HN user
Good luck with "avoiding" it. It's getting harder and harder to use Google without using Google+ (clearly intentional), and it's nearly equally hard to use the internet without using Google.
Yeah there is more than a little bit of selection bias going on here.
What percentage of criminals are dumb enough to get noticed and/or caught? Well, we don't know how many don't get noticed, so let's call it zero. Bam, 100% get noticed/caught!
I'd describe him as someone who has actually been around the block, as the saying goes. Compare that with this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6486142
Kinda speaks for itself.
revenue totaling over 9.5 million Bitcoins
According to this that's close to the current total supply of all bitcoins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time.p...
The graph shows the supply in 2013 at around 9.5 million, same number as what the article claims.
Bluetooth LE is in fact a standard, and is in fact much more widely deployed than NFC. Android already has support for it as of 4.3:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#LE_compati...
The segmented control in "Photo Investigator" is completely illegible post-update.
Google+ deserves to wither and die because of the BS they have pulled.
When I'm forced to create a Google+ account just to use some of the basic features of the corporate Google Apps account which my company already paid for, it becomes quite clear there is no one at Google who gives a damn about customers. They are just trying to inflate their numbers at all possible costs.
It will be a great day when companies are finally forced to stop playing the "number of signups" game and start playing the "number of people who actually like our service and use it willingly" game instead (and no, we're not there yet; not even close).
Yo Mama thinks it's a nice way to do it, too!
At least I gave an example. "Many things" are not just easier, but "far" easier? Like what? I've got plenty more examples, but I'd really like to hear about these "many" things which are "far" easier than in iOS.
All this talk about process, but not a word about the quality of the SDK itself. Android is quite frankly still very far behind when it comes to really basic things. Here's just one example: iOS has had easy support for custom fonts in native UI elements since the early days, meanwhile here is the situation on Android:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-ty...
(Yes, the thread was started in 2010, but scroll to the bottom to see more recent comments -- things have scarcely gotten any better.)
Anyone who has actually deployed a non-trivial app on both Android and iOS knows quite well which one is the "better" development environment.
Don't worry, they will work it so that there is a very expensive and labyrinthine process for privacy "compliance" for companies operating in the US which will purely by coincidence be so expensive and convoluted that only the big companies will be able to afford it. Just to reiterate, this will be 100% accidental and will in no way reflect an intent on the part of the established players to create a de-facto barrier to entry for potential competitors. You know you can trust them because the meeting was behind closed doors and both they and the president refused to comment on it.
I've actually found the opposite to be the case. I'm much more apt to concentrate and strive to build something great when I'm trapped in a run-down, somewhat distraction-free environment. If I'm in a really nice space, I often spend time just enjoying and admiring the space rather than working.
According to this, the tax lien is not related to the tax break for the Ann Arbor office:
http://www.annarbor.com/business-review/googles-31-million-m...
Just to pick one example, ancient people actually had very good teeth:
http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/ancestors-had-much...
Even though it was two years ago, we're still feeling the after effects. There is a considerable lag time between approving new construction and actually getting some built. One bad year (such as 2011) can cause lasting pain for many years afterwards. 2011 still feels very much like the present.
HBO and the other "premium" cable channels also do this. Not every single time, but much of the time. Try watching any of the Lord of the Rings movies on HBO or Cinemax for example. They're all 16:9, even though they were 2.39:1 "scope" in the theater.[1]
Forcing everything to be 16:9 has become the new "pan and scan", and it's actually been around for a while.
[1] Some of the time a movie has been filmed in a format which contained extra space on the negative, such as "Super 35", and in some cases the 16:9 might actually be showing more of the image rather than less, but it's very hit-and-miss and requires a custom transfer and master of the movie (which HBO has been known to do in at least some cases).
Both Mac and Windows may lagged behind the various unixes at the time in terms of WAN technologies (such as TCP/IP), but the Mac had fantastic LAN capabilities in the form of AppleTalk. Auto-discoverability and auto-setup was a dream. Just give your Mac a name, enable sharing, and you were off and running! Anyone on the network could find your stuff and share with you. All done with human-readable names and very simple GUI tools.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.
Just like when Steve Ballmer claimed[1] that "Vista has never been delayed" because they changed the name.[2]
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-09-25/online-extra-...
[2] http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server-2008/hasta-la-vista-l...
Your amazingly succinct description of all that is wrong with today's mobile app stores is bordering on poetry. Nicely put.
