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Comment by YooLi | Hacker News Reader

Is this available in video format? I can't help but think reading this is taking something out of context or missing information. Quick glance:

1. dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). - Like Google Code Search? That didn't turn out too well.

2. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. - What? I use email to converse with people, not to list what I need to do. Occasionally I will send myself a reminder mail with a list of TODOs, but my email inbox is definitely not a todo list.

5. his friend from apple: there will be no new good stuff post-steve jobs. - Is his friend Tim Cook? Isn't Apple famous for secrecy even inside Apple or do all 9000+ employees in Cupertino know what's in the pipeline?

Etc.

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Going to address only #2: My understanding is that what he means is that even a social totally "conversational" message is a todo item of "read me". Less "frivolous" emails tend to either contains direct action items or imply action items that must be taken.

PG wishes that aspect be more explicit in order to gain more control over it.

I would disagree with #2, At work my email inbox is certainly a todo list. I use IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Forums to converse. Actually 99% of my personal email is companies sending me updates (we got your online payment etc.)

It's funny that I read this now, during my lunch hour I was pondering over how email is broken and needs to be replaced I actually came up a few few innovative ideas but there's more to it. I don't however think that our curent Email system will be around forever, instead of a static thing that you receive it will will be more like a feed that can be paused and saved off to different tasks that could theoretically automatically handle the task for you. (FEED: Credit Card Statement just posted - You: Siri pay the bill from account XYZ)

I think you are taking it too literally or just not understanding the points.

Google Code Search is not the only example of a hacker search engine. StackOverflow is a better example and is turning out fantastically.

He's not saying it's a todo list for you to send in your own todos. He's saying that a lot of the mail you receive includes things you need to do.

It's not that his friend has seen Apple's pipeline. It's that his friend does not believe that Apple will be able to keep creating breakthrough products like iPod, iPhone & iPad without a product visionary CEO.

> Like Google Code Search? That didn't turn out too well.

Duckduckgo is sort of trying this approach. It isn't taking over the world, but I think it's having reasonable success.

> Occasionally I will send myself a reminder mail with a list of TODOs, but my email inbox is definitely not a todo list.

I think many people (myself included) feel their inbox is a list of things they need to respond to... which is somewhere between a conversation and a to-do list. But a full inbox can feel like a list of obligations.

> Isn't Apple famous for secrecy even inside Apple or do all 9000+ employees in Cupertino know what's in the pipeline?

His friend may be talking about the culture of Apple rather than the list of current products. I'm still skeptical of his friend's claim, but that seems a possible interpretation.

Somewhat curiously (since they're a company full of engineers) I don't think Google ever really understood what Code Search was about, or loved it as a project.

It was neat that such a thing existed, but every time I used it, I really had to get creative about getting it to cough up useful results for me. It certainly wasn't in the same league as Google.com search, or Gmail or Google Maps.

Whenever I tried using it, I could think of a million ways to make it better, easier, more effective, and so on, but they never seemed to do anything with it. I don't know how you'd monetize it, but I think it wouldn't be too hard to make something far more usable than GCS.

https://twitter.com/jessenoller/statuses/173365958767935490 According to Jesse Noller the talks are being recorded

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