I love that in Google Hangouts chat, default chat app on Android phone, there is no search capability.
I keep using it because I'm assuming they will add it eventually. I still find the Gmail+chat+hangout combo to be extremely robust and easy -- I just don't know why it isn't supported.
You can export your Hangouts chat history on takeout.google.com. The resulting Hangsouts.json file is human-readable but not fun to read. I have a one-liner to convert it into something nicer, but it doesn't resolve user names and you need to figure out the conversation ID you want to export yourself.
The is a chat-like client builtin to Photos now. It is actually pretty nice to easily send pictures to my mother with the ability to answer questions about them. Unlike other chats no need to download and reupload the pictures.
When that came out I was rather surprised it wasn't just an extension to Hangouts or one of their other chat apps.
- Google Chat = Hangouts Chat = Google Hangouts Chat
- Google Hangouts Meet = Google Meet
- Google Hangouts = Google Talk = soon to be dead
- Google Allo = dead
- Youtube Messages = is it even a separate product?
So by the end of 2020, the line-up should be like:
- Google Meet (=Zoom)
- Google Chat (=Slack)
- Google Duo (=FaceTime)
- Google Voice (=Phone call)
- Android Messages (=SMS).
Hangouts was great when it came out and a bunch of people I know adopted it... and then it stopped getting meaningful updates - instead of growing and expanding hangouts, they decided to rename it, replace it, redo it. I'm pretty sure there's a team at google that's just renames products.
Is Hangouts even a thing? I still see people pop-up in the Hangout chat section of gmail, I occasionally message people but never get replies. So it's either broken or I'm being ignored :)
It's still a thing for people that started using it when it was the latest Google chat product. It may be surprising but people just want stable chat experience not chasing whatever next product Google releases or kills next year.
(I did migrate my family and friends to self hosted XMPP server as Hangouts doesn't have E2EE)
People would be constantly popping up on HN repeating a different mantra about how bloated and unfocused they were (although arguably Google manages to be bloated and unfocused despite the shutdowns - but that's another debates)
Most of the Google shutdown's were understandable whether you like them or not.
In any case - it's getting tedious to hear the same comment on every Google related post. They shut things down. We get it.
All the services on AWS fulfill a need. Google often starts projects without direct profitability in their mind. Note that I'm talking about Google as a whole and not Google Cloud.
I'd say Google is a lot more liberal in starting new projects than any other company of its size. Look around in the news and you'll see how analysts comment about how Google has no 'direction' and is burning money.
I mean the second they decide to license their Google Earth data including the cleanups they do on it, their offering will be unparalleled. There's no other org who has gone through this expensive process other than google.
Even if they decide to shut it down soon, the value companies and scientists get out of it will be worth it.
Presumably you are talking about the vector dataset? I think most of the raster imagery comes from commercial aerial imagery sources (certainly they have no monopoly whatsoever on that). I think there are other global vector datasets that are broadly comparable, no? Streetview excepted.
Maybe also worth pointing out that Google's record in geo isn't without its failures.
You mean like spend a billion dollars buying and building a satellite imagery company and then liquidate it to a competitor for equity in their company?
Nowadays, I kind of enjoy seeing posts about people abandoning Apple ecosystem. Although it's painful, I myself have been yet another avid fan of pretty much Apple offered, it feels like this is not going to last forever.
When they do the math, iPhone might seem the most lucrative (they seem not to care about anything else) but since they are killing the ecosystem with no Mac Pro, no Mac Mini and with so called pro MacBooks, developers will abandon Apple eventually. Even if iPhone becomes/remains the most technologically advanced smart phone on the market, it would be like a distant paradise island with no airports. Airplanes (developers and subsequently the end users) will be landing on alternative airports on emerging islands, letting them prosper. Consequently, Apple island will be deserted.
I had whatever the latest iPhone was for the past 8 years. But at some point I realized a whole Huawei/HTC/LG/whatever Android phone could be purchased for the price of an iPhone screen repair and it's pretty much adequate for what I want to do.
So now I'm using a Nexus 5X. It's okayish, but costs 1/3 the price of the iPhone 7 that would also be relatively ok. Phones are just phones these days.
