skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aren't drunk teenagers known for vandalizing things? It doesn't even need to be motivated by anything to do with the robot itself, breaking shit's just plain fun.
Note this is in a fancy neighborhood. I wish all 60/70s projects to be redesigned like this. So far some very large towers have been wiped to build more human blocks. I didn't know it was an option to 'refactor' such a big thing but the result is pretty convincing, both in terms of living conditions and cost. Kudos.
I don't use messenger on FB. I just use FB to post pictures of cats and to see what my 'friends' have been up to. I like FB's light touch, you can just hit 'Like' to remind people you exist.
Not the same.

Orthodontic procedures generally pay off in the long run. Straight teeth and an aligned bite are typically more functional. Straight teeth are easier to clean and preserve.

In many EU countries health insurance pays for them because a long term financial argument can easily be made.

Bad teeth can cause severe health issues and get expensive later in life.
I get your point about "being the service people just dump their stuff to" but it is still a valid point. The problem with the network effect that Facebook has so thoroughly entrenched is that, in my opinion, you have to first replicate the network before luring users away with better features or, e.g., offering a more anonymous or secure or less invasive alternative to Facebook. It's somewhat similar to how a supply vessel docks to the ISS in orbit, you first have to match the speed in orbit before making an approach and then docking.
An API-based system might be a good potential "killer". If I am not mistaken, that is what app.net is trying to be - have not heard from them in a while.

To quote my other post [0] in this thread: Facebook cannot be killed with something so similar to Facebook like Google+, much like Google cannot be killed with something like Bing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991161
Game theory is usually presented as the science of human interaction, but I admit that I have no special knowledge about what Nash might think. I do think that individual interactions are very different from overall trends in the same way that the structure of how two grains of sand interact with each other is different from the structure of a beach as a whole.

I have no doubt that every new technology invites exploitation, and you're right to think about the consequences. That's an essential part of the design process of any technology, especially one that's general useful. That's the reason why we have such complicated software licenses.

But EvilCorp doesn't need smart contracts to send robots to steal your children. It will definitely use them if they're convenient, but they could just as easily go with the traditional human blood on dead trees contract that's ensnared many souls. Smart contracts add very little to their already efficient operation. But the people who can't afford to hire lawyers, bribe the police, and build robot armies will benefit a lot from enforceable contracts that don't require huge resources to enforce for purely digital transactions.
Not really comparable. Microsoft bought a unit with tens of thousands of employees, factories around the world, a (modestly) profitable featurephone business...

All that had some value in 2013 (although perhaps not the amount Microsoft paid for it). Microsoft's own decisions post-acquisition expedited the loss of value and resulted in them writing off the entire purchase price.
Facebook succeeded in a crowded space, full of mediocre but wealthy competition, because of where it started. It began at Harvard, moved out to the Ivies, then the top 100 universities, then all universities, then everyone. By this point, it had iterated its way out of the technical failings of the initial product (except for the use of PHP, which still hasn't been entirely undone).

Google+, when it started, was superior in almost every way to Facebook in its first few years. (That's not a fair comparison. Facebook was a startup social network; Google+ came out of the gate at 120 mph.) It had Hangouts, which would have been a killer app if people had actually used them as a sharable social space (i.e. to "hang out") as the execs thought they would. The problem was that Google thought its muscle would allow it to take a greatest-fixed-point approach (i.e. a "stay popular once popular" strategy) whereas any social network needs to focus on the least fixed point, because that's where it's going to land. It had wealth but no users and no credibility, and it wasn't able to get those.

Hangouts are genuinely useful and there was some guy at Google who argued that courting independent game developers (and getting high quality products, rather than third-string products and Zyngarbage from mainstream publishers who expected Google+ to fail and weren't going to use their best stuff) would have allowed Google+ to grow organically and inductively, with the same "cognitively upscale" initial user base that made Facebook, thus proving Hangouts and moving to progressively larger subsets of the population. It became obvious that the failure of Google Games (and, possibly, of Google+ in its entirety) came from Google's leadership not listening to him. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.
Common foundation of great engineering cultures
Everyone seems to be focusing on the economic and environmental issues but missing the elephant in the room. Even the original article misses the mark:

> After all, what wouldn’t China pay to see one of its naval fleets one day emerging from the Central American jungle right under America’s nose?

