skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yahoo and Hotmail could be substitutes for Gmail...I guess. Good luck.

Google Search has no reasonable alternatives.

Google Chrome can be replaced with Firefox. Do note that 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google.

YouTube has no viable alternatives. DailyMotion, Vimeo? Good luck finding what you searched for.

Google Maps' primary alternative is OpenStreetMap, but only as a repository for the maps themselves. Implementation like integration into smartphones is effectively nonexistent.

For Google Reader there's...oh wait.

Google Drive has alternatives, but not price-wise since the recent price drop. They're now shelling out 1TB of cloud storage for $10/month. Compare to Dropbox's 100GB.

Android has WinPhone and iOS as alternatives, but WinPhone isn't well-supported by third-party developers and iOS has almost zero flexibility.

G+ has Facebook as an alternative, but the crown for Most Evil is up for grabs.

Google Keep has Evernote or Simplenote.

Hangouts has Whatsapp, Skype, or any other chat app. Have fun trying to get your friends on the same one as you.

Google Docs has Microsoft Office Online, but I haven't used it and I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft is doing as much data-mining as possible on this platform.

For Google Wallet, you have Square Wallet, Apple's thing, and I couple of other services I've never heard of.

Google Voice has no alternatives, and it's about to be integrated into Hangouts somehow - you've been warned.

And Google Reader has...uh....

Google Calendar...good god. Good luck moving to another service with that one.

Google Translate's competitors aren't even in the same league.

There isn't even another service similar to Google Cloud Print.

And then there are Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdWords, and whatever other kinds of super-secret proprietary data-mining magic that they use. Good luck avoiding those.
Yes, their wealth flows through the economy in a way that benefits rich people. You can see this most obviously in charity work where many charities are largely about catering to whatever rich people want to do. (How many opera houses do we need?) We are lucky that some of those at the top are relatively far-sighted, but this is far from universal.

Buying power also affects who businesses cater to and which startup business plans seem promising. As a result, a lot more effort goes into solving rich people's problems. Businesses segment on income (Walmart versus Trader Joe's versus whatever the very rich do.)

Something like guaranteed income would also flow through the economy, but at least the first hop guarantees more attention towards the problems of the poor, due to a bit more buying power. There would still be plenty of ways to make money.
Wow. You managed to write all that without actually including a word that might have supported what you were saying. Maybe it's a "tired mantra" because it's true.
Originally, I was optimistic about the movement. The rent in SF is indeed too damn high.

Sadly it's completely radicalized into an organization which harasses individuals for the crime of spreading capital and demands that Google fund anarchist communes.

So much for anything positive (ex. better zoning) coming of it.
Attent by Seriosity has an interesting solution to this: http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html. They create a scarce currency that companies use internally to send messages.
We are the ones who serve them coffee, deliver them food, suck their cocks, watch their kids, and mop their floors

...

To this end, we now make our first clear demand of Google. We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing.

On the one hand I feel sorry for Kevin having to deal with these crackpots, on the other hand these crackpots are so bad at PR it's hilarious.
I was thinking about switching to Digital Ocean. Thanks for letting us know they aren't as professional as everyone claimed.
Maybe this? http://twin.gl/
I've been having this in my mind for a while:

A nice way to organize & share my knowledge. I know that lots of people have a self-hosted wiki or similar where they write nice tricks, something that they learned about and might be useful in the future, nice ideas...

Well, I'd like something like this, but more "social". Pages could be shared (or public), anyone could write a comments on something (I'd love to see comments a-la Medium), and it would be nifty to have a way to "fork" and submit a pull request for every page.

I guess it could also have the usual "follow user" that will show all of his pages in a dashboard, a "trending pages" for the most seen pages and similar.
The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates
>I have not once heard a compelling argument for why inheritance is a good thing for society.

You must not have kids, do you? It may not be good for society, but do you seriously want to prohibit parents from being able to pass things down to their children? That's a bit of a monstrous proposition, don't you think? Many families attach emotional significance to tangible property (land, a house, furniture, life insurance, etc), and stealing that from them because "you didn't earn that" is morally reprehensible.
I'd love to know who's actually putting the effort into this nonsense. While gentrification causes obvious problems, particularly around housing, the rampant doublethinky ignorance of literally pointing out that tech money is providing jobs and investment in the area is a bit hard to swallow… feels like there's something else going on here.
Lets see, it's an article about how tech workers are being targeted because of high earning potential by anarchist service workers, who in the past have harassed other employees of Google and anyone else who is part of the SF tech/startup scene.

