astrocat

Many may interpret this as victim blaming but I think it's a valid question: why have we as a country/culture become so much more resistant to moving? I know I've read more comprehensive literature on this before a but a quick google brought up these starting points:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/11/declining_ame...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/generati...

I understand that we develop local support networks of friends and family and it's easy to understand why moving comes with the fear of having to start in a new place with no such network. But it seems that this fear has become limiting - that we are now refusing to relocate to places where greater opportunity exists because we can't stand the thought of leaving our current network behind. We're stuck, effectively. And it exacerbates the conditions in places like SF.

It's unclear to me why paying individuals with very rare blood types for the blood they provide to the medical industry would in any way alter the landscape of general blood donations. I understand why it's a bad idea to attempt to pay for regular blood donations in general, but rare blood is not a "regular donation" - the individual is in possession of an insanely lucrative product. It just happens to be their blood, instead of something more "normal" like artistic talent.

I do exactly this as well. Some things need the user to spend time organizing them because search can't operate on it well (i.e. photos), but email is not one of those things. 99.99% of the time email search gets me what I'm looking for in a mater of seconds. Spending time organizing emails is going to be a complete waste of time for the vast majority of people.

This is also the reason I've never been able to use any 3rd party email clients and rely solely on gmail in the browser. Search is so much faster/better when done directly in gmail.

I'm curious to try Inbox and see if it provides a useful added layer of aggregation of messages above and beyond the current "conversations."

dug into this following https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8430412

what I find fascinating here is that this query appears to show a "knowledge box" result based purely on the content of some site (the answer is a direct quote of the allrecipes page referenced) which leads to the question: can this be gamed? As in, can pages be created with content that leads google to believe it holds the answer to some question posed in natural language? It's interesting that the page quoted also contains a more appropriate response: "1/4 cup of butter = 57 g" but this is not used for some reason (perhaps simply because it comes further down in the page flow?). Even more interesting that a more specific search for "how much is a quarter cup of butter in grams" does not yield a knowledge box result, but rather gives the quoted page as the top search result.

Does anyone have examples of Google providing knowledge box results that are clearly the result of someone attempting to trick google into treating some snippet as a knowledge fact when it isn't?

ok... so kids in the first world have mobile broadband and can sit on a bench in central park and photoshop away on their fancy chromebook pixel.

Meanwhile, kids in Egypt who don't have mobile broadband sit at a desk in an internet cafe and photoshop away on their cheap chromebook.

I don't see what the problem is?

I dunno... all of this sounds like fearmongering and some of these things are perfectly analogous to the way stuff already works.

For example: "Want to continue using SuperAwesomeApp? Too bad..." Want to continue using TwitPic? Too bad. Obsolescence happens, companies shut down, products go off the market and cease to be supported every day. This isn't new. If there's enough demand for an alternative, it will happen. Where there's a market, there will be product.

Or: "It's either pay up or lose access." When I stop paying my gym membership I loose access. Nobody complains that "it's either pay up or get fat." Photoshop used to be a product, now its a service. This isn't an "injustice" it's normal business.

Data safety in the cloud though is a reasonable concern. You don't know what's going on with your data on remote servers. But then, most people don't know what's going on with their data on their own machines. We've found ways to implement safety and security on our local machines (monitor for malware etc...), I imagine we will eventually find ways to ensure it on remote machines as well. Maybe.

The power/electricity analogy here is what's really key - there will come a time when the ubiquity of being "online" will be the same as the ubiquity of "the power is on." It's so prevalent in modern society we really don't think about it.

It took me a while to realize that this is where Google is headed with ChromeOS/Chromebooks. Ultimately, "applications/apps" will not exist, there will just be the web and all personal computing devices become thin clients. What to use photoshop? great, go to //photoshop.adobe (or something); Office? //office.microsoft; play the latest COD? //callofduty.activision. [EDIT: also note the importance of search in this scenario...]

I think google's bet is that just like CompUSA and other computer retail outlets have died, so too will "app stores" that sell digital equivalents of physical boxed apps. All apps will become services available openly on the web.