It's not what China would pay to have its naval fleets traverse the canal, it's what China would pay to have a legitimate-sounding reason to have its naval fleet stationed at either end. It's a similar motivation for building those artificial islands in the South China Sea. The canal itself is a red herring.
I honestly think that some areas of social networking phenomena are dying and Google+ came on board at the beginning of the end. From my observation, Facebook is dying a slow death. I see most of my Facebook "friends" aren't posting anything anymore and just browse. Some only post check-ins when they travel, otherwise everything is deadly silent. I have my Facebook disabled most of the time, but every once in a while i login to see what's going on with some folks across the pond and all I see is everyone reposting news. Facebook has become a boring place to read quirky news and get on with the rest of your day. And when discussing this with some friends who were at some point active on Facebook I consistently get the same "there is nothing going on it" response. I can't imagine that this will continue for much longer.

Frankly, another big reason G+ failed is because most people using Facebook didn't need anything else. Google essentially tried to fix a problem that wasn't even a problem. Yes, Facebookers complained about privacy concerns, but those who did were likely not even 2% of the entire user base.
I've never seen this mentioned so I'm doing to mention it. I suspect Google+, and the cannibalizing of other projects, was directed by Page. He became CEO in April 2011. G+ launched in late June 2011. April-May-June is about 90 days. From the article:

> The massive Google+ launch effort had all the hallmarks of a technology corporation: a code name ("Emerald Sea"), an artificial timeline (100 days to launch!), a dedicated secret building (with the CEO relocated there) and a full PR blitz once completed.

The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the driving force behind this. The article says:

> "Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive. "I am pretty sure Vic managed to frighten Larry into action. And voila: Google+ was born."

But for what actually happened to have happened, Page had to have bought into the idea independently (assuming he is independent). Every article I've seen about G+'s failure fails to mention anything about Page's role - this article goes out of its way in this strange way to try to say Page was just 'whispered to too much'.

> By early 2014, less than three years after its big launch, the Google+ team had moved out of its coveted building to a spot on campus further from Page. Gundotra announced his departure from the company that April — in a Google+ post, of course — to pursue "a new journey."

The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014. Evidence that Page was the driving force, not Vic.

This was an organization-centric article, but I wish it had mentioned the other potential causes for G+'s failure, such as being invite-only during the media attention, and the rude forcing of people over from other platforms (Reader, YouTube, Maps, business listings, etc).
I'm in California, where it is illegal.
If it did have a few hundred million actual regular users, that'd be really quite successful. But it seems incredibly unlikely to be true, but must instead be some kind of bogus definition optimized for hitting your OKRs. For example counting as users things like people logging onto third party sites using a G+ account or Youtube comment activity being artificially funneled into G+.
So, uh, what's the actual use of this? Think about it, normal emoji are pretty neutral since their features are abstract and they have a skin color (bright yellow) that doesn't exist anyway. If I send a smiley face with a skin tone attached I'm suddenly making a political statement with a smiley face. That just seems weird.
Europe's Waiting Room
> If Google+ has a few hundred million regular users

Yes, but that seems unlikely.
Thanks for giving the name; I wanted to describe why connecting two paths works. Other answers seemed to skirt around that without spelt it out.
Well, I think we should get the humanoids done first.

U+1F400 EMOJI MODIFIER SMURF
U+1F401 EMOJI MODIFIER NAVI
U+1F402 EMOJI MODIFIER GREY
U+1F403 EMOJI MODIFIER GRAY

… the last two being particularly useful for 1F47D  EXTRATERRESTRIAL ALIEN; and

U+1F404 EMOJI MODIFIER REPTILIAN SHAPESHIFTER

whose rendering is implementation-dependent but will be visually identical to one of the FITZPATRICK MODIFIER set if you know what's good for you.

