skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Half of a second is very noticeable (and annoying). I had similar perception in my previous work.

That's because it has to load django and the whole django project. Here's click:

> time python test.py --help
Usage: test.py [OPTIONS]

Options:
--help Show this message and exit.
python test.py --help 0.06s user 0.02s system 95% cpu 0.078 total

and argparse:

> time python test.py --help
usage: test.py [-h]

optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
python test.py --help 0.03s user 0.02s system 93% cpu 0.054 total

reference:

> time python -c 'print "hello"'
hello
python -c 'print "hello"' 0.01s user 0.01s system 88% cpu 0.025 total
Where did I say I wanted to kill anyone?
I think it would work better one-way if you could separate "visible to" and "posted to". I would like to post to "public" and "techy people", which would mean it appears in the feeds of people I don't have in my circles who have me in theirs, and people I have in my tech circle. It would like it to still be visible to people in my other circles if they went looking for it, but it wouldn't appear in their feeds.
Suppose the settlement was $6B and 60k members are in the class. That's $100k per worker. However, the lawyers usually get 1/3, so $2B for the lawyers and $67k per worker.

That's the offensive part about class action lawsuits like this. The lawyers MAKE A FORTUNE. The class victims get a decent check, but nothing great, and probably less than they lost due to the crime.
it would also shift the cost to consumers.. at least once you use up your data cap.
What are some of Sergei's accomplishments contributing to Google in a big way?
Right, a "fast lane" for one service is really just a "slow lane" for everybody else.
Another version of the same thing - encrypt your phone with a large key file stored in memory (like an 8096-bit SSL private key or something). If you don't take some action (logging in, etc) every 30 minutes, the key file is deleted, rendering the data completely inaccessible.

You then have the option of keeping a backup version of the key file somewhere separate, where police aren't going to be able to find it or using a dead man's switch which triggers the destruction of the backup key on a longer timescale (1 day, 1 week).

Of course, encrypting the phone with a password whenever the screen goes off serves essentially the same purpose, the only difference being that using an auto-shredded key file would likely be slightly more convenient for day-to-day use, and that once the key file is shredded, it's impossible for them to compel the login information from you; the best they can do is get the location of the backup key from you, which can itself be booby-trapped to self-destruct (this has the advantage that it's stored on hardware YOU control, whereas a self-destruct password on the phone itself wouldn't do much if they bother to make a backup image before they start trying to decrypt it).
If you're not using your Gmail, just unify it. Nothing changes for you, and it's not annoying anymore.

If you don't want a real name attached, create a Google+ Page with your current nickname and use that. Then nothing changes for you, or anyone following you.

If I were Google, I'd like to move all my products under one account too.
Any time you use your real name, real HR or potential employer sees what you did. I do not want my chance to find work be influenced by random HRs opinions on what google play games I rated or which youtube videos I have in playlist. Nothing really controversial there, but people tend to be judgmental about details.

Forcing me to use real name means that I suddenly must be super careful about everything and control everything the same way as I control work. Not worth it.
It incentivizes Comcast to provide faster service for those who pay. It incentivizes them to provide slower service for those who don't.

We can comfortably say that 99.9% of the services on the internet are not going to pay Comcast. The big players might, but there's an extremely long tail.

Thus, for most of the internet, Comcast encounters a conflict of interest. Its actual paying customers want higher speeds. But it has every incentive to reduce speeds for services that aren't paying for more.

I pay my ISP for access to the entire internet. If they screw with my access to a service simply because they didn't pay, that makes no sense.

If I'm paying $75/month for high-speed internet access, that means the entire internet, not just the parts they get kickbacks from.

I pay my ISP for my access, Netflix pays their ISP for their access, and we get to talk to each other. That's how this stuff works. Comcast charging Netflix is double-dipping, and is directly opposed to their supposed purpose of serving me, their customer.

(Hypothetically. I'm no longer a Comcast customer, thank goodness.)

Edit: I usually hate real-world analogies, but I think it could be instructive here. Let's take the USPS as an example of something in the real world that looks a lot like an ISP.

I can pay USPS $5.60 for a flat rate Priority Mail envelope, and they will deliver the contents anywhere in the country within 2-3 days. Doesn't matter who's getting it, and doesn't matter what's in the envelope as long as it fits.

Now, let's imagine that some company ends up receiving a lot of mail. Providing mail service is expensive, right? It takes a lot of trucks and postal workers to deliver all this mail to this one company. Surely they should be charged for what they're using, right?

Of course, this company says no. These people who are sending us mail already paid USPS. It's their job to deliver mail to its destination once they get paid to do so. Why should they get paid twice to deliver the same piece of mail?

In retaliation, to "convince" this company to pay, USPS starts slowing their mail. Those trucks and mail carriers are expensive, we need some of them elsewhere. You'll just have to wait.

