pessimist

Go has some really great features, I've written a few thousand lines in it and enjoyed it, but there are some strange hangups that the go designers have that in the end make me think its going to go nowhere.

1. Rob Pike is immensely proud that the language has no generics, but this means that in the last 2 years, there isnt a proper implementation of a linked list that can hold an arbitrary type, or a min-heap, an ordered map, or a b-tree, or any one of countless data structures that one can take for granted in every other language. And yes, there are implementations that take interfaces, but you have to very odd-looking casts to coerce values in and out of them.

2. Go - or its testing support - doesnt allow a simple assert or EQUALS macro, simply because Rob believes everything should be done with if/then structures. Along with error handling, this makes go tests painful to read.

3. Idiosyncratic handling of pointers and values, leading to confusion everywhere and accidental copies and bugs where people pass by value accidentally because its extremely easy to.

4. Channels aren't really that useful beyond small programs (IMHO, maybe I'm wrong), and by making them synchronous any non-trivial go concurrent program has to reason very carefully to avoid deadlocks.

There are countless similar things. People will put up with these idiosyncracies for a while but move on in the end.

No - net income in the 3 months ending Mar 2012 declined to $205m from $233m in the 3 months ending Mar 2011. A big surprise, probably some big investment in datacenters or something. Net income can be rather bumpy, revenue growth was more solid at 45% year-over-year, but even that can't justify the massive valuation. The valuation is really a bet that FB future monetization will be amazing.

I'm not trying to spin this to make GOOG look good, but I would love to be able to spend $1 and get $1 back as profit in addition to my $1.

First you said - "It's easier for Google to just withdraw money from it's own bank account and deposit it to another one and call it "net income"." This is absolute nonsense, and what I was responding to.

It may well be that increasing TAC % implies a worse business for Google, but thats certainly not what your original point was.

No. According to David Drummond's postscript to http://investor.google.com/corporate/2012/founders-letter.ht...:

"Larry, Sergey and Eric have agreed to subject their shares to a Transfer Restriction Agreement. This agreement will maintain the same link between their voting and economic interests that exists today, even if they sell some of their non-voting Class C shares. If the founders or Eric wish to sell or transfer their non-voting Class C shares, a “stapling” provision in the agreement requires them to either sell an equal number of Class B shares, or convert an equal number of Class B shares into Class A shares. "

Net income is after subtracting TAC. Revenues increased by $2.1b, so Google paid $500m to acquire $2.1b in revenue. Of the $1.6b in "real" revenue growth, they made around $600m in profits. In other words their profit margin is roughly 40%.

Also if you're worried about such shenanigans, you can look at free-cash-flow, which was $3.1B for the quarter (astonishing for any non-oil/AAPL company).

Do you have a reference for survival rates? Note that there are many confounding factors - lung cancer incidence has dropped a lot although lung cancer itself remains intractable to average cancer survival rates may have improved.

The most likely explanation is random noise, and that this experiment will not be repeatable. Sadly almost all psychology studies are like this, an odd result thata is most likely statistical noise.

RedHat's $1m stock is his only big payout, apparently. Rather sad, considering the number of mid-level facebook engineers who will become many times as rich in a few months.

Agree with vangale, also a disruption is something that would likely cause an entire set of jobs/companies to be irrelevant, I don't see that here.

I wouldnt classify this as a disruption - more like a useful middleman.

Valid reasons to quit Google, but then he joins Microsoft?

My 5 year old has been using his iPad since he was 4, and we've encountered all these problems and more. The funny thing though is that he learnt to work around all of them! Accidentally presses menu, after a couple of times he learns what to do.

I think these obstacles of bad design are just more little puzzles for children. As parents we shouldnt obsess about having a perfect environment for our kids.

On the other hand, what really bugs me is when educational apps can be easily gamed. The math bingo app was completely useless once my son figured out he could solve it by randomly banging on cells and would eventually win. A lot more effort should go in to designing apps so that the child learns something real, as opposed to just learning to play the game.

In defense of Google, I think their machine translation is highly underrated, its simply incredible how good it is, at least for European languages. As is their contribution to building large data centers and manipulating large amounts of data (mapreduce, Bigtable was the first major nosql).

Facebook is too young to tell.