But the real, important work will come with the modifier modifiers, e.g.

U+1F500 EMOJI MODIFIER MODIFIER EMBARRASSED
U+1F501 EMOJI MODIFIER MODIFIER SUNBURNT
U+1F502 EMOJI MODIFIER MODIFIER CHOKING
U+1F503 EMOJI MODIFIER MODIFIER DEAD

… to be used in conjunction with the EMOJI MODIFIER set.
These will need to be stackable if we are to be able to distinguish embarrassed dead white males from regular arrogant dead white males.

Another commenter mentioned the requirement for facial hair,

U+1F1330 EMOJI MODIFIER ANCHOR
U+1F1331 EMOJI MODIFIER BALBO
U+1F1332 EMOJI MODIFIER CHIN PUFF
U+1F1333 EMOJI MODIFIER CHIN STRAP
U+1F1334 EMOJI MODIFIER DUTCH
U+1F1335 EMOJI MODIFIER FIVE O'CLOCK SHADOW
U+1F1336 EMOJI MODIFIER GOATEE
U+1F1337 EMOJI MODIFIER HACKER BEARD
U+1F1338 EMOJI MODIFIER IMPERIAL
U+1F1339 EMOJI MODIFIER MUTTON CHOPS
U+1F133A EMOJI MODIFIER NECKBEARD
U+1F133B EMOJI MODIFIER SOUL PATCH

U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER BOX CAR MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER CHEVRON MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER DALI MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER HANDLEBAR MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER PENCIL MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER PYRAMIDAL MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER TOOTHBRUSH MOUSTACHE
U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER WALRUS MOUSTACHE

which in turn requires the development of headgear modifiers, so that it's possible to distinguish between U+1F468 MAN, U+1F3FB EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER TOOTHBRUSH MOUSTACHE (Hitler) and U+1F468 MAN, U+1F3FB EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, U+1F1430 EMOJI MODIFIER TOOTHBRUSH MOUSTACHE, U+1F1849 EMOJI MODIFIER BOWLER HAT (Chaplin).

(Edit: I'm at 1338 internet points right now, so somebody needs to downvote me for this.)
As someone mentioned, black text on a glowing white LED background is unnatural. Our eyes are not subjected to that anywhere else in life.

"Eye strain" might be overly dramatic, but certainly fatigue will happen earlier in bright contrasty reading conditions. Designers often want pure white backgrounds though, they love their white backgrounds! So the only improvement possible is to increase the text from #000 to something like #222. This does not mean the text won't look black anymore, it simply takes the edge off but still looks black. Obviously the lady's blog she wanted grey so she went with #444.

Ideally though pure white background should be avoided if there's pages and pages of text to read. "Paper white" is what e-readers aim for. Thank God the Kindle app for tablets allows background colours to be reduced. I like the "newspaper white" tone, with a touch of sepia thrown in. Perfect!

#FFF text on #000 background is the worst. Many designers I've worked with over the years agree. Paragraphs of text will "shimmer" due to the extreme contrast. If there's a lot of text on the page, never have it #fff on #000. Bring the white down a notch and/or the black up a notch. It will still look like white on black but just look softer and better.
I am sure there are differences, and many factors beyond the time spent at work that affect product decisions. At the same time, insulating your employees from the real world by providing services at work that allow them to spend more time at work is bound to create a disconnect between those creating your products and their ability to understand customers who operate in the real world. This may have been why Facebook was slow to figure out mobile...all their employees were spending all their time at work on desktops, and failed to see the fundamental shift happening as their users started accessing the site via mobile. Keep in mind I'm just speculating here...I have no inside knowledge of how either company operates.
Maybe when the delivery drone thing kicks off (if ever) they can make a slightly larger one and deliver people also. For that matter, if they can remote pilot a drone load of missiles to Afghanistan I don't see why it can't be done from rural Arkansas to Las Vegas. So maybe one day soon.. the technology is almost there. But right now we don't have the machines nor the infrastructure (legal and physical) to make anything like this possible.
"Most people, including many scientists, believe that emotions are distinct, locatable entities inside us — but they’re not."