The awkward part is that if you've ever played audio or video on an iOS device, you've executed some of my code.
I disagree with this. Most Android phones have a bad track record of getting OS updates (which may not be extremely important with Play Services not being part of the OS) and security updates. Depending on what one buys, it may be a phone with an outdated OS and no security updates or something that gets by for two to three years (on average). Apple provides updates for four years or longer (this has been the minimum for the past several years).
Combine the above with more malware spreading through APKs from random sites and "friends", I'd say Android is still stuck in the DOS era of PCs.
Of course, I realize this is a very harsh comparison that doesn't touch upon the flexibility that some users love, but in my opinion, non-tech-savvy people shouldn't be using anything but the best flagship phones if they choose Android and stay away from getting APKs from different sources. Any cost advantage with respect to an iPhone then disappears.
If they aren't tech savvy, they're dependent on tech savvy people to show them this option and educate them. Even then, they may ignore it. I've seen many people using Android where they just get APK files from somewhere and pass it on tho "friends" (in quotes because this is indeed a large circle of acquaintances and several degrees of separation). It's probably luck that more Android users aren't being hit with malware around the world.
The digital divide between those who can afford an iPhone and those who cannot is glaring on the security front. One of the ways this could get better is for Apple to introduce truly low priced phones (no, the iPhone SE is still quite expensive in developing countries). That's probably as much a pipe dream as getting Android manufacturers to care for their customers.
I had an iPhone for several years as well. On my first attempt to switch to Android, I went swimming with my new phone in my pocket a few weeks after I got it. Very frustrating.
I finally switched permanently last year, and man has it been worth it. I can actually browse my own files on my own phone, and it does virtual reality better than any current Apple product! I grew up with Apple around me and I used to love them, but they have fallen behind and made terrible choices and I won't feel bad for them if they fail.
Funny. I recently got a new position and I couldn't find the terminal on the company mac - and a fellow came by and said "you obviously aren't an Apple person". I didn't tell him that I was a Mach kernel engineer at NeXT and that I'd worked on code that is probably still in the OS - or that I've been in way too many meetings with Steve Jobs. Instead, I just quietly nodded and agreed with him.
My beard's not quite as grey but about a month ago I was asked in an interview to "design a garbage collector".
Motherfucker. I BROKE Objective-C 2.0 and its GC in order to meet the soft real-time constraints of video rendering, I made all video related objects reference counted.
Now there's ARC, but back then I took so much flack just to make video work appropriately.
Anyways the guy 10 years my junior didn't know anything other than the Java GC so explaining myself was futile.
Moral of the story: Don't work for Hudson River Trading.
Age discrimination is hardcore in tech! Especially programming. I get it, when I was 23 and people told me they were 40 I was like, "damn that's my mom's age. This guy is old." I was really stupid.
I'm curious to hear what your setup for the intervening 20 years has looked like. Did it involve moving to GNUstep when NeXTSTEP was no longer viable, or is it something like, you came to NeXT by way of e.g. Sun (or something) and never had any particular affinity for the NeXT environment and so your setup has always been Linux/BSD/Solaris...?
My skills have always centered around OS and Database. I've mostly worked on UNIX then Linux at command line. Lots of vi and compiling over the years. I'll use whatever desktop is around...and, practically speaking, that has usually been Windows at the Fortune 50.
Yeah. I guess I still think of Apple's OS as being essentially NeXTStep. Hard for me not to feel like I'm still looking at the same software - just with some superficial evolution.
I've been in situations like this as well. It's crazy to sit across from someone in an interview and think to yourself, "This person has no idea and I'm not going to let them in on it."
I chuckled at this because I have a 5X too and I like it but my wife's Moto G4 Plus is amazing and cost something like half of what I paid for my Nexus, so I feel like I paid more than I needed to for a solid phone.
I think the 5X gets security updates until September 2018. Meanwhile, my Moto X Style, which was top of the line not too long ago, got the September 2016 rollup... in January 2017. Nougat was rumoured but I'm not betting on it.
I haven't installed Cyanowhatever it is now - mainly because the IR sensors and gestures are really handy.
