dewitt

Even if you supported the publishing of the NSA documents on the grounds that it was whistle-blowing, and thus aided in uncovering a greater crime, there's no such possible justification here. (Certainly not in publishing them in bulk.)

We have due process for the discovery of private communication, and that process protects all of us. In fact, our personal freedoms depends on our consistent application of those protections, regardless of whether they're being use to protect you, me, our best friend, or someone we don't even like.

If we decide that it's up to thieves to decide what we do or do not get to keep private in our own lives, then we'll have fallen so far as a society. Good luck when they come for you next.

(Personal request: since this is obviously a polarized topic, consider posting your rebuttal as a comment, so everyone including me can learn more about the nuances of the debate.)

I'm not suggesting that's not accurate, but I'd love to better understand your sources for that, as my single point of anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise.

About six or seven years ago we torrented a single episode of an HBO series (I forget which—we were cable-cutters and it wasn't available to rent online at the time) and while we knew it was wrong, it was convenient and it worked.

However, we were surprised when, two days later, I received an email from Comcast saying HBO had reported that our IP address had pirated copyrighted material, and that if we did it again our service would be shut off and we'd possibly face civil charges. That actually shocked me into avoiding bittorrent altogether, which was undoubtedly their goal.

Empty threats or not, I hardly walked away feeling that HBO was "remarkably progressive on the piracy front".

Maybe things have changed?

(Note, I'm not actually pro-piracy, since I do think that copyright holders deserve a right to monetize their work as they see fit, within bounds. I just wish more of them had a more sophisticated view on how to make their content more broadly and conveniently available.)

Or am I totally reading that wrong? (Note, I really might be, this isn't my area of expertise. I just scrolled down to "Beneficial Owner".)

Edit: It was pointed out below that I double-counted Accel, making the total closer to 65%. Thanks!

It falls apart at a certain global scale, but I'm sure the business has pivoted twice by that point.

Nicely done.

Cromwellian (while awesome, and someone who never fails to impress me with his writing) is not speaking for Google, or even other Googlers. He is speaking for himself. As is his right, I'd hope you'd agree, even if you (like many) would disagree with some of the things he writes.

(Edit: you changed the first sentence. Which reads better, thank you. Though I would actually still make the case it's far less contemptuous regarding privacy than you suggest. Worth reading deeply, since I think what he is saying is nuanced.)

It seems the original author didn't understand this, so it's worth calling out here clearly.

  https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy

The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.

Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com, googleusercontent.com, or gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.

In order to serve fonts as quickly and efficiently as possible with the fewest requests, we cache all requests made to our servers so that your browser only contacts us when it needs to.

Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day. This allows us to update a stylesheet to point to a new version of a font file when it’s updated. This ensures that all visitors to websites using fonts hosted by the Google Fonts API will see the latest fonts within 24 hours of their release.

The font files themselves are cached for one year, which is long enough that the entire web gets substantially faster: When millions of websites all link to the same fonts, they are cached after visiting the first website and appear instantly on all other subsequently visited sites. We do sometimes update font files to reduce their file size, increase coverage of languages, and improve the quality of their design. The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: we only see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser.

We do log records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is on a need-to-know basis and kept secure. We keep aggregated usage numbers to track how popular font families are, and we publish these aggregates in the Google Fonts Analytics site. From the Google web crawl, we detect which websites are using Google Fonts, and publish this in the Google Fonts BigQuery database. To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google's Privacy Policy.

For further technical discussion of how Google Fonts serves billions of fonts a day to make the web faster, see this earlier tech talk from the Google Developers YouTube channel.

http://www.boredpanda.com/extinct-jobs/

Not sure if it's licensed copying or blatant plagerism, since they technically give "credit" at the bottom, but if it's the latter, it would nice to see links to vintag.es banned from HN, since this is the sort of thing that just sucks the air out of the web.

Out of curiosity, since several comments here complained about the paywall ("paywalls are nsfl"), and an equal number or more on HN run adblockers and/or openly dislike ads in general (the whole "you are the product" meme), how do you think news sites should monetize?

Seems like newspapers still add value in our lives (I know the WSJ does for me), but if they don't find a way to make money, either through paid subscriptions or advertisements, they'll be out of business just as fast as RadioShack.

