Oculus

Hypothetical: If AWS was available at the time Google was just starting, would it have made sense for them to go with AWS?

SEEKING WORK - Toronto/Kitchener or Remote

I'm a full stack web developer based in Toronto/Kitchener.

Skills: AngularJS, Node.js, Express.js, Android, D3.js, jQuery, pure Javascript, Photoshop, PostgreSQL, Nginx

Experience: I've written RESTful APIs, survey Widgets, web applications, and Android apps. I also have experience with Arduino (maze solving car), 8085 Assembler, and C (both at a basic level). I'm always open to learning anything that gets the job done.

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Could the older members of the HN community pitch in and give a couple points of wisdom they acquired over the years (Would probably more useful than everyone just bashing the article)?

Now it would be great if there was a certain court in Texas that votes in favour of citizens for every Patriot/FISA Act court case, just like there is one for patent trolls.

Are there really tech giants that are totally ok with our current patent system? I was under the impression that no company was happy, just some (e.g. Intellectual Ventures backers) are making due with what they can.

Ok, not as bad as I originally calculated. If that money went to lobbying though, it'd be fair to argue that they'd be closer to solving the fundamental issues there are in patent laws vs. acquiring a portfolio of patents that are only a temp. fix.

That's cool, I never knew Stack Overflow was using Node in production.

Google lost about ~$9 billion on Motorola (~$12 Billion acquisition and now a ~$3 billion sale). This happened in the span of 2 years. You could throw $100 over your shoulder every second for those two years and that still wouldn't amount to $9 billion.

We're the patents really worth that much?

Edit: To anyone who uses the recent news about Google being forced to pay a percentage of their AdWords revenue to a patent troll: couldn't you spend $9 billion on lobbying to end this whole disaster of a patent system forever?

Is it a Microsoft stack all the way down or are there parts of the codebase that are written in other languages? In my mind, when a company gets big enough you usually get different teams writing in different code bases if it fits into their problem domain better.

Man that sucks, sorry to hear it. I guess on the bright side, you didn't have your entire online identity destroyed which was possible given the attacker had your email.

If the author is reading, did you end up getting back your @n username? If so, did you simply go to Twitter and explain to them the whole story?

The fact that mental illness is taboo exaggerate its effects. If talking to counsellors/professionals was common practice and generally accepted the same way going to the doctor to get a physical once a year is, we'd not only lose a lot less people to suicide, but we'd also lower crime rates.

I can here to make that exact comment. It always irks me that a lot of people don't realize 'quantum' == 'small'.

Imagine a world in which Google recruiters have a profile of you on their desk of likes, dislikes, likely life goals, and potential avenues to woo you into joining them. I imagine Facebook has a dataset that could be applied to make such a thing and soon (if not already) so will Google.

Could 3 people be worth that much? This ranks as one of the ten most expensive acquisitions by Google[1].

1: http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/14/where-nest-ranks-among-goo...

This has seriously piqued my curiosity. Do you think Google bought the product or the team? $400M is a big chunk of change for ~3 people.

Edit: peaked --> piqued, thanks to spiderPig!

$400M for a company I've never heard before is quite surprising. Could someone who participates in the machine learning community share any insights or facts they have on the company? Other than the founders' histories, the article doesn't do much justice to the pricetag.

Is the main idea behind this scheme to get other participants to lower the price and since the orchestrators got their positions earlier they profit or do they simply need the volume of the masses to make their scheme profitable? If it's the latter, couldn't they just get a large enough loan and move the markets with their own funds seeing as Dogecoin is still a relatively small market?

I've been thinking about this all day. How could we, as hackers, build tools that allow for such activist groups to organize online, but yet keep these plans safe from the government?

The real power Netflix has is they're at a point where they'll decide the entire future of an industry. TV-advertising will have to adapt to a world in which most people watch Netflix. In House of Cards they did quite a few product placements, but I don't think that's sufficient to absorb the multi-billion $ industry that advertising is. It'll be interesting to see where Netflix decides to carry the torch.

I'm surprised Shopify[1] isn't on the list seeing as they're a fairly well known Canadian startup.

1: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-busi...

The likely logic behind shutting down Picnik would have been to lessen the competition to Google+.

I'm currently working on an programming contest judge[1] written in Node, that uses Docker to run submitted programs in.

1: https://github.com/EmilS/OnlineJudge

What I'm wondering is do people in North Korea understand that the government is lying through its teeth or do they really buy it all?

Isn't Lenovo beginning to encroach into monopoly territory? I keep hearing how they are purchasing large chunks of the current PC market.

If you're a one man show, keep in mind that all those users sending you emails about unwanted charges create a big customer support overhead. That's time taken away from marketing or improving your product. Instead of wasting their time and your's, just send them a heads up email.

I've yet to encounter a scenario where the name of the service changes. I guess in that case you could always use something like internet archives to see what the name was previously? The approach's success is in following a set of rules unquestionably and for all services. So for example for all multi-word services, you use camel case.

Personally, I use a self devised algorithm for each service. In comes the service's name, out comes a password.

An example of an algorithm could be the first two letters, the last two letters and place those around the name of the person who created the service. This is a poor and somewhat weak algorithm, but the main idea is given the service's name you are not only able to derive the password, but each service has a unique one.

'Local variable declarations are unobservable' - I thought that local variables get added to the function object similar to the way global variables get added to the window object. In that case wouldn't you be able to observe the function in which the local var is being declared?

I think this is advice that everyone should follow despite your age. Doing things like staying healthy or decreasing your own levels of stress not only do wonders to your productivity now, but you'll be repaid with a lack of health issues in the future as well.