pessimist

15 ms·

121.
by pessimist 15y ago
Must be a funny time to be Google. On the one hand, within the valley groupthink they are practically written off - a has-been failing at innovation and in great danger from Facebook. On the other hand, governments are out to attack them as
122.
by pessimist 15y ago
Two things - Windows license down 4% year-over-year(!) while macs rose 28%, and $728 million loss this quarter alone competing with Google. Thats a run-rate of $3b loss just to compete with Google - at some point one has to think this assau
123.
by pessimist 15y ago
I'm sorry, designing your service without taking in to account the SLA is just stupid. See how Netflix survived the failure for example. Now if you understand the SLA and still choose not to do cross-region deployments, then you've taken a
124.
by pessimist 15y ago
The simple answer in most cases is that group selection is vulnerable to free-riders. A free-rider gene that didnt help out would out-compete altruists and spread. The group of cells in a body is not a group of unrelated individuals - they
125.
by pessimist 16y ago
"Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do." Wow, that was a content-free article, borderline scare-mongering, eg. "when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer
126.
by pessimist 16y ago
If Google had indeed fought the Author's Guild on copyright/fair-use and lost I would have a lot of sympathy for them. But instead they came up with this settlement which does IMHO give them an unfair advantage and a de-facto monopoly, so I
127.
by pessimist 16y ago
In addition, irrational fears will devastate Japan food exports for years - Kobe beef and sushi industries better look to diversify.
128.
by pessimist 16y ago
Headline is false (possibly mistranslation). According to http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/latest-updates-o... : 11:13 P.M. (EST) Core Group of Workers Remain at Plant The Times’s Hiroko Tabuchi reports that a small group of wor
129.
by pessimist 16y ago
To update, NHK is reporting the fire at reactor 4 is out.
130.
by pessimist 16y ago
Japanese chief secretary's press conference which I was watching on NHK. NHK repeated the number several times. Found a press report here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/japan-appeals-for-i...
131.
by pessimist 16y ago
Well, at least one of the 2 possibilities is closer to the worst case since radioactivity levels are 500x (400 mill-sievert, from 800 u-sievert) what they were a few hours ago.
132.
by pessimist 16y ago
Turns out the optimistic reports upvoted by hacker news were polyannish. There appear to be 2 borderline catastrophes right now - 1. In reactor 4 spent fuel rods are burning and radioactivity is being freely vented in to the air. NONE of th
133.
by pessimist 16y ago
Turns out all the optimistic scenarios beloved by Hacker News were sadly wrong. The containment for reactor 2 is almost surely damaged now. If I understand correctly, the suppression pool is vital to maintain integrity primary containment a
134.
by pessimist 16y ago
Appear to be uncrawlable by Google/Bing - the closing of the web accelerates, sadly with the full consent and cooperation of users and websites.
135.
by pessimist 16y ago
The claim is that the people investing now are super smart guys like Yuri Milner, so there is no bubble. I'm mildly skeptical - Silicon Valley VCs appear to be as affected by herd mentality as everyone else.
136.
by pessimist 16y ago
This is true, but it has always been true. Google has always sucked for product review searches, local service vendors (try finding a plumber anyone?), travel searches etc. The odd thing is why people continue to use it for all these things
137.
by pessimist 16y ago
Google does support searching only discussions, you can find this on the left column (sometimes hidden under "more").
138.
by pessimist 16y ago
I predict that Nokia will sue Android for patent violations soon.
139.
by pessimist 16y ago
To put the blue dot in perspective, its unimaginably beyond the scope of our current technology to travel that far. Pluto by comparison is 13 light-HOURS away and it takes about 10 years to get there. At that rate, it would take approximate
140.
by pessimist 16y ago
The problem is that once we make contact with them, 50% will die due to disease. The rest will lead miserable dependent lives, and probably turn to alcoholism. I have seen this first hand with the Jarawa people of the Andaman Islands, and a
141.
by pessimist 16y ago
The click is stronger than the link, because MS is including the query associated with the click.
142.
by pessimist 16y ago
I was considering the case when you go to NetFlix, and they recomment the movie "Social Network" to you, and you click on it. Surely the url will have sufficient info to claim that its a recommendation. Now bing implements a movie recommend
143.
by pessimist 16y ago
I'm not talking about using just visits to improve search though, I'm talking about using the pattern of interaction on a site to basically replicate a site's data. That is, imagine netflix recommends movie X to you, now Bing infers that Ne
144.
by pessimist 16y ago
I wonder if you would be ok if Bing did the same thing to amazon. That is, imagine they used toolbar/IE logs to infer that people went to amazon, searched for LCD TVs and then purchased model X. Then they could boost pages about X in search
145.
by pessimist 16y ago
Not quite - they are admitting that click fraud on google.com affects their results!
146.
by pessimist 16y ago
To the defenders of Bing - would it be ok if Bing similarly used visits to amazon.com and various URL parameters to reimplement their "bestselling" lists for each category? I'm sure they could, and it seems clearly unethical. They are doing
147.
by pessimist 16y ago
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." – Brian W. Kernighan
148.
by pessimist 16y ago
Foolish move by the government. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are broadcasting images non-stop, and satellite TV cannot be turned off with a switch. Shutting off communication is ruinous to a modern economy like Egypt. Plus it broadcasts fear