arindone

Anyone going to say it? DuckDuckGo searches are still really low quality. I WANT them to be a legitimate competitor in the space (in fact, I've been having similar hopes for Bing for years) but it's just not there yet.

I'm surprised not many people are pointing out the antitrust concerns here...There are a few competitors in the space, but there may be a strong case that Google is essentially buying out that Waze's capabilities and niche are only rivaled by that of Google.

This is junk -- there is absolutely nothing that the companies can say to satisfy the critics. We're not going to get at the truth via conspiracy theories and making connections in the language of the denials. "Non-denial"??? If you were in the CEO's shoes, and knew that the PRISM issue was false, what would you say DIFFERENTLY?

What frustrates me is that this comes from the assumption that Yahoo & co. are absolutely without a doubt guilty.

To be honest I'm still catching up on a lot of the details with these stories, but it's this comment that made me wonder if there is a bit of hyperbole going around. Companies make leaks all the time on the most mundane things (hell Apple can barely contain the new iPhone that is usually coming out.) I'm hesitant to believe all the conspiracy theories going around that the companies willingly did this, or that it's as easy as it sounds.

I don't think this is helpful or productive -- it's not the companies at fault, but rather the government that is making this compulsory.

I agree 100% in theory -- but it's still a nice essay to have on HN given the million of other blog posts about the complete opposite reaction to Facebook that get upvoted to obilivion when they're also all pretty much annecdotal.

Essentially I upvoted the article because it's nice to know that HN isn't completely a sound-proof echo chamber =)

Agreed -- and I find your use case interesting, because when I hear of some obscure new social network that only works on web or some has some crazy obscure features that only rich white tech people care about, I think about the case of someone from Bolivia/South Africa/Phillipines who uses Facebook, can access it on pretty much any phone, and finds it valuable...a problem that many products/networks (outside of maybe Twitter and Evernote) have successfully solved

There are too many people commenting on Techcrunch that are almost rooting for Zynga to fail and/or finding it amusing -- there are a still good number of people working at Zynga (with families and livelihoods at stake) and I hope they can right the ship and figure this out.

Not necessarily true -- you can report/dislike ads anytime/anywhere on Facebook and Twitter (maybe Google+? I don't use it really)

Some of the discussion here may be PART the reason...but only a small part. If you really think about what Facebook and Twitter are trying to do, they're trying to construct 'graphs' -- a social graph or an interest graph, depending upon which suits your cup of tea; and graphs are based upon connections. When you "like" or "retweet" or "follow" something/someone, you establish and create a link in this gigantic web of connections. Think of it like developing a system of telephone wires.

Therefore, in this model, it doesn't REALLY make sense to have a dislike or a 'dis-retweet' option because you can't create a 'non-connection' more than leaving a void space between you and said other object. That's why these words aren't in the vocabularies of these tools mentioned.

At least that's the visual mental model that I have, and I would encourage others to consider this.

Exactly -- if the general public really cared about this, Outlook.com would be more popular and Gmail would be in the basement.

>Less kids get STEM scholarships and more H1B visas.

And more taxes would just put well meaning hard-working fellow Tech community members out of work at Apple. It's not such a clear trade-off as you make it seem with your logic. And frankly, the issue comes down to the key quote in the WSJ article:

"The investigation found no evidence that Apple did anything illegal."

You should be upset at your Congressmen/women that make the laws rather than the "big bad corporations" that obey them.

I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat.

Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on their chat client.

No love for Yahoo? I'm not an employee there, but even I find it annoying that even when there is solid good news there's a heap of people on HN trying to tear them down at every decision/move they make (let's not forget about the "forbidding working remotely will be the death of Yahoo..." tirades)

On one hand there were people trying to say that Apple deserved every bit of its stock drop, but when Yahoo gets a boost it deserves no credit?

These (Yahoo team) are your fellow tech community members who are passionate (hopefully) about what they do and have life savings and paychecks riding on this -- let's cheer them on and offer some constructive feedback.

Dude -- I think Yahoo is cool again in my book. 1TB of pictures free combined with the blogging platform that is Tumblr is pretty potent.

Unlike many haters out on the HN forums these days I'm actually really excited to see what comes of this.

Tumblr really has blown up in terms of users and content created (anecdotal evidence from some folks I know that used to intern there) -- however their issue is they waited too long to figure out how to monetize. And to be honest the formula for monetizing requires experimentation and iteration.

I absolutely love the Windows Phone and think it's very underrated. I would use one all the time but our company phones are only iPhone or Android =(

Ah that explains it. I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories in general, but it definitely was suspicious at first =)

I don't know -- at the time of this reply 12/30 top links were Google related. Google does some interesting stuff but the Tech world isn't THAT small.