And as a result, because USPS is demanding that this company pay to receive mail that I already paid to send them, my "Priority Mail" starts taking 4-5 days to arrive instead of 2-3.

I hope it's obvious that USPS is completely unreasonable in this hypothetical scenario. I see no difference between this and Comcast charging Netflix for service I'm already paying Comcast for.
No, customers who want to watch Netflix increase those costs. Which really means, customers who want HD video streaming bandwidth increase those costs. To which the right answer is, build more bandwidth and charge the customers for it. Customers who want to watch Netflix, or any other HD video streaming service, can pay Comcast for "HD streaming" bandwidth; customers who don't can pay for the bandwidth they need. None of this should have anything to do with Netflix.

I understand that Comcast doesn't like this because it makes them a simple seller of bandwidth instead of a "provider of premium services", or whatever marketing mantra they're using this week. But if customers do not want their "premium services", but just want bandwidth, the solution to that is to build better premium services, not to try to get paid twice for one stream of bits.
Azure SQL Database introduces new service tiers
Perhaps I'm misremembering how the Google+ story unfolded, but I wouldn't exactly call feminist bloggers the most influential. They're loud and often make PR waves (the dickwolves incident comes to mind), but I don't think that's what killed Google+ (PA is still going strong). If what the tech community thought was incredibly influential, no one would be using Facebook or Snapchat due to privacy concerns (comments that so-often get brought up on Hacker News).

I'm not saying the real name policy didn't hurt Google+. I'm sure it did, but I think it could have weathered that storm if it wasn't weak in much more important areas like their launch strategy.
Awesome, this will be helpful in tracking down some weird behavior I'm currently seeing in vim...
This may work in a gambling friendly legislation. UK is one of the more liberal countries in that regard.
I would have expected that career paths in software development would emerge as the industry matures. Instead I have seen promotion paths vanishing, even in older lines of work.

The companies where you can work your way up from entry level to executive are disappearing. The only one I am actually aware of that still promotes from within, even up to the top levels, is Publix.
I would guess then that an outbreak of this sort is a testament to extremely squalid living conditions in the areas affected.
This article kind of oddly goes out of its way to erase Sergey from Google's history (and present and future). It's always seemed to me that they have a very beneficial symbiosis.

The idea of investors bringing in a "professional" CEO has largely died, thankfully. It must have been incredibly frustrating for Sergey/Larry to see a younger Mark Zuckerberg go from strength to strength as Founder/CEO while they had to pretend Schmidt was in charge for "adult supervision".
I think this will happen, but with autonomously driven vehicles.

While you're at work, your car will leave and drive through an amazon warehouse at 1mph. Someone picks your order, loads it into the trunk of your slow moving vehicle which then returns to your office. End of the day, your goods are there.

Lots of problems to solve between where we are and there, but I do think that's where we're headed.
> Comcast's customers are paying Comcast to deliver Netflix's bits to them. Why does Comcast need to be paid for those bits twice?

Because the customers have to pay for the bits being transmitted to them over Comcast's network, but Netflix has to pay for the privilege of competing with Comcast's own video services. It isn't coincidental that this became an issue after the FCC's Open Internet Order -- which specifically forbade discrimination against competitors to a broadband provider's own video services -- was struck down. This was pretty much the prime example of what it was intended to prevent.
Customers already pay Comcast to deal with that problem.
I'm ambivalent about the future of Google+.

Eventually though, it would be nice if someone at Google figured out how to make multiple-account usage not suck rocks. Why can I not sign out of a single account? Why does the order in which I sign into my accounts matter for so many things?
The justification, at least for me, is in the approach that Thelema as a whole takes towards religious experience, and in the experience I've had with the Book of the Law. The perspective of this particular Thelemite is that the Book of the Law is the product of one man's religious experience, and that book has been very useful in the personal and spiritual development of myself and others. I don't think the value of the book is it's provenance, whether that be human or divine. I find that it's value is in the ethics of personal liberty that it articulates and insofar as it serves as a means of my own growth.

There's a phrase you'll hear sometimes in Thelema: "The method of science, the aim of religion." This might appear at first to be absurd, but if you consider religion to be the process whereby we obtain genuine and personal spiritual experiences it makes perfect sense. You experiment, you keep records, you evaluate your results and seek to have the same kinds of experiences. I think that this attitude, when it's present, is what separates Thelema apart from other religions.
Google+, as a login integration scheme and a way to unify policies across services, made sense. As a social network? Not so much.

Google is a great company but community building isn't a core strength they have.

Also...is anyone else surprised by the 1,000 - 1,200 employee numbers for Google+?
I wasn't implying it was an intentional, just that it looks to me it's often the case that the portrayal tends to support the typical stereotypes.

