skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a war to exist you have to have a frontier.

The 'google' territory centers around eyeballs, ads and possibly at some point in the future paid services (though it looks like google wants to avoid that).

The 'apple' territory is a unified media presentation vision centered around slick hardware and a common user interface design.

The 'microsoft' territory is mostly (xbox) centered around licensing software.

All three companies have a completely different take on how to make money of their IT business. Sure there are overlaps, and for sure there will be users crossing over from the one service to the other.

But if this were a 'real' war google would be selling hardware (or worse, giving it away), Apple would be getting in to the search business and microsoft would be going for the eyeballs at the expense of their licensing strategy.

Some of this is happening, but at least for the foreseeable time things are relatively stable and market shares will slowly fluctuate, no 'mass casualties' are expected.

For an idea of what happens when there is a war check out what happened to digital research, netscape and altavista. Skirmishes, yes, sure. War ? Definitely not.
The BIOS will have to go away for that to happen.
The article makes it sound like poker players have become a little more database-savvy than they really have. The vast majority of poker tracker users are vaguely aware that some db with a goofy name exists, but that's about it. The number of them who know what a foreign key is is a rounding error.

And the reason poker attracts so much technology is the same reason the stock market does: there's a hell of a lot of money to be made. A $50 piece of software is worth what you pay for it 10,000 times over if it even improves your win rate by 1% (and Poker Tracker most certainly does much more). A bot that can average winning 1 cent a hand could make you a millionaire, so a year or two spent building it is easily justified.
Yes, but...

For the most part "Google" is a condensed version of the web. In theory, you could "spider" a single site (google.com) and build your own search database without having to go out and crawl the web at large.

It's an odd paradox, but I think one search site crawling another search site is not a good idea. And there is probably an infinite spider loop hiding in that process somewhere.
Just pointing out that as science advances old techniques need to be updated. In no way was I implying that there was any problem with science.
And if you did 'solve' X = (.9... + 1)/2 using the standard 'algorithms' for doing it by hand you will wind up with X = .9... + .0...1 (more on this in a sec); you get there by noticing 1.9... / 2 looks like it ought to be .9..., but "of course" 2 x .9... == .9...8, ergo you can deduce you have .9... + a remainder of .0...1.

If you don't believe .0...1 exists (infinite 0s followed by a 1) then this ought to convince you that .9... == 1 (as (x+y)/2 == x => x == y) but since we're (hypothetically) arguing with someone who believes .9... != 1 it's quite plausible that the person is also going to believe in .0...1 existing, also.

What I suspect is actually going on (I've also met otherwise-savvy people who will debate this issue also) is that the human numerical-cognition system uses something like a crude form of nonstandard analysis internally; and, under this theory, you see this internal system (and its intuitions) leak out in some people smart enough to get that .9... really does have 'infinitely many' 9s but who also for whatever reason are both undereducated on this point of mathematics and generally self-assured.

Briefly: you can extend the real #s with a new entity (call it delta) such that:

- delta > 0

- if r is a nonzero # then delta < |r|

- (for now) delta^2 = 0

(in effect: delta is an infinitesimal, it's nonzero but smaller than any other positive #, and delta^2 is 0 is mainly an algebraic convenience).

Once you've extended things by including delta you can write extended #s in the form r + s x delta (eg: 1 - delta).

If we re-define ".9..." to be 1 - delta, then the following all drop out of that:

- .9... != 1 (1 - .9... == delta != 0)

- .9... < 1, (1 - .9... == delta > 0)

- and we even get: (1 + .9...)/2 = 1 - (delta/2) ==> (1 + .9...)/2 > .9...

And more generally in my experience most of the spinning-in-circles around people with beliefs about .9... != 1 is that the people who vociferously believe .9... != 1 don't even know about non-standard analysis (or infinitesimals, etc.) and thus can't articulate what their intuition is telling them, but what their intuition is using is basically (a nonrigorous form of) analysis with infinitesimals.
Testing with "The Force"
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Google knows who my friends are (Contacts), what I'm saying to them (Gchat/Gmail), where I'm going (Gmaps), what I'm reading (Reader), what I'm writing (Docs) and what I'm looking for (Search).

As far as I'm concerned, operating systems are pretty interchangeable. The things I care about are already all going through Google. Does anyone besides Google offer a similar suite of apps? The only one I can think of is Apple's MobileMe.
http://solari.com/archive/freddie-fannie-penny-stocks/
1. How many netbook users run Photoshop on their netbook? I'd bet that it's an insignificant number.

2. Aviary (http://aviary.com/home) will likely run fine on it. :p
Just a guess, but maybe the weird process-per-tab thing.
How about Outlook/Thunderbird/Facebook (contacts) + Yahoo (mail) + OpenStreetMap (maps) + Sage/Friendfeed (RSS) + Zoho (Docs) + Bing (Search)?