I'm still disappointed by no Cinema Display and Apple leaving the display business.
I'm baffled by this. Touchbar is innovative to some degree, but I usually connect my Macbook Pro to a bigger display and close it—making touchbar useless. So disappointed by Apple lately...
I hear you, but it's been so long since Apple made a decent Cinema Display, and we're so rich with better alternatives, that I don't really miss it. On the cheaper end, the Dell Ultrasharp is a fine replacement at a great price. For more premium needs, you can get something like an Eizo ColorEdge, which leaves the Cinema Display in the dust. And there are all sorts of other options in between.
The Cinema Display is not so much different from the Mac Mini in that sense. You feel bad that you don't have a new one, until you realize just how much better the alternatives have become.
The tool bar is modeled as a separate computer, that talks to the laptop not over USB, but a network interface.
That actually opens up a huge can of worms, as networking as a host of security issues. One example is with a VPN connection. For obvious security reasons, when a lot of VPNs are active, they force all networking to flow through them. That is problematic, because the remote side has no way to route the toolbar traffic back to it.
So, VPN software is now busily building out exceptions to their routing rules. Don't worry, I'm sure this won't lead to bugs or future security holes...
The touchbar is similar to an iOS device so it is a separate computing device that has a small attack surface so it is difficult to hack.
It for instance controls the camera, so without hacking the touchbar it is impossible to use the camera without the light turning on.
It also controls the fingerprint reader in a way that makes it hard to get the secrets that are protected by the fingerprint without actually providing the fingerprint.
I don't buy this argument. Developers will work on platforms that have users with money to spend, even if the development hardware is poor value. In this sense, Apple has us hostage!
I have no data, but I'd wager that iOS developers who sell directly to end users are rare nowadays. Most of us are paid good money to build apps for bigger companies that make their money outside of the App Store. Often we don't even use our own Mac for that, so as a first step, we might use a Mac at work and Windows/Linux at home.
If we left the ecosystem, the cost of native iOS development would increase, and companies would build portable (and/or crappy) apps instead. macOS indie apps would also lose some customers, and IMHO these apps are what makes the Apple world worthwhile in the first place.
Paid apps are essentially dead on iOS and Android, thanks to both of their terrible policies. Both search algorithms for each platform place way to much weight on volume (downloads, ratings, reviews) over other attributes which they could track (like user retention.)
This means a well polished, but expensive app can be easily ousted out of a top search result spot by a rushed clone at a lower price point, even if people end up deleting the crappy one after a day or two anyways. Basically both modern app stores place a ton of value on "new" things but don't care about software built to last. So as a dev you are incentivized to abandon your old projects and just stick out new ones every few months. And on iOS it gets even worse with paid search ads which can be targeted at competitor app names.
Couple that with a 30% revenue cut, no access to your users (So you have no ability to refund them or discount future purchases), and the stores having the ability to oust you at any time and it becomes obvious that the only sustainable business is continuous crap-ware or SaaS with your main business outside the App Store. Just look at the Top Grossing chart, there isn't a single paid app till around 80 and even then the app is Minecraft.
App stores are just a digital version of any physical store.
Honestly when I go any store, I sometimes wonder how all those companies with products on the shelves, manage to sell enough goods to keep the engines running.
Yes, as long as iOS stays a solid market, iOS developers are going to own one Mac at least. But when the Mac platform itself stops being attractive to developers and they are only using it because they "have to", it is going to have an impact onto iOS as well. Innovations go, where the developers like to be.
I wouldn't be so sure. Old platforms suffer from diminishing returns and developers get bored easily. If a platform is no longer exciting and dominant players are lame or annoying, then developers and entrepreneurs will look for alternatives in completely different directions deliberately avoiding the old incumbants.
Amazon.com wasn't a Windows desktop app even though most customers would have used Windows to buy from Amazon. You could say that shifts like the Web are inevitable and nothing Apple could do will change that. That's probably right, but the way in which it happens and the role old incumbants play in the new world does depend on whether or not they are hated and actively avoided by the new elites.
I believe that Apple is making the upcoming decline steeper and deeper right now.