That said, I really enjoyed the article, which I find really well-researched and well-written. Most of all I appreciate the fact that you, unlike writers on most publications, didn't waste time on useless descriptions of physical features or buildings and surroundings, and kept them to a minimum . Also, it's great that you reached out here on HN.
Google+ is Google's equivalent of Bing.

Scenario: a company with a quasi monopoly - and more money than it knows what to do with accordingly - responds to a fast growing potential competitor by getting into a market it doesn't understand well, is miles behind (arguably so far behind the market has already decided the winner) and isn't well suited to compete in.

See: IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook

Primarily I'm curious to see what Facebook's Bing is going to be. With a now very profitable, soft monopoly in social (and the willingness to spend to keep it), it seems inevitable Facebook will follow a rhyming history.
I agree with you, but I'm betting that's not where the actual congestion is occurring (although there may be artificial rate limiting)
They really do. Anybody who's been at a big company sees it all the time. Most don't make news stories because they aren't at a sexy company like Google, leading up a division that's well-known among consumers.

You wouldn't hear about something like the head of fraud detection at American Express leaving his job. I've seen it before (not at Amex, but other large companies).
> Routing each bit to customer houses is the difficult part.

That's what CDNs are for. Which, as the article shows, is how Netflix delivers video to subscribers of every other major ISP. Why is it they can somehow route all that traffic to customer houses but Comcast can't?
I didn't say it was immoral (my comment has generated a lot of straw men). I just think it creates other problems that no one seems to consider. I personally would rather live to 75 and be fairly healthy for most to that, than live to 100 and be in poor health for a significant part of that.
IFTTT deals directly with hooks that web/hardware/data services provide. Think of it less of a tasker for your phone (linking events on your phone) and more of a simple tasker that links web apps/services(often without even passing through your phone). So, it will not have nearly the amount of control that Tasker has on your phone, but also does somethings that would be less possible or more complicated with tasker. Give this page a look to get an idea of the breadth of recipies: https://ifttt.com/recipes
Hah! I'm right there with you, attempting to do the same thing in Central IL!

(Should I have acknowledged my bias?)
and this would be bad how? :)
Could only get it to work after a few tries unfortunately. Great to see some more options in the exit-intent space, but definitely needs some refinement; the form fields on the pop up won't accept any inputs.
I can see how 2 days can be unacceptable, but those reasons are just plain bad planning.
No, Comcast customers who use Netflix significantly increase those costs. It's not Netflix's doing.

If the usage pattern of Comcast's users is changing such that Comcast's internet offerings are no longer bringing in enough revenue to support usage, that's a problem with the offerings. They need to charge more, or charge differently.

However they change it (if indeed they need to change it, and it's not just a money grab, which seems more likely) then they need to charge based on how their users use the service, not what specifically they're using it for. If peak usage is a problem then charge more for peak usage, but there's no reason that A should pay more for the same peak usage as B just because A's peak usage involves Netflix.
Banks are hoding cash for the same reason as corporates. The cash is cheaply financed by low-cost debt and it has utility as an insurance-liquidity-pool-of-last resort in the case of a policy reversal by the Fed.

For argument's sake, assume debt is mis-priced right now relative to equity. If you believe that, and you are a bank, what you do is increase ROE through increasing leverage (shor debt markets+long equity). So, if you are a bank you borrow and buy back shares. Or, you borrow and keep shares at a minimum/flat.

On the other side of your ledger, if you are a bank and you believe debt is mis-priced, the last thing you want to be doing is going long credit (to customers). So, what you should expect is increasing debt/equity ratio and flat/decreasing proportion of long-credit/total assets.

The "stingy credit" allegation is perfectly rational if you make the assumption that debt is fundamentally mis-priced as an asset class. That is the essential assuption Wilson is making to explain why money is chasing equity/pe/vc.

The only open issue is whether or not the assumption is correct.

If we look at policy, when regulators ring-fence reserve and increase the reserve level, they are forcing the banks to sell-equity. The reason they are doing this is because--assuming equity is mis-priced--they understand that banks will leverage up. The problem with banks leveraging up increasingly over time is policy hysterisis.

If the fed policy results in increasing bank leverage, the baking system will become increasing more "brittle". This tie the hands of the Fed--when they move to revert policy--they will risk creating a problem due to having added "brittleness" to the financial system.

So, even the fed is acting as if the assumption about debt pricing is true.

That being said, it is a more difficult case to explain from first principles whether or not debt is truly mis-priced as an asset class. But the analysis can be followed as far as I can tell simpley based on the binary assimpyion (yes/no). And one of those assumptinos seems to explain alot, while the other faces a harder time making sense of the data we are seeing.

From your piece:

The hope is that the lower interest rates will encourage people and businesses to take out more loans and thereby start spending again.