This is a shame. They are radically better weather experiences than any you've seen before. Go check them out now.

In this case, you're talking about Dropbox, which already has achieved the scale, in both the large and small senses, that require a deeper level of problem solving than simply switching languages would provide.

Even if I personally find Go an odd choice for this project (why not C++, which already has the library support they need, and much more?), their present-day successes demonstrate that they didn't expect a scalability panacea from Go, just a better runtime for a subset of their critical path code.

While he's inarguably incorrect about quite a number of things, it's always better practice to assume the best of a fellow engineer and treat this as a teaching opportunity, not a cause for pitchforks and belittlement.

The package maintainer, threedaymonk, handled it perfectly, imo, by respecting the desires of the individual and not porting it, and closing the issue out quickly without further escalation. While it may have been technically "right" to copy the code, it wouldn't have been worth the damage it would have caused to the person behind it. Credit for handling a unfortunate situation with grace.

The App Engine team has a proactive policy about posting about downtime:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-appengine-dow...

Since the team highlights basically anything that looks like it is impacting customers, the issues don't always warrant a stand-alone blog post, but you'll notice that generally speaking the last post in each thread is a full public post-mortem with diagnosis and remediation.

Let me know if there's more you think might be useful for you as a GAE customer. Thanks!

And thanks again for the article itself. Very much enjoyed it.

One thing I didn't understand was the author's comment that "I bought the part off eBay, not from a reputable supplier, so it could have come from anywhere."

A 5-pack of quality 7805's can be found on Amazon for $5, including Prime shipping, (e.g. http://amzn.com/B00H7KTRO6), so what's the incentive to buy parts of unknown provenance on eBay or the like?

I ask not being a hardware guy myself, so genuinely curious, as I've heard stories like this before.

Again, fantastic overview of the chip, though. I learned a lot.

[Edit: spelling]

This is probably just some poorly timed high-profile acquisitions (Beats) and hires (Dre, Iovine, Ahrendts, Newson), though. I'm sure this occurs to them as well...

For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).

I'm surprised you didn't also didn't mention the ethical problems with trying to take something (search results) without permission.

Your new project sounds awesome, though. : )

If a hacker did this someone would be going to jail. But when a newspaper does it, it's journalism.

Edit: Jonknee's theory below makes sense. I jumped to conclusions and likely stand corrected.

The vast majority of native mobile apps are not. See http://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/paid-apps for a good list of counter-examples.

How many of those could honestly be called "web" in any way at all? 5%? 10%? It's a stretch to claim otherwise.

  "We should think of the web as anything transmitted using HTTP and HTTPS."

It may be his intention to position native "apps" as something not in opposition to, but rather a part of, the web. But that does a disservice to the original meaning of the web, which thrived in large part because it wasn't just another native app connected to the net.

Instead, I'd recommend pushing back a bit, and trying to retain the other critical elements of what made the web the web, such as transparently introspectable formats, RESTful documentment-oriented architectures, hyperlinkable URLs, crawlability, freely-licensed and open protocols, etc.

This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.

Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing itself for a new era.

Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I don't, but that's not my point here.

What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working engineers deserve that much.

Still, while I know it's not good to say "data" and "gut feel" in the same sentence, I just have a very hard time believing that IE usage is trending upward while Chrome is trending down. It just doesn't add up.

This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers.

Can you explain why you'd make that claim?

"Firefox is the world’s second-most-popular Web browser on personal computers, with 18% market share, according to Net Applications, a web-analytics consulting firm. That trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 58% share, and just ahead of Google’s Chrome, with 17% share."

Here's what I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers:

                Chrome  IE      Firefox Safari
  StatCounter	46.60%	24.64%	20.37%	5.06%
  W3Counter	34.1%	20.3%	18.3%	17.8%
  Wikimedia	42.69%	18.02%	15.28%	6.06%

And the interesting browser growth today, of course, is all mobile. (So those outgoing board members were right in several ways.)

(If the free support isn't working, I'd still be interested, but also would likely recommend you consider signing up for a Silver or Gold package if you're building a business on GCP. Thanks!)