The problem is our small shop, revenues are something like 600% iOS/Android. We make hardly anything on the Play Store because (and you can call this classist if you want, but it's what my data tells me) Android users don't spend money. Now that could be because they don't have it, because they don't see value in software, whatever but the point is if you're an app developer and you want to make money, you go to Apple. And because of their ecosystem, you must develop on a Mac.
Now, as they make the Mac worse and worse to have, who knows, maybe people will finally be motivated enough to build an Xcode that runs on Windows or Unix. But you'd still have to have at least one Mac to do your publishing.
Nothing wrong with that. I'm sure there are many other companies like yours. I doubt that many profitable companies will abandon iOS development just because Mac hardware is a bit dusted or a bit overpriced at this point.
But where is the excitement? Where are the growth opportunities? Where's the space for experimentation? Where are things moving?
Once all the wealthy people on this planet have their iPhones and their six favorite apps in their six home screen rows, all extremely vetted by Apple, the market is saturated and stagnant.
You can't skate where the puck is going to be because the puck has come to a complete stop and all players are sitting on top of it.
I'm a Mac, iPhone and iPad user. But would I ever build a _new_ company on that platform. No. Definitely not.
I mean, depends on the company. I get what you're saying but for a smaller company looking for exposure to a wide audience with spending money, the data tells us iOS is pretty much the best balance of relatively low introductory cost versus return on that investment. Android has a lower cost still but also a much lower return as I said, even though we have more users, our revenue stream is 6-7 fold on iOS.
Maybe iOS isn't the new platform, but it's certainly a good place to start. Still miles ahead of the next few options.
Developers will target platforms that have users with money to spend. I can have a team developing on a non apple platform, and then share one mac mini for final builds.
OsX has always been the alt-users paradise. As a sysadmin and developer I've disliked it from the start. Windows I could use for gaming and when I had to. Linux and FreeBSD are fine for every conceivable use I have d2d.
Everybody is rushing to develop their own self-driving car, then they change their minds in various ways, then team members change who they work for, some of them quit and start their own company, some fail, some got acquihired. They give deadlines and cannot meet them. Everyone is dying to be first in the market or something like it. Feels there is so much greed. I don't get it, what's the big fuss, why must everyone hurry? Can't they be just calm and progress in a sensible manner. I don't expect this thing to turn out to be winner takes it all. Automative industry is much like a close knit society where they depend on similar resources. It's not exactly the same as posh start up culture.
Simple: everyone is looking for the next big platform. The smartphone revolution came by surprise to most and it has taken years for companies to catch up. Everyone is racing because they don't want to be caught with their pants down again.
The size and value of cars as a platform can't be emphasised enough.
It goes way beyond hardware. Whoever controls the car as a platform in theory controls the services layer that would be built on top of it (ride sharing, delivery etc.) and also the captive attention of the cars' occupants outside their phone. Then there is the data that comes from a device that takes you wherever you want to go, with tons of internal and external sensors to get data on occupants (unique identification will be trivial for audio ads, etc) and their external environment.
My guess is Google sees the rather low margins of cars and would much rather focus on what is likely substantially higher margins (and far less capital outlay) on the software side which is much more closely aligned their core strength.
Exactly that. If one company (especially one with high production capacity) would now release a fully functional self driving car, they could dominate the car market for the next decade. Orders for trucks, delivery vehicles, uber etc would alone max out production for several years. If done by a major player (e.g. Toyota, GM, VW), they could probably get legislation in some states changed quickly if they can proof that their system is safe.
Catching up isn't easy, you won't be able to just reverse engineer it.
What you're suggesting is that the first self-driving car manufacturer (as long as its cars are rolling off the lines of one of the major players) will dominate (parts of) the fleet sales market. That's not insignificant, but it's not the car market. I think you're underestimating how resilient the existing driving paradigm will be among consumers (i.e. the people buying personal cars and driving fleet vehicles).
> Catching up isn't easy, you won't be able to just reverse engineer it.
No, but the California-based employees with an understanding of that system will be able to get a nice payday when they start working for a competitor.
So if Google has this tech, isn't this move basically saying "Hey boys, I've got this sexy stuff. Who's going to be the highest bidder?".
Is there still a no politics policy on HN?