Which in turn, becomes a place to discuss whether their complaints are valid, and either way, what courses of action might be taken.
i think this just goes to show that the DO platform is not suitable for sites that require uptime. The price point justifies the simplicity, but sometimes simple isn't enough. AWS still has everything a startup needs to run their stack
Sorry to split hair but until 1998 GiB didn't exist and GB were indeed 2³⁰ so it's wrong to say GB are now 10⁹ because of a decision of the BIPM from 1960.

GB are 10⁹ because in accordance with its mission the IEC made them so in 1998 which incidentally base its work on this 1960 decision.
Without the IEC, we would still have GB referring to 2^3,. I can tell as I lived through this change as the annoying cs student who correct something the professor said, in front of the class and is right about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
Those contracts and benefits were already present and available under a domestic partnership. Prop-8 merely wanted marriage to remain between a man and a women (in the legal sense, in all reality, some scummy shit came out around that prop)

My issue with Karunamon's argument in most of his comments, is that he dismisses that idea, and instead attempts to force his own morals into a legal construct. Namely, that all people should be able to be married, regardless of religious connotations involved.

Then he defends forcing that legal construct into law by claiming it's only to gain the rights of marriage, ignoring that they were already available. He is now participating on the same level that prop 8 was: Forcing religious constructs into law, because he agrees with them.

Now, solving the separate but equal nonsense is a good discussion to have but his points there about co-opting marriage to do it seem hollow, It doesn't solve the problem, it doesn't solve dependency hell.

It just co-opts a word to mean what he believes it should.
I don't know what Yagan looks like and my mom has no concept of image based memes. That being said my mother can understand:

OKCupid blocks firefox over anti-gay Mozilla CEO

That sound bite works, and it works across a lot of demos.
Vis-à-vis Wall Street's dalliance with the left coast: this is what you get for dating crazy.
That's an April's fool, right?
>We are as stupid as the general population who believe we all can aspire to be members of the one-percenters.

Why would you want to be? You think having that much wealth would make you happy? Why not be satisfied with living a comfortable life of plenty?
Why the medical miracle device won't work
> Yet you aren't going to get fired for having expressed those views five years ago.

There was a time, during my own lifetime where it is was perfectly acceptable to openly discuss weather whites and blacks should be allowed to get married or not. Social change can occur quickly, like a wildfire, the recent history of a change is not all that important -- the fire has already happened.
I guess the question is, when is your money your money? I like to think once I've paid my income taxes and all the other taxes levied on my income, that the rest is mine. I own it and I'm free to do with as I like.

What estate taxes say is "none of it is your money. once you've paid your income taxes, we'll let you keep some of it, but if you die, we're taking the rest of it".

So individuals who want to pass down their family business to their child? Tough, the gov't gets it all. Want to make sure your surviving spouse and kids will be taken care of? Well that wouldn't be fair. The gov't takes it all.

I take the opposite stance, inheritance taxes make no sense at all.
Did you take a look at https://coderwall.com/ ?
There is Wow dad, and there is mum version called Wow Mum (maybe Wow Mom). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.wowdad.ui
Here's the source post from the protest organizers http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/04/06/18753651.php
So to get this straight, we should blame the KHTML devs for adding a feature after Google forked it's code? While not blaming Google for never adding the feature?
> First you would need to prove that.

Right.

> Consider a world with perfect income equality. In such a world, there is no economic incentive to work at all.

Nobody needs an economic incentive to work (please prove me otherwise). In fact, an economic incentive is the only reason we screw other people over and produce shitty work.
I want to search for furniture, and other products, based on dimensions. My girlfriend and I furnished a new apartment recently, and had to be space conscious.. This spot next to the couch could fit a 10" wide table. It's not easy to search for that, yet the information is there. My original plan was going to use the Amazon API and take a search term and page through looking for dimensions that fit. I still think it's a great idea, but obviously not huge, and I don't really have time to build it. If you do, hook me up.
Yeah, I totally lost it at that last line. Still, I don't understand how people with grievances think it's ok to vilify and hurt others. The solution to one's suffering shouldn't be found by spreading the pain.

Seeing hateful messages about you spread out to your neighbors must feel like an emotional knife to the heart no matter how famous or successful you are.
Linode opens a ticket for all affected users and emails them proactively, I think this is the right way to message this type of outage.
You make an important point, but I want to add a caveat. We know a lot about how long we have to wait to deal with "regime crimes" in order not to jeopardize the political system of the successor state.

It seems that in the case of maximum scale crimes, the right number is somewhere around 30 years (one generation). That was approximately the time between the end of WW2 and the 1968 student revolts in Germany, and the Bonn republic survived it. As another example, given the divisive nature of the incredibly bloody Spanish civil war, societal "digestion" of the Franco dictatorship also had to wait for almost 30 years.

What happens if winners rapidly turn on the former suppressors can currently be observed in Egypt.