While no-one may be offering a similar suite of applications, if you want to use them you can find different services that do.

Also currently even if google does know all that information about you, it doesn't know what files you have on your hard drive. In my opinion, giving carte blanche on data on my hard drives to google is a big no for a company that doesn't give two hoots about the privacy of their users.
Its so nice to see traditional media releasing open source tools like this. See also the New York Times release of their map reduce toolkit http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/announcing-the-mapr...
"There is no lock-in with Google"

While Microsoft owned the program and the data format my data was stored, Google owns the program, the data format and the server my data is stored in.

I am not sure how comfortable I should feel. Data export facilities are your friends.
Since I paid for this (as a license fee payer in the UK) I'm glad it's been opened. You don't need to thank me :)

I look forward to the day they send me Blu-rays's of my tv programs as well :)
3.- Being a bad communicator.
Focus. They just talk about what is need to be understand.

Perhaps this person needs to reflect on this themselves.
Great moments is space exploration - Buzz Aldrin punches Bart Sibrel
The Google OS: Are we saved at last?
The article is spot on in asking a critical question about exactly how capable Google's offering is in reality as an OPERATING SYSTEM. To say that Google's OS is to provide a distributed storage mechanism is to bypass the concept of what an OS actually is - the gateway to the underlying hardware so that you can perform the functionality required to complete a specific task.

If Google's goal is to provide us with a distributed storage mechanism, then a better strategy would be to provide a better interface to their web offerings on existing operating systems.

No matter how much we desire a web-centric user experience, there will always be a need for software that takes advantage of all the computing power available in as small a foot print that is right in front of you. The question is will Google's OS provide this ability equally as well as Windows or Mac OSX can in order to be considered a "complete" operating system that has additional advantages.
Can I call alarmist bullshit?

I think the inevitable consequence of fears like yours is that you'll be able to pay different institutions, so that you can store part of your data here, and part of your data there. So that you can surf behind company A's proxy most of the time but use company B's when you feel like/need to.

Yes, there are going to be less entities on the whole. But if the internet keeps growing, that might be a temporary setback--the infrastructure is going to hopefully become more spread out, more resilient to attack, and more designed to protect individual rights, and individual property. Think about it this way: as we move more and more pieces of our lives online, the value of our digital "stuff" grows higher and higher, and systems to protect that stuff, and our hopefully our constitutional rights (including the right to privacy), will appear.

At the very worst, you can always wait for some kind of massive privacy or fiscal (or even just data loss) tragedy would at least cause governments to act quickly to more clearly define the rights of an individual online :p
He's talking about search traffic to his business. I feel the same way. It's scary knowing that if one company blacklists you, you basically disappear from the internet. Google provides 99% of my incoming search traffic (even though I rank higher on other engines).
Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook
Not like anyone writing a spider has to obey the robots.txt file.
Apple also decided to make a linux distro which happens to be very good. If it wasn't for OSX, then Ubuntu would be far more popular than it is today. The author is thinking that perhaps Chrome OS will do more of the same thing (take away market share from Ubuntu).

I personally think that there is a lot more to a computer than a web browser, so maybe Chrome OS will be mostly competing with Windows in the Netbooks market - since linux has mostly lost a lot of ground in that area.
Engine Yard: Running on Rails
Also posted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693786 (with some discussion going on)
Google seems to be taking a page from the Microsoft playbook to spread some FUD.
This was reposted from Appleinsider, discussion of that here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691844
> Any proof to back up the idea they might abuse data?

There's no need for proof, and it would be really difficult to find even if they were already doing unspeakable things with the world's data.

The problem is that the data is there, ready to be abused when a Google executive happens to make that decision.

Imagine sitting next to a conveyor belt shifting an endless stream of cheese cakes past you. You know they're not your cheese cakes, and that it would be inappropriate to take one.

Now suppose you also knew that even if you did stuff your face with the cheese cakes whizzing past, there's no way you could get caught.

Now suppose that you knew a guy who'd pay you truckloads of money for a few cheese cakes.

And finally, suppose that the government stepped in and insisted that you leave the room and let them watch over the cheese cakes.
See the comments about Android in the Google Blog post.

Android: Aimed at small-screen, low-power devices (handhelds, set-top boxes, MIDs, netbooks). Java-based application development. Touchscreen-oriented UI.

Chrome OS: Aimed at netbooks, laptops, desktops. Web-based application development. Browser-based UI.
I would prefer a desktop-like OS for ARM-based devices.

If the mainstream go for simpler OSs for those smartbooks, there will be little demand for a multi-gigabyte RAM with real hard-disk class of non-x86 machines.

I love my Acer Aspire One and use it as my main development system, but I have no need for its Windows compatibility and would trade it for longer battery life any day.