I've said this before and I'll say it again -- why the complaints now, when Google has been doing this for years? Essentially, they can collect your information from emails, purchasing habits & financial information from Google Wallet, income, and combine that with Google+ social data, files you put into Google drive, and you have a complete profile that's ripe for advertising.

'There is no shortage of tech workers' != 'There is no shortage of GOOD tech workers'

What has been bothering me about this study is that almost no effort has been made to quantify or even investigate the quality of these workers. A community college can pump out STEM folk by the bundle, but they're not the quality that a school like MIT will produce -- the latter of which we desperately need and the former of which are f*ing worthless.

"How can you tell someone isn't on Facebook? Don't worry -- they'll tell you."

I read this a while back on a HN thread and it resonates more and more by the day -- there are a number of dedicated haters such that such things don't suprise me...it may need a bit rough on the edges but some take it a bit extreme

Agreed - yet another article on HN that's all hearsay and uses no data to back it up

(I actually love HN, but this trend, especially among a group that's supposed to be very technical, is often disheartening)

I am really impressed -- With the results in their current state, I'm excited to see how they improve with scale (i.e. more and more people searching and adding data to the machine learning algorithms)

I think a Bing vs. Google vs. Samuru challenge should be done a la what Bing did in their most recent marketing spree; I'm curious what the rankings would be

Data? Source?

But that's just hearsay and conjecture -- we don't know it was turned off for "profitability" reasons or whatever. In fact Ribbon's blog indicates that Twitter was very receptive to the idea: http://blog.ribbon.co/an-update-on-in-stream-payments-on-twi...

Further, we haven't heard Twitter's side to this -- was there a violation of the TOS that the Tech bloggers didn't catch (or bother finding the other side of the story?)

Essentially you're jumping the gun in saying that Twitter is two-faced ("They say they're open but they're really not") all based upon no data or concrete evidence.

1) The constant refrain from many in the tech community of "I would pay to use service X and therefore having a paywall is a legitimate business model" frustrates me to no end, because it's such a "moderately wealthy tech person from the West" point of view held by those with the disposable income to spend on these services. If Facebook's mission is to "make the world more open and connected," it would be impossible to accomplish that if you're charging some rando in Uganda who is accessing Facebook on a 'feature' phone, or worse, the equivalent of their monthly or yearly income. Further, if you look at the political discourse in the middle east that is occurring predominantly on FB and Twitter, it would be ass-backward (and truly "evil") to charge these people to have that discourse.

2) Indeed the point you make about non-techie friends is relevant but you miss the point -- most people don't care about these issues if the result is an amazingly useful tool. So what if ads are correlated with usage: god-forbid you see something interesting that you may want to buy or is relevant to your tastes. And honestly it's no more true that FB 'gives' your data away any more than Google 'gives' away your Gmail/Gdrive/Picassa/etc. data.

Some thoughts:

1) this article is based upon hypothetical notions about what Home "may" do, despite it being not even released yet

2) Google has collected user data for ages via Android for Google Now and few complained about privacy issues -- all data from its various accounts are aggregated into one centralized location to target ads more effectively for users. If you're really going to cry about privacy issues you need to be fair here and hold everyone accountable, and not just sites you may not like.

3) The majority of people may not care, frankly -- people optimizes their utility differently.

Depends on the OS -- Jellybean is different from Ice Cream Sandwich is different from Gingerbread is different from...

If you want something like this on all Android phones, it's more than just making an app to put in the Google Play store -- it's understanding the ins and outs of the different nuances of each OS...

get the average person to care?

currently anyone in the world on pretty much ANY device can access, register an account, and connect fast and easy to their nearby friends on Facebook. The FB philosophy is to "make the world more open and connected" , not "help connect relatively wealthy, tech oriented people." Diaspora has a number of <i> significant </i> hurdles it needs to tackle to just be in the conversation:

1) Ease of access from any device -- can some rando in Egypt open up a 'dumb' phone, sign into his account, and enter the political discourse relatively easily? Twitter is getting there on this account, and it's why Twitter is in the conversation.

2) Scale -- currently everyone and their mom (and dad, grandparents, cousins, long-distant alumni friends, etc.) is on Facebook. For a social network to "replace Facebook" in your words, their needs to be a solid value proposition over Facebook that causes huge droves of people to move away or switch. Currently there's little -- maybe privacy controls could be easier to use, but Zuck himself said that users control their data already: "Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with." Other than that -- why would the average person put in the "activation energy" over inertia to switch, other than "it's shiny and cool?"

In all Diaspora is an interesting project, but it has little differentiating value prop