So far, so interesting, but what it doesn't tell us, is what the time scale for a (comparatively small) intrasocietal adjustment of morality is (gay marriage = sin -> gay marriage = fundamental right).

One decade? Five years? Fifteen? I can't think of any precedents that can truly be compared to the gay marriage situation.

My personal feeling is that the reaction to Eich was not appropriate considering where he stands on the currently applicable bigotry scale.

But that is also just a gut feeling. The question remains: What is the right time to wait before a step of progressive change in society should be "enforced", so that the backlash remains minimal?
Such methods are despicable in and of themselves, not for being associated with a particular faction. If that was how it worked, Germany would have outlawed vegetarian diets, art school, mustaches, and pants.
Actually, we built our static hosting service because we were already developing with a static web architecture and couldn't find an existing acceptable option for hosting.

I'm building the platform because I believe in the technology, not espousing the technology because I built the platform. :)
I'll clarify this. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever check return values, that's obviously not the right thing to do. And of course there are exceptions to the general rule. If you're allocating a large chunk of memory and there's a reasonable expectation that it could fail, that should be reported, of course.

In the general case, however, if allocating 100 bytes fails, reporting that error is also likely to fail. An actual memory allocation failure on a modern computer running a modern OS is a very rare and very bad situation. It's rarely recoverable.

It's not bad to handle allocation failures, but in the vast majority of cases it's very unreasonable to do so. You can write code for it if you want, have fun.

And just to be completely clear, I am ONLY talking about calls to malloc, new, realloc, etc. NOT to OS pools or anything like that. Obviously, if you allocate a 4Mb buffer for something (or the OS does for you), you expect that you might run out. This is ONLY in regards to calls to lower level heap allocators.

I don't think you'll find any experienced programmer recommending that you always check the return from malloc. That's completely absurd. There are always exceptions to the rule, however.
something like wikipedia?

1. where quality doesn't compromised,

2. company runs by donation and

3. keep growing with volunteer support.

That sounds like excellent idea. I don't have too much time but i would love to be part of something like this.
Colin, you're absolutely right, and we are going to do several things about this. Some involve software, and some involve rallying the community. We'll know we've succeeded when users like you start noticing changes for the better instead of the worse.

I don't believe the wider community wants this sort of item here. It is antimatter to the things HN calls for: intellectual substance and calm reflection.

The only thing you said that I'd push back against is the "I haven't flagged it" part. This is what flagging is for!

Also, you've posted so many high-quality gems over the years that your intuition for what's on-topic deserves high respect, and it certainly has ours.
I don't know, maybe they prefer to live on benefits in a cheaper place? If you live on government support, jobs in your area don't help you and the higher prices worsen your situation.
He is alone in his battle with their neighborhood raccoon problem.
> You must not have kids, do you? It may not be good for society, but do you seriously want to prohibit parents from being able to pass things down to their children?

I don't have kids yet, but I do not intend to leave anything to them once I do. I'll make sure they get a good education, but will be donating my estate to charity.

> Many families attach emotional significance to tangible property (land, a house, furniture, life insurance, etc), and stealing that from them because "you didn't earn that" is morally reprehensible.

It's no more "morally reprehensible" than any other taxation. In fact, compared to "stealing" my personal wages (ie. income taxes), it's significantly more moral—it was never there's in the first place.
Tracked changes for gmail. So instead of replying to an email in text and then changing the color/font/size of words, tracked changes will do it for you similar to how it does in Word.
A data driven and personalized alternative to credit scores.

Credit scores lack transparency, usability, and are often inaccurate representation's of a person's financial health/responsibility. Especially regarding student loans, credit scores are useless...all a 20 year old's credit score tells you is how much his parents planned his financial life for him
I agree with the sentiment, but I think a 100% estate tax is never going to fly. I'm definitely for steeply increasing it as wealth goes up, however. Maybe it goes to 100% at some level (a billion?).
I don't think it's appropriate to invoke separate but equal if the only difference is the legal term used. Separate but equal was about separate physical facilities. And as far as I know, it was never illegal for any couple to claim that they were married. It's just that the official legal term would not be "marriage."
Well, pirated live video events are a well known malware vector, along with certain kinds of online gambling and adult video. Often they don't even bother with a zero day, they just ask you to install a "video codec" which is really the payload. They know you want it ...

Running that illegal live stream is a far cry from your initial hypothesis of unopened Gmail messages. By definition the people offering it to you are perfectly happy with doing harm.
Well, I only partly agree. In a developed country, that the poor should have enough to survive is a given. But once survival is assured (and I'm not saying it is, but it's not far from it), there are other important issues to consider. Money isn't just glitz, glamour, mansions and fast cars. Money is also power. And when money is distributed unequally, so is power. Now, this is a price we have to pay, because completely egalitarian approaches seem to have failed so far, and in order to incentivize people to create, some inequality is actually good. But the question is how much. When is inequality so blatant that feudalism is near? When is inequality so atrocious that the basic values of democracy are threatened?