-- POLITICS BELOW--
Also it'd be interesting to see in the Age of Trump if Google would be red-taped if tries to sell the tech overseas, Trump would probably solicit bribes from the Detroit people to put up such a law.
No, all of the major auto manufacturers have pared down their spare capacity (and dealership networks) to save costs. So even if Toyota, GM, or VW invented an affordable fully functional self driving car tomorrow they wouldn't be able to dominate the market. It would take years to build up additional factory capacity, giving competitors a chance to catch up.
The first person to succeed will usher in a new transportation revolution and become insanely rich.
But I think a certain amount of hubris is what's causing all these companies to take a swing and then back out once they realize what they're up against. It's not an easy nut to crack. The software in itself is incredibly complicated, not to mention the politics involved, and all the special interests you have to win over before you can even pass go. But then the fact that you need to attach it to a car means you also have to compete in one of the largest and most competitive industries that ever existed.
Big risk/reward situation. Althoug the reward is possibly gigantic. It's not even clear that it's possible as described yet, imho. i.e. Fully autonomous vehicles. It's somewhat likely to be a winner takes all situation in terms of market share, patent ownership. I'm exaggerating slightly but I can't see there being more than a couple of big winners in this space.
I guess, that's the end of it. Hereby, my love relation will die when my early 2015 Macbook Pro dies. There is absolutely no reason I'd update. Nil. What kind of "pro" would care about a touch bar? It's merely a toy. More often than not, these machines are attached to larger screens. It's not even going to be used much even if you wanted to. It's stuck with a 16GB RAM. If I buy it now, then I will be stuck with a 16GB RAM laptop for several years. The only thing I can appreciate is it's lighter now, but then I need to carry all the adaptors for HDMI, SD cards, USB devices. I wonder if it would feel lighter or a headache to travel with the new MacBook pro. To sum up it up, I would not consider to replace my 2015 Macbook Pro to a new one even it's for free. What was needed a lighter, more powerful "pro" computer with more battery juice maybe. What we get instead? How am I supposed to benefit from this? Will being able to select emojis from the touch bar increase my productivity?
It is impossible, at least continuously. Nobody has ever managed to do that. You'd be lucky if you could beat the market by a few points on average over a 20 years time period. Compensation well for good performance does not make sense when you aren't penalized for losses.
Right, and a lottery winner who wins a $500MM jackpot on a $1 ticket has annualized return of even more than that, when annualized over the same timescale.
None of that matters if you can't pick the winning players in advance. With enough variance and enough players, someone will eventually have double-digit annualized returns over decades, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily superb investors.
The BIG difference is someone can go invest in Greenblatt or Icahn's fund with a reasonable expectation of these returns ongoing. Not so with a lottery winner.
Simple, compare a large number of investors based on some criteria with the overall average.
AKA, if you think there are people that do better than average, then picking people who have beaten the odds for 10 years and see how they do over the next 10 years. Repeat over a few decades.
There are things that seem to work. The most common way to 'beat the market' is trading a low chance and ideally hidden chance of failure for inflated returns. EX: A 1 percent change of losing 95% of your investment should be worth lot's of money on good years. This is really appealing when investing other peoples money as you don't share in their downside.
People have done it before. It has always turned out to be luck. Fantastic track record until they cease being lucky.
So, cynicism and economic orthodoxy aside, that sounds like a really cool company. Has anyone tried just tossing a big dumb neural network on stock data and investigated whether it can make money? It sounds very obvious, but a quick googling returns little. But I guess the investment industry is pretty secretive by nature.
Renaissance technology is a quantitative trading company, meaning they use computers to trade; they probably do thousands of trades per day, and consistently make a profit. There's approximately 0% chance that it's just luck.
Now, you might say, they were lucky to stumble upon a strategy that works. You can also say that the strategy will stop working at some point (because of competition), so their "luck" will run out, and they might not get "lucky" in time to find a new strategy. But their past performance was most definitely not just "luck".
Btw, in most other professions (e.g. the arts, technical inventions, sports) we call this kind of "luck", "skill".
Are you seriously asking if hedge funds that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars salary to top experts from all kinds of fields have investigated using machine learning?