It's definitely exciting, though I realize it makes a lot of people scared and there are definitely security risks that need to be kept in mind. But overall I see it as another step in the democratization of access and knowledge. A few hundred years ago, only the privileged had access to resources enabling them to read and write and create things. A few years ago, only those with some serious cash could (legally) purchase a license to operate a copy of Adobe's products. Now, any kid with 100 bucks and a decent laptop can spend 3 months with the entire Adobe catalog available to them. Pretty soon, that "high-powered" hardware requirement will be gone and the market opens up even further and pricing will drop even more.

That's pretty awesome.

I guess YMMV... I also had to get my screen replaced because it was one of the small number of screens that had severe burn-in issues.

Actually no. Or maybe: yes, but...

My first MPB was one of the "high resolution" ones that ran at 1680x1050 and I loved it. So when I first got my 15" retina MBP was miffed that now it felt like I was running a 1440x900, just with double (well, quadruple) pixel density. So I opened scaling preferences and set it so the retina screen would "emulate" a 1680x1050 display. It was terrible. Blurry and SLOW. Good lord it was slow. And impossible to do any design work on. I went back to normal 2x scale.

So sure, this kind of scaling has been available for a long time but the reality is most people don't scale their MPB retina displays to anything other than 2x.

This. Most people don't understand the difference between the two. You can have all the bandwidth in the world, but if your latency is high, browsing around the interwebs will still feel pokey.

> The best way to do that is to advocate against ad-supported websites and services, and to advocate (and invent if missing) honest ways to get necessary revenue

I like this. I mean, not gonna lie I love free stuff as much as the next guy but most services that offer to remove ads for a subscription (Spotify/Pandora for example) I pay for.

Even journalism - support your local NPR!

Monopoly situations certainly make abuse easier but the monopoly isn't inherently problematic. Government and law enforcement are essentially monopolies in their own right and we see the results when those powers are abused. But instead of being anarchists we call for transparency and accountability. The same applies here - if we spend our time trying to become "black boxes" (as someone else here called it) we're not really going to get anywhere. If we push for greater transparency and accountability of the companies that handle our information we can better trust that they will continue to act in ways that are mutually beneficial.

> the question is: do you trust google?

This is too myopic of a question. Do you trust Apple? Do you trust Microsoft? Do you trust ____? There are arbitrarily many of these questions to ask.

What really needs to be asked is: how can we establish levels of trust in companies and services that handle our digital information that approaches the level of trust we have in our direct, inter-personal connections?

Not ratting on your friend is trust established through close social connections. Trusting Google to not sell you out is a level of trust established... how?

> your interests, preferences, and proclivities are being used to make others richer.

Your logic here villainizes a behavior simply because it benefits someone else.

Let's say that every day you stop at Starbucks and order a cappuccino. The people who work at there recognize that you always show up at 8:10am and order the same thing so they begin to make sure it is ready for you every day so you don't have to wait. Did you give them explicit permission to notice your habits? No. Does their behavior benefit them? Yes, they keep you satisfied and paying obscene amounts of money for coffee on a daily basis. It's mutually beneficial. Now an employee of Starbucks could potentially give information about your daily routine to someone else who was looking for you (say to the police for whatever reason) but you don't hear anyone lamenting the presence of eyeballs in the heads of baristas as massive privacy invasions.

I believe what you are really getting at is that these companies like Google and others can - and have at times - abuse the information they have available. This is exactly my point: what's needed is greater accountability.

It's true - the standard results on-point, but the top of the page is filled with images of food and links to recipes.

This is, ultimately, a nuanced point. It's a bit difficult to contrive a situation where the discrepancies are extremely stark in a single case, but over time and with consistent use (especially something like Google search which i use literally hundreds of times each day) the differences add up to make a pretty pronounced impact.

> "Like most people, I don't like to be tracked. I also am the founder of the search engine that doesn't track you, DuckDuckGo."