Hmmm, smells like a straw-man. What kind of scientists? Biologists? Chemists? Cosmologists? And how exactly does the author know this? A recent survey of published papers? TV shows? An informal questionnaire? Maybe the author will get to it later.

"My lab analyzed over 200 published studies, covering nearly 22,000 test subjects, and found no consistent and specific fingerprints in the body for any emotion. Instead, the body acts in diverse ways that are tied to the situation."

There we go.
I find that the prevalent user-friendly, minimalist design philosophy is very much compatible with performance principles like those that I have outlined.

Performance is not the opposite of UX, it is an important part of it.
I'll be darned. Would you say they fix its core problems vs other protocols? Or try to do incremental improvements?
Oneplus is a low end phone? You might want to do some more research.
As someone who worked at Google when Google+ was released, IMO the failure was all about Vic Gundotra.

1. He's the elitist who went against Google's culture and separated the Google+ team in its own sooper sekrit headquarters with its own cafeteria.

2. He's the backstabbing liar who first said the company-wide annual bonus was going to be based on the success of Google+ and then when it briefly looked like it would be a facebook killer, he went back on his word, thus alienating pretty much everyone.

3. He's the out of touch dumba$$ behind real names that sucked the appeal out of Google+ and left it a dumping ground for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else.

The day Google+ was released, I was besieged with invite requests from friends and acquaintances. And the Google+ UI IMO was nicer than Facebook's (and it still is IMO). However, as soon as Google+ made it their business to out gay people using pseudonyms to stay in the closet, those requests stopped.

I'm sure there are many more reasons for the failure, but this was what I saw from within Google at the time.
> Without looking

You risk being wrong this way. Your #1 is OK, but #2 is false: there's no database (in the sense of RDBMS or NoSQL) behind HN. It's just plain files on disk. Which, of course, makes fetching data blazingly fast, thanks to how filesystems are already handled and cached by the OS.

Anyway, I long suspected that "gzip and cache the hell out of your site" is not the best way to go about optimizing websites. From my experience websites come in two flavours: tiny with no need for optimization at all and huge, where you need to optimize everything and you know it's not going to be enough unless you're willing to rewrite some code in C.
Well it's not anymore. There is a very clear picture of torn off arms lying in the gutter.
> The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off

This is a constant in every struggling project / startup.
Well the "⊂" symbol is actually somewhat ambiguous. Different mathematical pedigrees define it to either mean either loose subset or strict subset and its usage has never been completely standardised. The "⊆" symbol always means loose subset of, and the "⊊" always means strict subset of. Generally it's best to always use one of those, but in this context, where we're not trying to prove anything, just communicate an idea, the distinction between a loose and strict subset relations isn't really all that important.
I tried the online test a few weeks ago, and while it confirmed my colorblindness, it also said there was only a 30% chance that the glasses would work for me. :-/
I've seen similar patterns elsewhere: company X brings on powerful, smart, and egotistical person Y, who browbeats others into believing their pet project Z has to be top priority; those who disagree with Y leave Y's team (or perhaps leave X altogether); groupthink takes hold, and this perception of priority becomes reality; groupthink mutates into sunk cost fallacy to convince everyone to keep going.

This process is often reinforced with incentive structures:

- raised salaries for everyone working on Z;
- higher performance bonuses offered to top performers on Z;
- greater social cachet for those working on Z (more mentions in Q&A sessions, presentations, etc.; more marketing punch; more opportunities for advancement; air of secrecy; etc.)

