crunchlibrarian

Yeah cloud and ML numbers are becoming a running joke in financial circles, at this point I'm pretty sure Oracle counts JRE downloads as cloud revenue somehow.

I wish these large corporations didn't demand so much creativity from their accountants to bluster an image.

Last quarter IBM had free cash flow of 2.2B. They spent 2.1B of that on stock buybacks and dividends

You can't really hide your lack of R&D or missing long term vision with numbers like that.

It's funny how picky and particular HN gets over the wording or sources whenever the story is about Google. In nearly every article you see comments like this upvoted to the top within 10 minutes of posting.

Any other topic or company: the wording or journalistic techniques are an unimportant aside, if they get mentioned at all.

Not really, they used them to buy back shares while simultaneously expanding equity compensation plans for executives. There is very little corporate investment going on anymore despite many companies being awash in new cash.

I just wish these awful link shortener/trackers were faster, on lower end network connections you have to sit there and stare at the waiting for t.co for two or three seconds before you actually get the link you want.

This is not as black and white as you portray it.

1. They don't actually know if the breach was exploited, because of the limited log window.

2. It appears that Google intentionally avoided the congressional hearings last month because of this breach, if they asked a question such as "are there any other incidents you have not disclosed" they would have had to either perjure themselves or kick off a PR fiasco in front of lots of TV cameras in real time. When you're evading authorities because of an incident like this it's far worse than any hack itself.

Maybe it is high time for software companies to start disclosing internal vulnerabilities (whether they can demonstrate it has been exploited or not) in light of the massive, worldwide societal impact these companies now have.

People everywhere should be mad as hell that these mega corporations are so powerful that they regularly evade oversight to continue building their monopolies. It's not about disruption or innovation anymore, it's become something far more evil.

This is new, particularly the details around search history and location data being stolen, as of an hour ago.

I wonder if we'll see a greater scrutiny of where startups and M&A targets get their funding from. Today, I don't think any founder would dare to ask a VC where the money was made that they are investing, but maybe they should start.

Off the top of my head I know that Saudi money has been used to fund JetSmarter, Lyft, Uber, and JD.com. I'm sure journalists will be looking at many more companies and where they money came from in the coming months.

Most of machine "learning" in real world use seems to be humans fiddling with weights until they get the magic number they want.

I think the most upvoted answer will be problem solving, but instead I think it should be a broad liberal arts education, ethics, and learning how to say no. We've had enough of building machines as efficiently and ruthlessly as possible, it's time to start questioning the what and the why instead.

I have a friend who quite literally works on cluster bombs at Lockheed Martin and says they see no connection between their work and anything else in the real world. They just make "tools" like people at Facebook, it's not up to them how the tool is used.

We don't need any more software engineers like this who are good at solving problems and not much else.

Sure, but when you're talking about a military house inside a military base owned and maintained by the military you have to assume that the military bears some responsibility for it.

Just waving your hands and walking away because it's old is a bit short sighted.

Trying to view every problem through the lens of a probability distribution seems to be Google's only way of looking at the world. Converging every answer to the same hivemind mean is not always the best solution, let's start thinking more about the edge cases and outliers which do actually still exist.

I cannot track down any screenshots of how Path worked in the early days, only some media buzz around Path declining Google's buyout offer shortly before they launched +

So many old apps and services are just forgotten now, it's hard to prove any claim about who stole what idea. Kind of a shame really, so much of our digital history is effectively unknowable and lost forever.

Facebook is the most consistent company I've ever encountered. They have never really changed and have always hit the same notes over and over.

Remember the beacon fiasco? That was the start of the pattern, the fact that they were so baffled by everyone's reaction was so amazing to me that was the month I deleted my account and never looked back. But they haven't changed one bit since 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

You can't "dox" a company by calling them out for lying and incompetence. Rachel simply does not want to get sued. This isn't some virtuous moral high ground you're standing on, stop pretending otherwise.

To be fair Google+ just straight up stole the circle idea from that Path social network after failing to buy them.

I think even Maroon 5 fans and band members would agree with you.

Yes I am scared of anonymous sources writing with an agenda that is bullshit as often as not. Not sure when this became the norm in journalism for people to just take everyone at their word just because they are senior and they have an axe to grind but it's quite tiresome.

If it's important stand up and put your name behind a story as a source, everyone just cowering in the corner because they want to keep their careers safe is making things worse, not better.

Putting aside the specifics of this story for a moment: I really hope that we don't enter a new era of tech journalism where we get story after story written by anonymous government sources, because I am about to lose my mind over the constant barrage of reporting in this style on politics.

It's already creeping into business sections, just make it stop.

This may be the first time in the history of the internet a statement from Facebook has ever been held up as an example of honesty and transparency from a corporation in America.

The GDPR has already called out Facebook for lack of info in its response to the breach: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/facebooks-muddy-account-brea...

Not sure why you'd pick that example.

What percentage of stories like this do you think never come out publicly? 50%? 90%?

I think the point is that actual honesty from these megacorps would be so surprising that even raising the possibility of it happening is so absurd it feels like parody writing.

This is interesting in how vehemently all the companies are denying everything. I am pretty clueless about how the feds work so I'll ask: is it possible they would be violating secrecy laws or leaking classified info if they acknowledge this really happened? Could they already be under NDAs or whatever the equivalent is in the national security world?

Or is it simply a matter of their shareholders having lofty expectations about tapping the biggest market in the world (China) and saying anything that angers China is the worst thing you could possibly do from a PR perspective?

And the goal of just growing as quickly as possible to the exit event is questionable at best. It leads to many unfortunate side effects that create unsustainable businesses with illusory short term growth, and the overlooking of unethical and illegal behavior in many instances. I don't need to provide examples, there are plenty in the news.

We need to move beyond this old fashioned idea of shareholder primacy, there are more important things to consider than just clawing at an equity stake and optimizing to increase the value of that stake at the expense of everything else.

Based on nothing but my own personal experience when I get tired I get cranky and more truthful, so the sole factor could be nothing but more people filling out the survey honestly.

I'm only half joking.

"Not a media company, just a technology platform"

Coal plants have killed. NOx emissions have killed. Lead has killed. Nuclear waste has killed. Gamma rays have killed.

You're trying to complicate something that is very simple.

As an American I find it endlessly amusing when Europeans poke fun at us, the history of the 21st century so far makes it almost too easy. The jokes write themselves.

But yes, Europeans should be as mad as anyone, the con of clean diesel that has been foisted upon them has killed at least a few hundred over the years.

Not really, Google has pushed the "relevancy customization" to it's extreme limit and the conclusion of this process is search results that are often just garbage.

Not just in the filter bubble sense of keeping out any info that the targeted user might find unpleasant, but also in the sense that "we don't surface anything outside of very recent, very mainstream, large corporate sites" even when that's exactly what I don't want to sift through on a given search.

It's a real pain if you're trying to do research in a niche area or in an academic field that isn't hip and popular, if you're not in the 90% bracket of the distribution results for what people click on you just don't exist on Google anymore.

This phenomena is most obvious when you're searching for something that you know still exists on the web, you can remember it being a top result years ago, but has now been effectively eliminated from the results because it's not sitting on the domain of a large corporation. Bing will still surface these sites, at least for now.

It seems like a pretty safe assumption that google will just play along with the Chinese government and force spyware into phones via play or some update mechanism, if they aren't already working on this.

Stopping people at random on the street to make sure an app is installed seems quite inefficient.