It pains me to hear intelligent people talk about being "tracked" as something "bad" a priori. While there are certainly plenty of examples of abuse of knowledge, I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building." Let me explain...

Google is a service provider that I frequent, just like my coffee roaster or my stock broker or whatever. Over time, service providers develop a relationship with their customers based on knowledge of that customer. This knowledge helps inform how they provide and improve their service. My coffee roaster knows what kinds of coffee I like and makes appropriate recommendations when new beans arrive. My stock broker knows what kinds of risks I like to take and gives appropriate investment direction.

Ok, so I don't really have a stock broker but... My point is: I appreciate that google is aware enough to know that when I search for "hash salt" I'm not talking about potatoes. DDG shows me recipes and first.

The problem (as with most things that are hot-button issues) is that the most talked about thing - "tracking" - is a red herring. The REAL issue is accountability. True information lockdown rarely benefits anyone, but openness without accountability is useless and downright dangerous.

Suggesting people flee one provider's services and head to other providers who are not concretely more accountable (just because they "say so" doesn't make it true) is simply being petty. We should instead be spending out breath advocating for greater accountability in the system as a whole.

Nothing, not even the risk of municipal-infrastructure-shennigans-leading-to-disaster, should stand in the way of more competition entering the ISP market. Google Fiber is awesome and all but they're pretty much the only company big enough to tackle large-scale rollouts nationally. These smaller, municipal efforts have much lower barriers and will ultimately provide the market the kind of competitive landscape it needs to begin improving.

err...

"Another obvious idea is to simply land the craft, drop the package, and then take off again. To test the premise, they brought in some of Google’s user experience researchers who queried people about how they might react to such a delivery. What they found was that individuals could not be stopped from trying to reach for their packages, even if they were told that the rotors on the vehicle were dangerous, which they are."

I have worked for neither company but I use products and services from both daily and I have to say I disagree. And remember the Prime Air demo video that showed a drone landing in a yard? And when your dog thinks it's a great new toy and runs up to it? Or your kid?... I have to say they didn't really think that experience through before taking it to the press.

>"Some experts are bothered by Google’s refusal to provide that sort of safety-related information... the public 'has a right to be concerned' about Google’s reticence: 'This is a very early-stage technology, which makes asking these kinds of questions all the more justified.'"

This seems to be a pretty common opinion, but I fail to see why anyone feels they have a "right" to be told Google's plans, strategies and ideas, much less their development mistakes and failures for a thing that is not a product currently available (or even close to it).

I realize there is a very real fear many people have about autonomous vehicles because it's something they don't/can't understand. And while that's something Google's marketing/PR department may want to deal with, this fearmongering attitude of "Google won't tell me exactly how it's going to work... it must not be safe... oh no we're all going to die!!! " is just getting ridiculous.

Yo. From EARTHQUAKE.

[edit] tough crowd...

Ironically, for all their efforts to make government decisions inclusive, they're choosing to marginalize those who don't meet their tech standards - and being kind of dickish about it. "Sorry Grandma, but you don't use a 'real' browser or a smartypants-phone so bye." "Oh hey José, they only have IE8 at the public library? Tough."

Pure speculation: this is carmax for housing. Moving is like trading in your car for a new one. They'll start with a focus on buying from the public to build inventory then begin facilitating the end-to-end of sell-to-buy.

Imagine this: I need to move from, say, Columbus OH to St Louis MO (their focus is not on hot markets). I browse their STL inventory online, pick the house I want, sell them my house, click, click, click then go have a beer and wait for the movers to show up.

Rabois has the money-moving chops from paypal and square... I don't see why this isn't possible, aside from the nightmare of paperwork...

>As it stands, what this app fails to do is establish a channel of communication.

This might be the allure. Its a message without baggage. There's no guilt for failing to say "hey, how are you man?" No shame in saying "yo" and getting on with your life. Because it lacks the ability to "establish a channel of communication," it inherently removes social pressures to extend the communication to a degree one or both parties may not want at the moment.