Still, IBM is the gold standard for CS research - Microsoft appears to have many productive researchers but I'm not sure they have made fundamental advances like virtual memory, hard disks, relational databases (all of which came from IBM).

Agreed, its the nature of science. That's why theory is so important and why physicists pay as much importance to non-experimental features like "beauty" when judging theories. Experiments cannot be trusted unless explained by theory!

The real issue is that experiments that give "expected" results are not subject to this kind of scrutiny. Thus experiments are much less trustworthy than one would assume. It sometimes takes decades for errors in experiments to come out - eg. from "Surely your joking, Mr. Feynman":

Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...

So by using a custom compiler someone speeded up an unspecified benchmark by 20%. Is this news?

Facebook will never grow revenue to 10x (matching Google) by continuing to sell display advertising on its own site.

However, it knows so much about users and keeps them logged in, so it definitely has potential to serve highly targeted or viral campaigns everywhere else on the web and mobile apps, a much better version of adsense.

Secondly, it is involving itself deeply in to user's habits and eventually may make a big play in to e-commerce, getting a cut out of every transaction made by the user (while frictionlessly sharing the information, of course). Credits is just in its infancy.

Finally, its learning so much about user's habits on the web that it can do a better job than Google at search, and make a killing on search ads.

If all this happens, $100B is a bargain.

Interestingly, Google 2011 revenues are $37b, profits $9.7b, ratio almost exactly the same. Google also has 10x the number of employees as FB. Of course FB growth is much faster.

Googler here - thanks for the real example query. Could you confirm if the query [nfc championship game] is still showing the MG Siegler post, or if it appeared only for a short while during the game. Thanks!

Thanks Google, small but symbolic.

Disappointed that Facebook/twitter appear to be relatively quiet. Facebook especially is immensely influential now. Perhaps they feel anything that hurts Google is good for them?

Hmm, "Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets according to a detailed statistical study based on the detection of three extrasolar planets by an observational technique called microlensing."

So we looked in 3 places, found 3 planets and are extrapolating to 100 billion? Surely I would wait for a few more examples?

Edit: Reading the full story, "Of the approximately 40 microlensing events closely monitored, three showed evidence for exoplanets. Using a statistical analysis, the team found that one in six stars hosts a Jupiter-mass planet. What's more, half of the stars have Neptune-mass planets, and two-thirds of the stars have Earth-mass planets. Therefore, low-mass planets are more abundant than their massive counterparts."

I dont get it. Any explanation?

I'm worried seo spammers will start adding them to this circle. Does HN support some OAuth you can use to verify that those who add themselves are actual HN users? If you could require minimum karma points that would be awesome.

So what happens when spammers start adding themselves to the Hacker News circle?

When the Queen asked Michael Faraday of what use his funny experiments with magnets would amount to, he is reported to have said - "Of what use is a new born baby?"

From another angle, during some collider hearings in congress, the physicist RObert Wilson was asked: "Did the collider have anything to do with promoting “the security of the country”"? He replied "nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending".

In other words, fundamental research has definite technological implications, but also just satisfying our curiosity about nature is reason enough.

Its disappeared for me for the queries [browser], [internet browser] etc. The change probably takes a while to rollout everywhere. Probably fair that it still shows up for [chrome].

The first time I read Christopher Hitchens was his takedown of Mother Teresa - "The Missionary Position". It was emblematic of his writing - shocking, irreverent, but beautifully written and argued. The most intellectually honest pundit I have ever read - even when I disagreed with him. Sad to see him go.

In all honesty, I'm surprised people are surprised by these actions. Its routine that when companies like Google acquire smallcompanies, tons of people in the smaller company are fired. I know for a fact that this happened in the Admob acquisition, for example. This is really no different.

The valley is sleazy and management treats engineers like expendable resources. Get over it. The only consolation is that engineering is the worst possible job except for all the others.

I see, this must be why the iPod has improved people's lives so much whereas Google search and maps were merely about pointless technology.

I've had success with Monkey Math, Math Bingo and Rocket Math, and later Grow Your Garden. I should say its not that you let your 4 yr old unattended with these games, but you work with him - teach him methods but dont give him solutions, stop before he's bored, and definitely let him have some fun time also.