?
hmmm, so every new digit is the coefficient of the next power?

(i.e. (x+1) = 1x^1 + 1x^0 => 1:1)

it makes sense, haven't thought about it..
TSA Starts Instagram Account of Crazy Contraband
I think Facebook itself has the memory leak: I never leave it open for more than about an hour at a time, but I've heard from people that leave it open for days that it can take up between 1 and 2 GB; some of these people use Firefox, some Chrome and some Safari.
> Right, except it wasn't done well in this case.

According to you. Is it so hard to imagine others may disagree? Must you downvote?
If Snowden gets asylum in Russia after a few days of stress and uncertainty he is well ahead of Manning who's been held in conditions tantamount to torture. And he knew that was a possibile outcome before blowing the whistle and it didn't deter him.
Show HN: Noowit Public Beta
So is there a way to make bbc.com articles available to us in a way that doesn't involve unfair promotion?

The problem is that I can't read an article that somebody else referred me to. He's already promoting it. I don't think it'd be unfair to give me access on that basis.

Browsing bbc.com through the front page? I'm not interested in that anyway.

LWN.net do "subscriber links", where a subscriber can share a subscriber-only article. What if bbc.com did that, so that readers can share an article with everyone?

This is subject to abuse, of course. LWN.net control it (presumably) by controlling subscriptions, since only subscribers can generate subscriber links and the links are unique and trackable. But I can think of some mitigation strategies for this, and am not sure that abuse will be such a big deal.
The anger by the OP and most of the commenters is misplaced. This is not a decision solely by the BBC Trust, and was not done with the licence players best interest at heart. This is the result of lobbying by newspapers and commercial broadcasters. The theory is that compulsory tax (or license fee) payers money should not be used to compete against commercial interests in anything other than TV broadcasting. In the current political climate, this is unlikely to change.

In fact, there was a concerted effort a few years back to shut down the entire BBC News website.
I am not saying Dropbox sucks, I am just criticizing those aspects which I think could be improved and are being neglected.

From my conversations with Dropbox support I understood that Dropbox really can't handle a large number of small files. The large plans are intended for people who store large files, not lots of stuff.
Current US foreign policy is short-sighted. There is more to power than force.

When the brightest minds of the young Latin American population in 5-10 years time ponders an international career in the US or China, things like this will nudge a few more people to China instead. This could make a huge difference in the long-term. Big leaps can be made by relatively small teams of people.
It depends on your manager. If your manager is OK with it or unaware, then you have 20% time. On the other hand, there are managers who throw anyone with a 20%T under the bus in the Perf Room (quarterly stack ranking).

It can be an effective way to work out a transfer. Google's transfer process is broken-- you are fucked without a high-level (preferably Director or VP) sponsor-- and that requires that you kill it on an audition project. In practice, though, this usually ends up requiring more than 8 hours per week, so you're either working long hours or putting less than 80% into your assigned project, which is a gamble.
It doesn't remove the oldest items? (I really don't know, I only visit Facebook for about an hour at a time at the most.)
Just like when the US built a tunnel under the Soviet embassy in DC: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/us/us-thinks-agent-reveale...
they are only recorded in the actual cockpit (this would probably happen in cabin. Also they are overwritten every 2 hours (depending on type)
You might want to rethink that conclusion - lots of US traffic to anywhere in Europe is going through the UK on tapped lines and being delivered back to the NSA. The UK has a lot of power to harm US citizens, EU partners, and UK citizens by doing this.
Written by Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) in the European Parliament, I wonder how much impact a column like this, or his views as a whole, will have on the whole situation.

Surely he can't be the only member of the EP who feels like this?
Who Watches The Watchers? On Russia Today: Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party founder
I disagree on one point... 'socialism'.

If you agree with the premise of the article, social agreements which can be trusted are vital when an individual is deciding to take risks. One side of this is ensuring rewards for successful risk-taking. A 100% 'tax' as you describe in utopian communism, or widespread corruption, or a bad legal system, etc, all redue the possibility of seeing possible rewards.

The other side of the coin is risk limiting. Healthcare, retirement, children's education, bankruptcy protections, unemployment, etc, all affect risk-taking decisions in a similar way.