What we are seeing is opportunistic borrowing for financial engineering. We are not seeing 1:1 borrowing to spending on operating expenses or PPE. We are seeing borrowing that is being spent on share-buy-backs and/or cash-stockpiles that maked increasing leverage ratios more operationally risk-tolerant. (And it seems this is true for corporates and financials, at least to a first order approximation.)
How come no one goes to prison? (Genuine question: does US monopoly law not allow that outcome?)
That's a "150mbit" connection that still stutters when watching YouTube and Netflix.
I agree too. Google tend to generate hard to use interfaces. Especially when you have small monitor, it is as if they did not eve tried them on such device.
IDEO Takes on School Lunches
UPS drivers are making six-figures with seniority, and most of them love the work -- they're outside and get to interact with people frequently. (I've yet to work at a business that isn't on a friendly, first-name basis with their UPS driver.) The preloaders who actually put the packages on the trucks don't have it so great. The shift starts at 2-3 AM, you're working on a conveyor belt in a big warehouse, and you have to load 5 trucks in 6 hours -- while the drivers get 8-10 hours to unload their one truck.

Source: Dad works for UPS, I worked as a preloader.
The funny thing is I really like Google+.

Of course I don't use it much because so few of my friends do, and that's the rub. But if I could magically move all my facebook friends to G+, I would.
> It's a good idea to be comfortable compiling/packaging your infra from source

Would highly recommend becoming comfortable making your own packages (with any security updates, misc changes, etc.) over compiling and installing your own stack from source - distro packaging really is mostly your friend.
It's related to something called the Shadow DOM (http://glazkov.com/2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/)
(http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/intro-to-shadow-dom--net-...)
and our friends the render-engine makers just had a big internal 'argument' about the wisdom of exposing it [Encapsulation !] and how. Where it is accessible -- Chrome -- things are pretty sketchy.
Personally, I'd think long and hard before enabling it and all but Google [and Opera] seem to agree, but last I heard, 'we' are not going to have much say in the matter since Google announced they will go ahead with it unilaterally.
Try using Chrome's multiple profile feature. I use one for each Google account and it makes the multiple accounts issue much easier to manage.

I also use LastPass across profiles and 2-way auth for both LastPass and Google accounts.

If you want separate accounts just make one for YouTube (or whatever) then a separate one for Gmail.
Was there a project management level reason to it, or was it just not the right combination of people? Anybody know more?
How The FCC Plans to Save the Internet by Destroying It
Street View Motion-from-Structure-from-Motion (Google)
I don't disagree; I think that slow rollouts of large products make sense from a technical standpoint (you can make sure that nothing breaks down at the large scale, and fix problems before they become a big issue), but I think that invite-only betas which last weeks or months can often hurt product uptake.

I was just clarifying that the invite-only stage didn't last more than a year.
> suddenly your concentrated 1GW beam is pointing at an apartment building.

Wait ... have you calculated the antenna size required to produce a beam able to pick out an apartment building, at microwave wavelengths, from orbital heights? Consider the distances and the available microwave frequencies, and you'll see that you cannot get a beam narrow enough to resolve an apartment building from orbital heights, with any reasonable dish size.

Remember that, at sufficient distances, all antennas become cosine emitters with no ability to concentrate their energy in a specific location. This is true for lasers, x-ray emitters and it's certainly true for microwave emitters.

My point is that a practical system such as we're discussing must have a large receiving array to accommodate the beam size at ground level. It's not going to be anything resembling a death ray.
The risk of getting caught isn't constant, it's highly dependant on the circumstances and the perpetrator.

Also, besides the crime itself, spending a large sum of ill gotten money without getting caught is a lot easier if you already move in an environment geared for that - few things you can do in a middle class lifestyle that won't arouse suspicion.
The thing about Mesothelioma is that it doesn't show up for a long time - sometimes 20 years or more. That's what makes asbestos so devious - it's easy for corporations to deny injuries they caused people 20 years and billions of dollars of profit later. If you think this isn't happening in the US anymore (a misconception a lot of people have) - I would recommend you read up on it:
http://www.takejusticeback.com/Asbestos
That makes no sense. Charging Netflix for congestion their traffic creates on Comcast's upstream pipes has nothing to do with congestion or routing difficulties inside Comcast's network. Comcast still has to route "each bit to customer houses" in the current scenario of Netflix paying for access.

The fact that Comcast is eschewing the Netflix offer of free Open Connect CDN appliances (https://www.netflix.com/openconnect) tells me that this isn't an issue relating to upstream congestion, but rather with Netflix competing with Comcast's own VOD service.
"Its the advancement of human race that matters."

Is it?
Its all going to fizzle out anyway.
Odd, it would be $120 for 100mbit for me. The joys of regional pricing?