geuszb

Golang, as a garbage-collected execution environment, suffers from lousy tail latency

My theory on this is that it is easier for designers to empathize with users who are the same age or younger, since in these situations they've had the experience of the user's age, whereas very few designers have had the experience of being old (save for the author of TFA).

It's kind of funny to point out issues with SQL's composability, and in the same breath spec out a language in which "a set (including an empty one) cannot be an element of another set".

There are many real life problems with SQL but this doesn't feel like it's resolving any of them.

This was 2007. Is this used in production these days? If not, what else is used instead?

That strategy is dumb because in practice people don't mind or prefer using distinct apps for each of their subnetworks; and when these networks start overlapping in the same app, they start posting less (Facebook's problem), creating multiple accounts ("finstas" on Instagram), or bifurcating their real friends to another app (Snapchat 3 years ago).

Hell the fact that Snapchat succeeded in growing a credible threat to Facebook with a fraction of the engineering and marketing resources as Google+ should tell you how wrong that strategy was...

Each of the networks grew initially by providing an insanely better experience specific to a subnetwork (FB for alumni networks, Insta for narcissistic hobby photographers with its filters, Snapchat for horny teens who want to send nude pics, or who want to be goofy with its funny face filters...)

There were a few niches where Google+ unintentionally ended up being successful, such as internal to enterprise, and for pro photographers who liked that pictures had an option to be hosted uncompressed. But the vision overall had poor market fit and would never have latched on to a dense enough subnetwork to succeed IMO.

This gives me an idea... Even in fullscreen, I believe hovering the mouse near the top of the screen will also bring back some controls into view, but temporarily... So there's already some kind of "peek mode" for the controls... Entering this mode while typing a password in a standard password input field might make sense!

Thanks. This is a great reference indeed!

The challenge is preserving ability for content to control all pixels; without it, the content ecosystem ends up developing single-purpose, generally crappy apps, which isn't necessarily a better thing either...

I'm not sure it is the only solution either - what about "secure attention key" type ways to get the system's attention (in this case the browser's), bypassing any content interception? For example, what if there was a key combo guaranteed to always bring in the browser UI, and typing that key combo was necessary before inputting any password field?

Alternatively, the reliance on browser password management could provide some security if it can be trusted to always work...

Hmm not if your users are trained to press Ctrl-Alt-Del again... The login screen would also allow them to order the OS to log off the current session too.

An API usually embeds significant design decisions that are hard work to come up with. That said, there is some precedent for companies reimplementing competitors' API verbatim in order to get customers to port their applications more easily...

In large companies, there's another factor to consider, which is that if you're a few years into the company, the stock grants that you received a few years back and that are still vesting now are now possibly worth a lot more... your total yearly comp increases quite a bit if your company stock did well for the few years you've been with them.

You can negotiate for a reasonable increase but if an offer comes in at half of what you're making, negotiation is a waste of time for both parties.

Education is no doubt one of the problems underlying credulity but it is not the only one. I have seen very well-educated people repeatedly fall for misinformation on social networks that played to their preconceptions.

Protected from prying eyes

Yes but only by law, which allows exceptions, notably law enforcement, national security, etc.

And I wasn't saying this causes fake news, but it does pose a moderation challenge when done at scale

What exactly is it about the platform that makes it so "evil"?

Off the top of my head I'd personally nominate

Ads on WhatsApp Password breaches affecting both fb and ig Forced homogenization of the product offering via Stories Sleaziness around graph growth An upcoming boondoggle of an integration between Fb Ig and WhatsApp identity systems supposedly to align them on strong privacy via end to end encryption And personally I'd add the pursuit of end to end encryption at scale, which sounds like it'll lead to a disaster of moderation. (Ie don't count me in as the supporter of e2ee in the first place.)

Do we really think we can stem "fake news" by expecting Facebook to bear the responsibility for everything that is communicated on their platform(s)?

I am not sure what the alternative you propose is. Dig your head deeper into sand?

are we truly confident that hamstringing Facebook with a "break-up" is really going to lead to a better future? Do I really want my kids to be using TikTok/WeChat/Telegram or some other foreign controlled platform over which my government has much less oversight

I am not sure which is your government but it would probably have some power as long as we're talking about commercial operations, which tend to have some substantial presence in the jurisdictions where they're operating at scale. Or, even just blocking...

Ad-nominem!

Big companies know that every one of their binaries gets torn apart by people eager for a scoop and have exploited this in the past. See for example https://www.androidpolice.com/2014/08/06/google-just-rickrol... (though this one was for a laugh)

Excellent research. I wonder who the artist is who drew the typeface and whether they realized at the time that it would have such significance that somebody would still be studying their work so many decades later

Thanks. I thought this was about the gaming industry, which also has a tradition of crazy crunch time.

Opening up the site, I saw the headline load up, then something asking for notification permissions, then I'm not sure exactly what happened but many elements came on screen at the same time and the browser window became unresponsive (Chrome latest on a Samsung Galaxy S7). A subsequent visit worked out better, so I wonder if you have a problem on the first ever load of your site.

I definitely felt on the wrong side of a gazillion popup banners after that click

Ah yes sorry fixed that

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for?

EDIT

I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe that's an outdated assumption? I feel like I've come across a few instances where vi has been the only choice...

Thanks for sharing the insight... This being HN, it doesn't necessarily read to me like a disadvantage for QUIC the protocol as much as an opportunity for someone to come up with a way to do hardware-assisted QUIC in the networking interface...

Because the consequences of claiming these things but actually not doing them would be both prohibitively large and impossible to avoid in a large company with a history of whistleblowing employees.

This is where GDPR would help. They wouldn't be able to keep your account and personal info.

This is a badly designed survey. Why would I give you my name before even knowing what for?

Middle of the road?

If the main point is that we moved from a state of information scarcity to a state of information abundance, one piece is missing in this article: abundance is not, by itself, utility — to turn abundance into utility, you need one of a very small number of organizations that have dug significantly deep competitive moats around them (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, or even Wikipedia). It's not altogether clear that these new gatekeepers won't start applying the same recipes (of vertical integration, for example) to re-consolidate the industries around them.

How is there more coupling between a company's profit and negative social externalities resulting from its actions when the company is privately-owned? If anything, I would think there's rather less coupling in privately owned companies, as a public company is at least forced to be somewhat transparent, publish SEC releases, subject itself to audits, etc. For example, unlike a private company, it wouldn't be possible for Google to engage in a material transformation of their business without accounting for it publicly towards their shareholders.

[Sundar Pichai views] the censorship as a worthwhile trade-off to gain access to the country’s more than 800 million internet users

Citation needed.

Alternatively, Google's mission of "organizing the world's information" isn't quite complete if it continues not serving China.

Alternatively still, the real danger is not lost opportunity, but the emergence of a strong Chinese ecosystem (from network equipment all the way up to search and apps) that will steamroll Google's current Android-based hold onto the developing world.

Which would you rather believe, the CEO as a sellout who would do anything for a buck, or as a purist on a principled quest to be as useful as possible to mankind, or as a strategic leader aware of the risk of letting competition grow unchallenged?

Believe what you want about it, but neither is "news", just opinion.