ronack

Dear Website,

I wish you would put the "Read a message" button above the content so it doesn't jump around vertically each time I click it.

Maybe it changed more recently, but in the first couple years after acquisition they (WM and Jet) had very different approaches to things like search and there was a lot of internal conflict over whose was better. I think they pretty much just kept things separate as a result, so probably not a lot of long-term tech value attained by WM.

Reminds me of Ghost Mouse from 20 years ago. I remember using it to automate Connect Four and win a few bucks from iWon.com.

It's definitely a thing and prevent some SMS use cases due to this security hole. This new FCC doc only references tracing the original sender.

"The FCC has also called on the industry to “trace back” illegal spoofed calls and text messages to their original sources."

Will this also prevent spoofed text messages?

I'm a longtime subscriber to Launch Ticker (their tech/startup newsletter). It lets me very quickly be kept abreast of fundraising and M&A activity relevant to my startup. Saves me about 30 minutes a day of visiting several popular tech news sites, so well worth $10/month to me.

300k PAID subs is kind of a lot.

I would not have expected Larry Page to have such a severe "I mean" verbal crutch.

Two 1/4 lb. frozen patties are around $6. I've never been a fan of veggie burgers, but these really do taste excellent and the nutrition profile is great.

But reading the above account, it sounds like Snopes has devolved into something of an outsourced content farm, and various parties are now squabbling over control of the cash cow.

"not already a millionaire"

When your company is where Snapchat was at the time there's a good chance you've already taken millions off the table as part of a round. Even if not, when your company has achieved that level of growth, you can feel fairly confident that you will walk away fairly wealthy in the end, and it's more interesting to continue running your own company than it is to be rolled into someone else's.

These are pretty well-worn arguments against chatbots. There's an overuse of bots for tasks that do not benefit from a conversational interface (checking the weather, surveys, promotions, etc.). But if you stop thinking of bots as sentient beings and instead treat them as domain-specific command line interfaces, you may get more utility out of them. For instance, it's possible just typing/saying "Send me a pizza with sausage and black olives" is the most efficient way to order a pizza.

Came here to say just that. I've seen entire living room sets put out in the alley and collected by Streets & Sanitation as if entirely routine. We did get a $10/month garbage fee added last year but it's still a bargain to have literally anything you put out back magically disappear.

Sure, but what were the improvements to on-site search? More relevant results? Tweaking the display? I know from experience that improving search result relevance in e-commerce has a (sometimes drastic) improvement in conversion.

This is interesting but I definitely question some of the results, for instance reporting a negative impact for changing search results. Many businesses have been built on improving conversion through search result optimization.

I shared a cowork space with some of the founders when they were struggling with a previous soon-to-fail startup. It's inspiring to see how things worked out the second time around.

Yes, I'd say the most obvious tell was the strict quantization. If they can transfer some of the timing information it might be more convincing.

Huh, I had assumed this was dead for quite some time based on the lack of updates. Here's hoping someone will take this as an opportunity to revive the project.

It is being represented as the answer to my question - visually on google.com and explicitly from Google Home. This is different than a forum, Reddit, etc. hosting a variety of content for which it is not responsible. Google is effectively endorsing a specific piece of content in response to my question. This will either need to be refined or I suspect it will be challenged in court eventually.

Yes, those are default search results and the same content that drives Google Home's voice responses when you ask it a question. Originally Google stuck to Wikipedia/Knowledge Graph types of answers but have expanded this in recent months to try to answer just about any question you search, however dubious the answer's source.

I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples:

Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi...

Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay

Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv

Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's question answering. Yes, they say "according to so-and-so" first, but if Google is responsible for "organizing the world's information", they are essentially endorsing that answer as the best response. They've gone too far in favor of recall over precision/reliability and need to dial it back. Otherwise you end up with crap like this:

Is Earth flat? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat

Yes, I recall seeing a ticket that referenced Gitlab using Azure because it was heavily subsidized. My company uses Azure for much the same reason, and my experience has been largely positive.

Azure offers $500k for YC startups and $360k for "lesser" accelerators. It's by far the most generous offer out there.

Does Microsoft use this for anything in production?

Team up with someone who has a good idea but struggles with implementation.

In my testing it struck a good balance between accuracy and performance. I was also impressed by the lengths the group goes to help people on their mailing list. That said, their licensing is not friendly so I generally have to rule it out.

If you have the money MSSQL is a better all-purpose RDBMS. The tooling is in a completely different league and there are fewer surprises with regards to performance (like PG's slow counts, paging, etc.). I very much hope PG will close the gap though.

This seems like a step backwards to me in some ways. I'd prefer to see them evolve Lambda to support containers, longer jobs, and better workflows instead. I thought we were moving away from EC2 with its slow provisioning, spot bidding, and per-hour billing.

Pairing Lex with Polly should get you there.

https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

You're right, lack of standardization and portability is a major problem. I would not personally choose IBM due to the pricing model and previous bad experiences. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (and a bunch of startups) have all built or acquired conversational services very much like Lex. None of them is a clear winner at this point in my opinion.