You can't just "toss a NN to stock market data" and expect good results. There's too little historical data, you can't easily "generate" more data for the network to learn from, making it really easy to overfit. In other fields (e.g. computer vision) a lot of research has been focused on inventing techniques that prevent overfitting, thus enabling "learning" (i.e. generalization of patterns), such as dropout, convolutional neural networks, flipping/rotating images, etc. Very few of these techniques can be applied generally.
Dropout can certainly be applied generally - it's useful as a regularization technique (especially in wide and deep networks) to combat overfitting in other fields than computer vision.
It turns out to be rather difficult, because in most setups you see in the stock market, the market goes up roughly half the time, and down roughly half the time.
There are millions of investors. The chances of a few outliers getting a long streak of returns are pretty good, even if they picked stocks at random. It's impossible to tell in advance who those lucky parties will be. But their existence is very likely.
That's my point. When you have so much money to invest you (are forced to) capture a more representative slice of the market and regress closer to the mean.
Continuously? Ok, perhaps that would be almost impossible, to pull off 20% for 20 years without missing a year.
However, Buffett and Soros managed to average above 20% annual returns over 30 plus years.
For example in the 1960s Berkshire returned 28.3% per year averaged. In the 1970s it returned 22.2% per year averaged. In the 1980s it averaged 39.1% (!) per year. In the 1990s it averaged 20.5% per year.
Nobody would hold their breath on another investor matching Buffett or Soros. It is in fact possible though. The big problem for the Norway fund is obviously the scale. Berkshire at $360b in market cap, will struggle perpetually going forward with keeping up with the S&P 500 over time (as is frequently noted by Buffett).
The thing about both Buffett and Soros is that they get deals that the general investor, or even really good and kinda famous investor, would never get. For example, Buffet did 300 million in unsecured loans (but with front-of-line payback) with Harley Davidson in 2009 at 15 percent, essentially to cover customer financing (i.e. cashflow) not because the company was in any real trouble. You and I would be lucky to find that sort of return from the riskiest loan, let alone a profitable manufacturing company. AND, Buffet could have made more than a Billion extra if he'd bought stock instead of debt, so even when he's wrong he's still getting a sweetheart deal.
It's important to note that this discussion is about a massive sovereign wealth fund, not the average investor.
I absolutely agree that the average person should stick to passive index funds. But if you have nearly a trillion dollars to invest, you'd be a fool to stick to passive strategies.
Yeah, the oil fund averages just 0.25% above index, and that's without the extra cost of being actively managed factored in (although its huge size probably makes it impossible for it to be passively managed).
So at this stage factoring in the active management cost they are outperforming the market. Of course we don't know in the long run whether that will continue to be the case.
I like Uber. I use it from time to time. I use it less frequently nowadays because the government here blocked UberPop. I enjoy using it as much as I hate using taxis. I particularly enjoy it because I can rely on Uber when I travel abroad when I am most vulnerable to taxi scams.
Having said that, I am one of those who does not get this type of ultra high valuations. That's another topic of course, I am not going to claim anything as I am not an expert.
The thing is if yet another company pops up, maybe a local one, with similar offerings as Uber, I might as well start using their service. It's so easy to switch or use them both, I don't have a emotional connection to Uber, why should I? I'd always use whatever works for me. So, I see Uber is not something irreplaceable. The most valuable thing is the idea itself, car sharing etc. It's not like building up a search engine, with secretive ranking algorithms that works better among competitors. Of course, what Uber had been doing is phenomenal, they probably do a lot of things behind the scenes. Uber had more capital and did more. The others will catch up. Which is a good thing, I'd rather have multiple service offerings, it's good for consumers.
To me, Uber is a ice breaker ship. Started exploring in the frozen seas. Opening up new paths. That's expensive. They have to do a lot of things right. It's difficult. They are ambitious. I am excited that new paths appear in the frozen seas that I can benefit eventually. On the other hand, what I see is, once the paths are open, others can follow easily. They don't need tank-like ships to overcome the icebergs, they don't need the best captains and crews, they don't need the most of the crucial stuff Uber needed. They will just sail along the paths Uber opened.