Once the incentive structures take hold, even smarter employees have rational reasons to perpetuate Z.
It's beautiful and a great piece of work - not only its intentions, but also the code behind it. From that perspective all the games posted on HN would be inappropriate..
Yeah I have a small investment in SolarCity and I keep meaning to find out how they handle this situation. Imagine in 5 years some stories coming out regarding home owners having trouble selling (or losing value on) homes they equipped under a solar loan. That would likely affect future sign-ups.
Should I go to college?
What Emotions Are (and Aren't)
I regret that I have but one +1 for this comment. This is exactly what happened. The thinking was, "We're going to make a successful social network ... what can we do that looks like successful products?" So the target audience is just "everyone", since of course everyone wants to use a successful social network. And if the stats don't look like they're successful, make up new stats ("the fastest growing social network ever" bullshit). And when that fails, we force as many products as possible to integrate with it, which of course they have to do because we're making a "successful" network and who wouldn't want to integrate with "success"?
Now I have to wrap "every" "search term" "in quotes", it's completely absurd. Even then it assumes you made typos.
Why? It's a great example of marketing and an innovative blend of a modern tiling map and an old school guide map.

This is exactly the sort of thing to expect on HN, especially at a weekend.
I sincerely doubt that for people that wanted Facebook without Facebook Inc., Facebook with Google Inc. would be a winning proposition.
A well-understood phenomenon in DNS that most admins take care of to ensure users with a reasonable expectation end up in the right place. Further, a common case a admin should account for. Then, there's these admins and their apologists...

And another try has root working but not www. Need I say more lol?
Lovely map. It could do with clearer borders though. At first, I thought that parts of the map just weren't loading, when in fact I had reached the edge of the drawing.
What killed G+ for me was how hard they made it to actually read anything. Originally it was okay, but as time progressed they favoured images over text, and then kept spreading text out further and further apart. I took a screenshot at one point where I highlighted in yellow the actual readable content, making up a tiny proportion of the page: http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png

Of course they had years of experience in helping people read content with Google Reader, so that had to be shut down and lessons ignored. Then they made sure there was no API, or even RSS feeds, so no one else could make a more efficient reader either.

Or in other words, did anyone at Google actually try using their product? (I seem to say that a lot about different Google products.)
If you would truly rather keep a Nobel quality breakthrough to yourself in order to maximize personal gain, then I worry about you.
The blog post mentions "the images are too low resolution for a good print. We've made the high resolution versions available below for you to download."

Does this mean higher res versions came from another source or that these were somehow enhanced/cleaned up?
Gatún Lake of the Panama Canal is also freshwater, at 26m elevation.

Generally, the big risk with elevated freshwater lakes connected to the sea by locks isn't saltwater contamination, but the disastrous flood that would happen if all the lock gates were opened at the same time. A lot of work was put into the safety measures, most of which have been removed due to cost in recent decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_locks#Safety_feat...

If a flight of locks was completely opened, Gatún would promptly drain out of them, wiping out everything downstream. You could imagine the entire canal would be offline for months to years as infrastructure was rebuilt and the lake was refilled by rainwater.
I see all you can do is stoop to calling names, but I'll give you a proper reply regardless of the fact that you don't deserve one.

No, it's the artists who feel entitled to make money off their work, work that oftentimes is quite worthless or poor. Others are not required to offer content for free and I don't feel entitled to it. If it's there for free, maybe I'll consume it, maybe not. It's only the content creators who think their consumers feel entitled to free content because they're too stupid to come up with better business models to market their content. As a writer, musician, and artist, I offer a lot of my content for free with no ads and have no problem with that. I actually enjoy creating it and don't do it for the ad revenue. If other content creators want to charge for their content or wrap it up in ads, it's up to them to figure out a business model that works for their purpose. Their failing to do so does in no way reflect a failing in anyone's morality except possibly theirs.

tl;dr: If my ad-blocking is hurting these content creators so much, they should figure out a way to deliver ads that can't be blocked and stop calling the consumers names like "entitled" (because that's another reason the consumers don't want to pay for that mediocre two-paragraph piece surrounded by 10 megs of ads). Period.