I don't think there are clear answers, but this is a continuous struggle in any capitalistic society. Capitalism has to be maintained, but curbed so that it doesn't run rampant.
I remember the story of a guy who could ride a bicycle by using his tongue to make a loud sound that bounces off of objects. Not sure if it's real, but it sounds plausible.

And this. All of these are amazing.
This pains me to read. Are you really so convinced that the techie crowd got ahead from its own savvy and motivation and everyone else is too lazy to do so?

There's nothing like writing off huge swathes of people based on an utterly distorted view of reality.
One reason you may have been downvoted here is that you've replied to a misreading of my comment. Subsidized or not, the Asian rural poor have no access to healthcare --- or, often, consistent electricity and running water. The government does not have to subsidize anything: for every Medicaid patient in the US, there are 6-8 people in India without access to medical care of any sort.
I wonder about these folks. Are they the gays, hippies, yuppies, and beatniks or the children thereof that changed San Francisco to the chagrin of the previous generation?
> I guess the question is, when is your money your money?

It is indeed your money once you've paid taxes on it. But leaving it to your children is a transfer, just as your employer paying you was also a transfer.

As far as I'm concerned, payments to individuals based on zero productive activity should be taxed at 100%.

EDIT: clarity
You seem to have a contradiction within your three sentences.

Eich was CEO of a company called the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation employs people to work on free projects. one of these projects, Firefox, is governed by The Mozilla Foundation, a completely different entity that Brendan Eich is not a member of. Javascript is handled by ECMA, which is a completely different entity that Brendan Eich is not a member of. Brendan Eich was instrumental in the creation of both, but he has no brand or direct authority over either Firefox or Javascript.

So while your first two sentences were technically correct, the further understanding makes the third sentence a contradiction. Why is it perfectly fine to boycott a brand Eich has no authority over, but not ban another one for exactly the same reasons?
Is there any SR tool that can just remind you to review stuff while taking into consideration the date it was added? The use case is as follows: Suppose I read some article on some neat python tricks today, if I don't review it or use it I am going to forget it in a month. But if I note that I learnt it today, the program should remind me after say 3 days later, two weeks later and then probably after one year. My understanding is that Anki cannot do this, since it doesn't know when things are added.
Yes high school is different than college. They are not equivalent and that is not the issue in the instant case. What is the societal cost of a 19 year old faffing about in CEGEP in Quebec and how is it different than the societal cost of a 19 year old faffing about in college in Ontario?
Only dead trees there. It used to be a great place, but after it got acquired, acquired, sold and then acquired again, all of the community was long gone. It had its peek under Kyle Bragger when he was actually running a community with staff full-time on it, but after he sold it, it went downhill. Fast.

There's some recent attempts to bring back the community and improve all sorts of things, but it's just renovating and feeding a rotten tree. Sure, it will live for a long time but it will never be as beautiful as a real living tree fed by nature.
Of course, why would they, 'ordinary' (bear with me) people not caught up in the world of PR and media and product promotion, have any talent at PR?

I think they're allowed to be mad regardless of their media savvy.
Plenty of social studies show that median happiness is lower in societies with relatively higher income inequality. So, while you may be the exception and can be happy while your neighbours have more than you, most people aren't.
I think the killer feature of Gmail is the priority box view. It is your personal todo list, your second stage spam filter, etc. Would be great if that could be implemented in a mail client. I would instantly use it!
Dynastic wealth was earned by somebody. The way I look at it we should respect the spending decisions of people who make the money, and in this case the decision was to give it to their children. And it's not like society doesn't take a big bite out of large inheritances - the US takes 40% of the really large ones.

And I don't see why you think it's "harmful to the mobility of others".
She's a Man, Baby
And yet, it is the "Rich who wage war on the poor".

Granted, this is San Francisco. They've always been a roudy bunch over there. But this kind of behavior negatively looks upon the "99%". (or more specifically, the activists who claim to be the 99%).

Gendrification happens all across the country, and the renting-class poor are forced to move out of neighborhoods as they get more expensive. But only in San Francisco does gendrification seem to be so painful...
"Legal regime" sounds fancy, but if it's just a word difference I wouldn't see much of a problem. Similarly, we have word differences like "brother"/"sister" that are descriptive but which don't involve any difference in rights.
Wealth inequity is only one factor. Since we're throwing around hypotheticals, which society would you prefer? One that has high income equality, but most people are poor (i.e. Bangladesh)? Or one with low income equality, but most people are middle class (i.e. America)?

Where would you like to live?
Nice to see that crazy hasn't disappeared.