And a cache-heavy 4+ core ARM with decent FP capability would still need less juice than a single-core Atom.
I read that as "Montreal Gazette's radical browser". WTF.
I think the goal is to prevent other robots from accidentally crawling the Google corpus. At the end of the day, robots.txt is a stab at comity. There are many well-known services which use crawlers that fail to obey it (or identify themselves). The file merely announces, "This is all recycled content." -- notice that none of the Google corporate pages are disallowed.

Aside: let's say you've whipped up a spiffy new ranking algorithm, and you just need an index to launch your search engine. What's faster: crawling the web, or crawling Google? I don't think such an entrepreneur would pass on a big speed up just because of a text-file.
frig presented it as an equation.
Indeed - was reinventing the wheel really a good use of my TV tax money?
The site has a ad banner with sound, very intrusive, 'congratulations, you won!', it may embarrass you if you open at work.
Agreed.

The Washington Times have also released some pretty impressive open-source django apps over at
http://opensource.washingtontimes.com/projects/

it includes django-supertagging which is pretty much the best automated django tagging solution out there!
Have you seen how much memory a couple tabs open in Chrome take? Heavy browser usage in a 128 megabyte machine is ludicrous.

What I fear is that a viable low-memory option for ARM-based netbooks kills the need for memory expansion on them. I want a light and inexpensive netbook, but I also need 2+ gigabytes if RAM to work.

And no. I won't return to a full-size (and full-weight) notebook.
Layar Wants More Layers, Opens Augmented Reality Platform To Developers
Microsoft set to respond to Google Chrome OS next Monday?
FTA: Google won the browser war, with the help of Mozilla. The important point here is that Google doesn't care what browser you use. They don't make money on browsers, they make money on online offerings and apps so all they care about is that your browser is fast and supports the newest technologies.

1) Chrome's market share is minute

2) Google makes over 95% of their money on advertising

I'm not entirely certain how much thought went into this article, but I'm certain that the Google OS hype machine has gone into overdrive as I'm seeing too many articles like this that make absolutely no sense.
Interesting, but a netbook running linux also does not have the microsoft tax associated with it and can do all that googles os promises and more.

Things that come to mind:

- work when you don't have a network connection

- store a sizeable amount of media to entertain you while on an airplane

- use 'skype' and several hundred thousand open source packages

It does boot slower, but I find it hard to benchmark software that hasn't been released against software that does exist.

I wouldn't be sad one bit of google threw their weight behind linux adoption, for them to go and launch yet another OS to fragment the market is not what I was hoping for.
Flagged because this is one of oldest memes, myspace angles, rewritten to appeal to snobs like us.
SEO the Google Way
For those of you who still believe that SEO is evil and that Google hates SEO.
You get acclimated to your 1 or 2 regular lines and then when you go exploring, this would come in handy. But, even on your regular lines, if you go to an unfamiliar stop this would be handy (the A/C line has 18 possible stops on my commute - I use 3 of those regularly and many others infrequently enough that this would be useful). The other scenario is when you move or switch jobs, your subways lines may change so this gives you a head start on the learning curve.
I thought it already was planned to be capacitive: http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/10/crunchpad.apr....
Layar is absolutely amazing, and I think this will be one of the killer apps on the mobile platform.

The first demo I saw (a while ago) was so totally unexpected that I thought it was a mock-up of some science fiction like application on a mobile phone instead of a real live demo.

This is one company to watch closely.
The value of Google's services, at least for me, is that they all work together. I can login from an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere and have all my contacts in my email program, the same ones synced to my iPhone.

I don't know if I buy the claim that Google doesn't give "two hoots" about your privacy, as long as you don't count selling contextual ads as over the line. But anyway, my point is that the "files" I care about protecting are already with Google. For true protection of your local files, on any operating system, encryption is your only answer.
I agree that the traders weren't the primary villains, although they certainly traded a hell of a whistleblower opportunity for a fat paycheck.

I refuse to believe there aren't real villains, that they have names, faces, addresses, and that they knew what they were doing and didn't give a shit.

http://solari.com/archive/freddie-fannie-penny-stocks/
And there is probably an infinite spider loop hiding in that process somewhere.

And then, this strange loop attains self awareness...
(GEB reference)
People tend to judge entities based on their actions, not their capabilities. Microsoft has acted as a rampaging barbarian horde, happily destroying competitors and allies alike. Google employs hundreds of students every summer to work on random open-source projects.