The stores themselves will just roll out their own competing services.
Safeway already has their own online ordering & delivery service, however it doesn't allow you to bundle items from other (possibly competing) stores. Instacart allows you to pick (for example) 3 items from Safeway, 2 items from Trader Joe's, 1 item from Costco, and 6 items from Target ... all in the same delivery. It would take a joint venture / agreement among all the major retail chains to make that happen with their own services. Instacart's model is actually safer than it seems at first glance.
Yeah, somebody hasn't gotten the memo it seems.
It's because our society simply doesn't value the profession, and those engineers who feel guilty have internalized it. There is a strong undercurrent of social programming in western culture which says that working in computers and other technology fields is a nerdy / oddball profession and that those who choose to do it should be ostracized. People are actually surprisingly open about it, too. See for example the essay from earlier this year by Rebecca Solnit[1] which engages in much hand-wringing about "nerds" (yes, the article actually contains that word) moving into the Bay Area and how "people are ground underfoot" as a result. Such name-calling in the mainstream press is more or less exclusive to tech.
This weekend I spent some time walking around SF and was astounded at how many new apartments are under construction. Even more interesting were the old run-down buildings which were apparently being shuttered in preparation for even more new places to live.
There will be a lot of hand-wringing about the city's loss of character, but in the end the new construction will probably ease things.
The city in essence put a moratorium on new housing after the real estate bubble burst in 2008. For several years afterwards there were virtually no new housing units added to the city at all.[1] Now that the de-facto ban has been lifted, there can actually be some new units to help give all the newcomers and old residents places to live.[2]
[1] Go here and scroll down to "Previous releases": http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1691 Note the difference between 2009-2011 and now.
[2] Of course there will some who claim that no amount of new housing will fix things, or that new construction will only make things worse. It remains to be seen what the longer-term outcome will be. Rents in the Bay Area actually went down after the last two bubbles burst (the original dot-com boom in 2000 and the real estate boom in the mid-2000s), so it is clearly not impossible for the housing market to change direction.
In case anyone doubts the reality of this quote:
http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-use...
Yeah although a big question is: what will that do to battery life? People who install lots of gimmicky, frequently-updated apps and forget about them after trying them once will suddenly be at a loss as to why their device suddenly doesn't hold a charge as long as it did before.
I fear the auto-update feature combined with multitasking will drastically reduce the typical battery life of an iOS device.
Skeuomorphic vs. flat is a red herring. Either one can be tastefully or tastelessly done. Today's iOS 7 unveil was unfortunately the latter.
The sad truth is: once Steve Jobs passed on, the quality of designs coming out of Apple started to decline. The ousting of Scott Forstall and the rumored eschewing of anything resembling skeuomorphic design was heralded as the coming of a great new era, however now that we can see the first results it's apparent that Apple is no longer capable of producing great design at all, no matter where it lands on the skeu vs. flat spectrum. The new designs are still as ugly as the Forstall-era stuff; it's just a different kind of ugly.
It makes me really sad, because the original iPhone was an incredible triumph that led the way of the industry for the next several years. I fear we will not see something of such high quality for a very long time after this. Nothing will change until there is once again someone in place at the top of Apple's hierarchy who can enforce the notion of good taste, regardless of the current fashion or style.
> I've heard it argued that the housing bubble was somehow "unforeseeable" and that "no one saw it coming."
I've heard this from various corners as well, and it utterly amazes me that there are people who would actually try to claim that with a straight face. There certainly was plenty of warning of the housing bubble both in the mainstream press and elsewhere. Here are just a couple of examples:
The Economist called it "the biggest bubble in history" in 2005:
http://www.economist.com/node/4079027
And here is a blog which goes back to 2004 dedicated to discussing the housing bubble:
http://thehousingbubble.blogspot.com (original site)
http://thehousingbubbleblog.com (post-move site)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble#Id...
In short, it's quite obvious that plenty of people "saw it coming", and anyone trying to claim otherwise is just desperately playing the CYA game.
There needs to be a corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines: if a headline reads "Why <foo> is not happening", that means it most definitely is happening (or has already happened).
Anybody else watch the video? There were at least as many cops as protestors present. It's eerily reminiscent of those pictures from OWS where the cops were lined up outside banks.
> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century...
So what? The previous poster's point is that both forms of property are social contracts. All private property, physical or otherwise, are nothing but societal agreements, regardless of whether there is a written record or what point in history the agreement began.