dreamfactory

> For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.

You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.

I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in.

On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do we representatively govern otherwise - the alternative is to cede governance to global corporations). Google is particularly sensitive to the latter as it has a huge de facto monopoly and has become part of our infrastructure - it is absolutely a huge target for regulation wherever it has traction.

Talking of competition, is there anything viable in the shape of an open source effort where the algorithms and indexes could be crowd-managed - perhaps indexing via browser plugins?

> what some bureaucrat has decided

That is precisely my point.

(And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)

Disagree. The sanctions that Google applies indicate that it is unable to effectively index a free web and is instead relying on editorial control and favouritism.

As a user I care whether Google finds me the most relevant results from the biggest haystack or whether it editorialises those results - it's a big distinction. By that measure I'd say they definitely _shouldn't_ be penalising sites for finding loopholes in their algorithms but should simply close those holes up.

About a year ago I tried it for receipts due to the OCR but at least half the scanned images got lost (some in transit, some after they had been viewed in evernote). Shame as I'd have have gone for at least one paid account if it had worked.

google docs?

Seems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).

demographics and dwell time

That's precisely why they are usually legally worthless, where they act as a restraint on trade for the individual concerned.

> every despot on the planet sees that and can say "Well America does it," and have firm ground to stand on. That's why we need people like Snowden, to keep the American government in line...

Whether styled as a despot or not, when it comes to the exercise and maintenance of power, nobody is ever saying anything remotely like 'well America does it' - it's just irrelevant. It's never a moral question, but one of what power can be assumed (both at home and abroad). That's the interesting thing about Snowden - he just acted and took the upper hand. (And even more so that he further consolidated by maintaining it, despite huge efforts to bring him down a peg or two.)

Think about any big project you've been a part of. With the benefit of hindsight, is it not true to say that you might well not have taken them on in the first place if you'd known what would be involved?

I take management blaming here to mean that this is a systemic problem that can can only be solved at an organisational level (rather than blaming a caste within that org).

This whole light thing seems a bit out of proportion, like being paranoid of people wearing shades in case they are eyeing you up (which is more than half the reason anyone wears them in the first place).

How hard can it be to just stick them in some aviators? Plenty of people would be after a pair of those. You could be half geek and half Lou Reed circa Street Hassle.

I think there's maybe a distinction to be drawn between transactions between individuals, which could be made in virtual doughnuts if both parties agreed, and a currency used in trade.

As far as I can see, btc is now two things - a protocol which could be used as technical implementation for any number of things, and also implementation of a currency which isn't backed by any concrete asset or entity (other than end users). For the currency, the main value and insurance against risk seems to be in the brand (i.e. what makes a bitcoin worth more than a foocoin).

But it's trivial for a government to kill commercial use of btc as an alternate currency within their jurisdiction. It's not legal tender and therefore can be banned for use in transactions by registered companies - that can be easily enforced by tax authorities and police. It's also quite justifiable on the basis of collecting taxes, protecting the economy generally, and protecting citizens from being caught with paper that isn't backed by law or national banks. Black markets are by definition illegal - the only question is to what extent they are tolerated and that is largely a question of their size and impact on the formal economy.

It may not be for all but as far as I'm aware most productive creative people are rigorous in their schedules. For example, I've read a number of artists and writers talking about the importance of developing the habit of creating output every day regardless of quality.

If it were me I'd also get together a consortium of competing civilian recruiters to back such a venture.

There's no such thing as an unbiased report and you are being disingenuous here as the article is clearly a personal account. As such, it obviously wouldn't and shouldn't aim to be a broad survey on the pros and cons of the utility and ethics of various approaches. On the contrary, the aim is clearly to add new first-hand information to the public debate, which has hitherto been deliberately biased by extensive and coordinated efforts to repress that info.

I think you intended this as a reductio ad absurdum but a lot of people take this view, quite possibly the majority of Europeans and Buddhists for example.

A related point is that we used to have conscription and it was much harder to get elected if you didn't have a good record of service. This meant that leaders thought much harder about going to war and there was a genuine political cost in that the masses had a better grasp on the implications.

The usual argument is that such people 'occur naturally' and the army at least directs their activities outwards (it forms the distinction between grunt and officer class in the forces). I don't agree with the premise but it's a nature vs nurture question.

Remember the official public NSA justification includes 'defending economic interests'.

Not to justify any of this business, but why on earth wouldn't they apply 'beyond reasonable doubt' in their own minds when summarily executing somebody in the first place?

It's already got a lot more political stories (though necessarily post-Snowden); HN feels pretty much like early reddit now. Though I do think Reddit morphed its community precisely to avoid just being another in this list (Digg exodus helped that too of course).

Modernism finished some time in the 80's (though I do wonder if Ballmer ever left that decade).

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a big overlap of the early adopter core user bases from kuro4hin, slashdot, reddit, and HN - i.e. a lot of the same people moved from one to the other and created the editorial direction (so to speak). By that measure HN is 'the next Reddit'.

> What actually happens

You have Digg as an example of what happens.

Online display advertising is dead, even the biggest web publishers are trying to develop alternative streams and get off it. The money is now all in commerce and engagement (leading to commerce).

Isn't solutions/application architecture a kind of unicorn job by this definition?