'Socialist' protections can thus strengthen capitalistic behavior.
Impatient R - Burns Statistics
Question: Wouldn't it be super easy to check a private plane for how many passengers are on board? Just watching the passengers board with a thermographic camera should do the trick.
And that's where RetroShare comes in: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

It's:

1. Decentralized (real p2p, no central servers)

2. Encrypted communication

3. I'd even add: Easier to set up than encrypted email:
Install -> Exchange "certificates" -> Done.

IMO, it's currently the best way to communicate.
Julian Assange calls on Europe to 'welcome' fugitive Edward Snowden
Same here, this is weird. I live in a country where free speech is given but I still censorship myself when talking about the US online.
"No "hockey stick" growth, just small victories we fought for and earned each day. Somedays, we messed up. We couldn't always give 100%. I probably beat myself up too much for it."

This is important. Sometimes founders question themselves when they do not see hockey stick growth. Your product may not be in the kind of business that sees such growth or you may be growing slowly and steadily. The OP's persistence paid in the end.

Congratulations.
Advice: wait three more weeks before continuing in this vein.
If Google wants to kill off internal competitors to Google+, I suppose blogspot is next on the chopping block.
BYOD – A Possibility or a Threat
Then let those who want the BBC pay for such a thing. I see no good reason why I should have to subsidise your tastes.
This just reads to me as generic nerdrage and/or an attempt to gain some internet points by piggybacking an earlier discussion on HN.

It would be far quicker to view the article via Coral Cache, the Way Back Machine or some other proxy, and it would be far more effective to write to the BBC Trust and/or your local MP.
There is a Hall of Legends on the forums. I recommend Nist Akath for humor and excitement. His fighting dwarves become unbelievable.
Opera 15 released with stable Chromium fork
My apologies. You are correct. I wrote hash(actually typed "has") when I really meant that they are stored encrypted. I forget the algorithm that's used, but my understanding last I looked into it, the encryption lastpass uses is the best available.
UK's MoneySavingExpert has a flight checker tool that works for low-cost airlines too. Bonus: it's free.

http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/
Because Bolivia is 'nothing' from a US POV, doesn't make it any less wrong. Apart from right and wrong, there are several examples where countries which were 'nothing', are creating several problems for the US. Most of the middle-east, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc are countries which at some point were 'nothing'. It is because of this heavy-handed approach that he was being downvoted.
Twitter Mistakes Businesses Can’t Afford to Make
I bet it was monetizable. Would it have been profitable? I bet yes, it could even have been profitable. Would it have been insanely profitable, or have the profit scale exponentially based on use? Probably not.

Had they say $50/year, loads of people would have paid it without a second thought. A $20m revenue stream overnight is probably not enough for the G though.
ITunes song list colouring in JavaScript
domestic policy too, the land of the free isn't so attractive to the potential immigrant as it once was. I don't think China is going to be filling the void though.
Amazon makes big revenue as a retailer, even though it's low margin. AWS is all margin, though. That ~5% is worth 3.8bn in 2013 and will hit 7% ($8.8bn) in 2015.

http://www.zdnet.com/amazons-aws-3-8-billion-revenue-in-2013...
From that recording it seems that it is the pilot who initiated the landing because of problems reading a fuel indicator?

There seems to be a lot of confusion around this whole landing.
> Apart from damaging even more the already quite low international reputation of the US.

You have never been pig farming, have you ?

All that pigs care is eating shit.

Swimming in shit.

Drinking shit.

You can, say ... "Hey piggy, clean up ! Be decent !"

But it will throw shit on your face and lick it with glee.

The interesting thing is, even if you hit your favorite doubly elected representative with feces, he will get a mexican to clean it and move on, as usual.

> international reputation

I am such a cunt, I can sit here and comment. I want to reduce reality to a spectacle.
The large database cost is noticing that people who follow JGCs feed also tend to follow the feeds from the Chris's, furthermore they're apparently real human beings and have been reading for awhile, therefore when optimizing search engine results I'd put something linked to by JGC much higher than something linked by rgfbebgep240895i who is probably a SEO spammer rather than a human.

If you'd prefer a physics example, admittedly popularity is not truth, but you Might be able to add valuable data to search engine results by a careful examination of exactly who subscribes to Shetl-Optimized vs Backreaction vs Not Even Wrong vs all of them, and how long people subscribe, and other blogs they read...

Its the relationship between my set of feeds and your set of feeds that "should be" useful, not just the feeds themselves.

