throwaway23597

Search revenue miss, apparently. Not sure whether this has happened before. But I wonder if this could be the long-predicted beginning of the downfall of search as a "money printer".

I actually tend to agree with Sweeney here. At the same time, I think this is kind of doomed for the near future, as people turn more and more against AI. Especially gamers, who now are paying double or triple for the hardware they need.

Firing everyone is lunacy. I think this revolution is here to stay though, and SWE workflows are going to crystallize around "building the agent systems that build the product" rather than "building the product".

This article seems to conveniently ignore the fact that the latest models have essentially solved coding.

I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.

Who is in charge of naming things at Google? Like a five syllable word followed by "AI", I couldn't think of a worse name for a product competing for mind share.

Hmm. Gabbard is on the way out. Something tells me that perhaps her bosses may not be so happy about this disclosure.

Hmm, so for $30 a month you basically get 10% cash back. There's some break even point here if you use Waymo enough. I think in SF, this would make a lot of sense, especially since there are so many Waymos up there to begin with. In South Bay though, if you don't have a car you're pretty much cooked.

OK, well the "circumstances and context" here are that most people commenting on HN live in the United States, so obviously they will be better off if the United States does well. I don't think your "um actually, you can't ALWAYS support something in all cases, sweaty" critique really adds anything to the discussion here.

Windmills? They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. Yet, the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. I had them way down. The windmills are the most expensive energy you can have, and they don’t work. They last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody ever takes them down. They just go onto the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that. It’s incredible.

- Donald J. Trump

So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.

Uh yes, because they founded the company? If Google was never founded nobody would be working there, don't think I need a citation for that.

The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry.

I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.

Hi, is it going to be beginner friendly? Been meaning to learn some linear algebra as it's a course I unfortunately wasn't able to take in school.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you think Google is gonna be any better in terms of the "random censoring" for content that their SJW overlords deem "harmful", I have a bridge to sell you.

The behavior described in the article (licking the utensils, putting saliva on the sushi, etc) is seriously antisocial and psychopathic. Especially in our era of heightened public health awareness. People have been charged with terrorism for coughing on each other, I think it's only fair that this person gets charged with terrorism as well.

It's not like we DON'T have a catalog though. Amazon exists. The problem is that there is such a deluge of products that it becomes difficult to choose. That's where advertising can help.

As for the environmental situation, it is unfortunate. But I do believe that the only realistic way out of the climate crisis without a collapse-level drop in standard of living (read: starvation) is technological innovation, a process that seems to be aided a lot by a healthy economy (which results in stable livelihoods, etc). So I'd say if anything there's a moral imperative to keep the economy as healthy and productive as possible.

How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.

IMO there's a big difference between university level SQL and the ability to competently write SQL in a professional setting. In university, at least at my school, you are getting maybe at most 3 tables overall, with 3-5 columns each. Professionally, you're dealing with hundreds, maybe thousands of tables, each with between 10-1000 columns, and usually not even in 1NF either. It really takes a lot of practice writing queries professionally to get to a level of competence here.

I mean honestly, you can't possibly think that just adding people of other gender / skin colors just magically improves profitability. There's clearly some lurking variables here that McKinsey purposefully ignored in order to draw this specific conclusion.

To play devil's advocate, in the case of a company like Google, it's unclear whether or not execution actually gets much slower. From what I hear the amount of people coasting or even distracting teammates with negativity is pretty high, cutting such people might even speed up execution in the net.

As for Fuchsia as a product I'm not really sure what exactly it is so if possible I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how.

Well, how does that explain the result of 7.304 for the q-hypothesis?

People seem all outraged, but I really don't care. Kurzgesagt is just a youtube channel of explaining cool science topics with very high quality animations. It's really not so different from Cosmos, or Into the Universe, or Mythbusters, or any of these other shows that were also financed by multinational corporations. Nobody cared that billionaires financed those other shows, why's it such a big deal for Kurzgesagt?

In all honesty, the fact that this laser based communication exists makes me a lot more likely to believe that SDI was actually a success in the classified world.

I'm pretty sure that a municipality needs a population of 50K to be considered a city. This is more of a small town.

Welcome to the future. As these tools improve, expect a massive explosion of content, in increasingly complex forms. Today it's comics, tomorrow videos and music, next week video games. I for one cannot wait until any old schmuck has the power to create a full-featured 3D video game.

Uh, extremely high? It just wouldn't be Musk doing the evidence releasing, instead it would be leaks from other employees.

I mean, isn't it kind of obvious that this design "flaw" was engineered on purpose in order to force people to buy more JoyCons? Every company does this sort of thing.

On a side note, does anyone have any recommendations for a legitimate premium controller for PC that won't break? I've tried so many controllers and they all turn out to be cheap bullshit... the best I've been able to find is the official Xbox remote. But I'd gladly shell out big bucks for a high quality controller that won't break, like a mechanical keyboard but for gaming controllers.

Great, another excuse for the automakers to keep prices high. But the truth is that they're shooting themselves in the foot. I simply refuse to buy a new vehicle until we see significant deflation in the auto markets. And I'm not the only one. Nobody wants to play this stupid game with these greedy bastards, especially not when wages haven't budged an inch to keep up with inflation.

Scary stuff, and it makes me think that the days of anonymous online forums are coming to a close. Even HN, unfortunately. I'm not sure how you stop this from happening without increasingly invasive KYC-type measures.