Google _could_ be evil if they wanted to, but so far there isn't any evidence that they have done so. Microsoft has been a force of destruction in the world, and there is no evidence that they have any desire to do otherwise. Which entity is more deserving of fear?
Nice writeup
I would agree, but it appears Google is banking on a lot of what we do on the desktop moving to the web in the next few years, and that is where they are hoping this will poise them to get a foothold.
I smell a business opportunity here! I could develop a Digital Robots.txt Management platform that will be built into all server operating systems and would enforce that no spiders are allowed to disregards robots.txt. I'm a genius! Oh, wait...
The media player battle heats up: VLC 1.0 released
They both make operating systems, browsers, and web apps.
Also, historical note from MacUser, Jan 1997:

"For the last word I'll hand over to John Carmack, Technical Director of ID Software, who used NeXTSTEP to develop Doom and parts of Quake (that's right!): "We developed lots of products under dos (mostly borland c++), and never want to again. We went through five major iterations of our tools under DOS, and they are all junk below our first iteration of NS tools. You can't really just point at specific things and claim superiority. It is the complete package that has the appeal. NS is the best tool I have found for MY development work."

from http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/NeXTSTEP.TechReview.html
I believe with facebook connect, you can maybe hack those different services to work together (firefox extension?). Maybe, I should take a look at that idea.

And if google did care about my privacy why read all my mails, and keep track of every webpage i visit from their search engine. I don't buy the "we'll only take a peep, just for advertising" logic.

Also, google already having all the files you care about would be more an exception than the norm. I would presume a majority of people keep their files stored on their hard drives.

In my opinion, keeping track of my actions in any way goes against google's self stated "don't be evil" policy. Or did Paul Buchheit take that policy with him to friendfeed???
There is need for proof - or even some kind of suggestion. Otherwise it's just a scare story :)

YES consider what data Google stores about you and if you feel comfortable with it. But to suggest they are or plan to do something evil with it you need to actually come up with something more cohesive than, say, a feeling.

Example: I can suggest your bank could be doing all SORTS of things with your data - potentially supremely damaging stuff.... but you trust them, right? ;)

Capacity to do something and trust are different things. So I say again: if you dont trust them. Dont use them. :)
Nice to see someone talk about all the "other stuff" once in a while.

"#1-Lack of discipline" and "#2-Big egos" are not non-technical skills. They are personality traits and apply to everyone.

"#3-Being a bad communicator" - absolutely! In business situations, sometimes it's half the battle.

"#4-Forgetting about the customer". If you're in business this should always be #1.

"#5-Not prioritizing the work properly", another bad habit that applies to almost everyone.

I think OP missed the #1 (closely related to the Customer) non-technical mistake made by programmers: systems analysis. Determining what to do before determining how to do it.

I've seen plenty of bad software, but I've seen just as many projects fail with good software written to do the wrong thing. When we learn to spend more time on the "what", the "how" invariably gets easier.
Chrome's market share is minute

Well, that's kind of the point I was trying to make - Google make their money on advertising and webapps, not on browsers. It doesn't matter for their bottomline which browser people use. All that matters to them is that people use google's products, and the fewer roadblocks there are the more money google makes.

Chrome doesn't need to have more than a minute marketshare to drive the competition to make better browsers and more internet capable OS'es, which will ultimately be good for Google. For Google it's not about marketshare in the OS or browser business, it's about driving innovation so that users will move on to the web.
I think the more exciting part of this is to see another media company releasing open source code. As it's been said, the JS library is becoming a crowded space and perhaps it would have been better for them to contact another library and see about integrating into it.

I think we're going to see the beginning of meta libraries. Code which links up multiple libraries. Maybe you grab a few libs from moo, prototype and jquery, and then layer Glow on top?

Useless side note: When I was planning my own blogging engine I was going to call it 'Glow' so I definitely like the name at least :)
Precisely. Will the Google OS be the best at video editing, so that when I plug my camcorder, I can edit video footage of my kids intuitively? Manage my photo album?

Apple has shown their strenght in combining great apps with tailored hardware so that simple "multimedia" tasks just work.

Anything can be replicated, but so far, I haven't see Google go after the same target at all.
Inflation is good for debtors and bad for creditors; it reduces the value of every debt.
One perspective I found interesting was http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081209145737.pdf
From the article, it seems that what is really broken is the I/O in the web interface - input is (wrongly) 'sanitized', output printing is misformatted.

Trite lesson we (do not) learn from this: beware trivial tasks that don't seem worth the trouble of testing.
Google to Microsoft: "Step aside Windows, Here comes Google Chrome OS"
http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/startup-issues/7-legal-docum...

http://www.entrepreneur.com/formnet/index.html

http://www.jasonnazar.com/2008/07/10/10-incredibly-awesome-d...
#6: It will start floating.
I think they'll be more like Intel and Microsoft. They'll benefit each other. Hopefully, they'll keep benefitting us.
How to make money from swine flu
I have a really hard time believing that the average margin on consumer hardware is 30%. Very few companies, with the exception of Apple, can pull off that kind of margin. As a new market entrant, you're going to have to significantly discount your hardware to attract consumers. Even established players, like Microsoft with the Xbox, sell hardware at or below cost to sell software.