Something no one has discussed yet is the whole topic might just be a big F you to the NSA. I'm sure they'd love a subscriber list of "from the bunker" or "zerohedge" and GOOG has to either give it or give up on the product so they have nothing to give. Can't give up on search results, too much money, but reader might have been expendable.
> And one day some country may use this as a precedent for a more damaging action

Slightly related, but the 1993 Rwanda civil war was started because of a (let's say) similar incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Habyarimana_an...

> The airplane carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda. The assassination set in motion some of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century, the Rwandan Genocide and the First Congo War.
The thing is they're still running the services whether someone in the UK consumes it or not.

I thought the primary reason for it not running commercial services was so that its integrity as an independent source of news and culture wasn't compromised. So surely by running anything commercial, it is potentially compromised.

You can already see that by the type of programmes that get made these days. It's clear much of it is made to sell to the rest of the world, rather than just for a UK audience.
Your files may have changed between logins (multi-user system, multi-OS system, etc.).
I'm talking weird glitches like a nib gets corrupted and I've made enough changes to matter but haven't committed anything yet
I'm using Sinatra - little overhead, simple code.
I used node.js/express.js in the past, but the callback hell made me dislike it a bit, although admittedly I'm not experienced with node, so there might be a way to avoid that.

I had a look at Firebase and my main problem with it is having to rely on 3rd party service and storing data on their servers + portability if I was to decide to leave them in the future.
A thousand startups and every newspaper have failed to topple craigslist-- but maybe their own over-litigiousness will (finally!) be the downfall.
Downvote me then without reason. The arrogance! ;)
UK law says provide key to encrypted data or go to jail
Bush said God told him to invade iraq and other boatload of stupid shit, didn't stop Americans from electing him twice. What does it say about bush and even worse what does it say about americans?

The point is, what stupid shit the president said has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.
Something about searching on United: http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/16581/does-browsin...

I've experienced it myself searching on United.com. But yes, sticking with a single airline's usually a good idea — there are benefits towards acquiring elite status on a single airline's frequent flyer program (even when we're talking about airline alliances).
Fliike: Internet Of Things-Styled Facebook ‘Like’ Counter For Local Businesses
It was not forced to land directly, they were denied entry to airspace and they had to land to refuel, unable to reroute within their fuel limits.
> he would leave the company and build it on his own

Every place I've ever worked has made me sign a piece of paper specifically trying to prevent this scenario.
arbitrary length passwords simply aren't necessary though, and are unlikely to be used - if you were to cap passwords at, say, 128 characters, who would run into that limit?

I'm not arguing that if this functionality were already present in an app that you should remove it; however if it's not there already there's very little value it could add that would justify any development time. That's just my opinion though.
Yes, I also mean Google Search. As a user I don't rely on it, there are alternatives. If they shut it down tomorrow I'd be sad because it's a stellar product but I will survive without it.

As a business owner I pay them through adwords so I don't expect them to shut it down any time soon.

The problem with GReader is that the industry never bothered to produce a quality alternative until now.
Restore the Fourth: Find a Protest in Your Area
After reading the article, I am slightly disappointed. This is about banners on homepages, not people carrying signs through the streets. Please don't underestimate what actual protest in the streets can do, especially if it appears in unexpected places or in unexpected social circles.

And don't think that there is no precedent for street protests against internet policies either. Remember that the turning point for ACTA was the moment when the people of Poland took it to the streets. [1]

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...
This is just "might makes right". It's not an ideology that anyone who wants to live in a country or a world that values individual liberty should desire.

Consider how few hops it is between "it's ok to violate a country's sovereignty if it is small and powerless" and "it's ok to violate someone's 'rights' so long as they are powerless, unimportant, or poor".
you would think that with "intelligence" agencies looking into it they would be able to tell whether or not Snowden was in an airport terminal or was getting on a plane.
All this "we have no idea where Snowden is" sounds like BS to me.
If Snowden was a free man we would be seeing his face doing a video interview.
Is it even useful to talk about 'US foreign policy' anymore? I mean, I generally hold Conspiracy theorists in marginal disdain, but aren't we seeing the machinations of a shadow authority usually beyond the concrete knowledge of the electorate in operation?

Either it's incompetence, or ruse, or a 'not-giving-a-fuck' if we know that the intelligence agencies are above the law and can act with near global impunity.

whelp. I should shut up. Probably?
Does browsing airline ticket sites in incognito mode result in cheaper prices?
Thanks! Going to check this out.
Grocery store apologises to rude customer using 'phone
Nice read! Congratz!
Yep. South African here.