brindle

Google does provide customer support but the end user is not the customer. The customer is the consumer of the data that is gathered on the usage data that is collected from the end user.

I lost an gmail email account, and I had no recourse. In all fairness I was not actively using it. I had registered and received the account so I could have my name. When I decided to start using it, the password no longer worked.

I also had an issue with Skype and I was paid customer. No tech support. I discontinued that account

I have a Google voice account and I use it as my primary phone number. It would hurt to lose or have issues with this account.

I'm a chemist and a software engineer. With all due respect there are a lot of similarities. People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property, whether its patents, copyrights, and or reasonable license fees, etc...

Slashdot was one of the first weblog frameworks, written in Perl, and was very similar in the beginning to the vibe I get from Hacker News. It (slashcode) was also Open Source. These days I feel Hacker New has more of an edge and, like Slashdot used to be, is "right there" when it comes to technology.

Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent.

Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.

Symfony2 and Backbone are both great frameworks. Props to you for getting this up on HN!

I read an article years back and I think it was in the Wall Street Journal. My understanding was that an unexpected grandmaster-level move at a point where Kasparov was expecting to see a different move occurred.

Kasparov suspected user intervention. Unfortunately the event was sponsored by IBM, so ther was potential for a conflict of interest.

He requested to see the source code and the game logs which was denied by IBM. IBM also disassembled the computer immediately after the match to re-purpose the computer for protein folding.

I think this book is rewriting history. Kasparov was devastated.

Great little article bootstrapping the start-up. I hope to see a follow-up if the company gets traction. These article help me keep in touch with the technology that is currently being used. I was unaware of SendGrid until I read this. On a side note, I'd like to see complete solutions a la Google Mail - Send & Receive Grid.

So you quit Google and headed over to M$. Hacker News, this should be Wanker News.

I'm a bit late to this party...

I liked the article title but the article is weak. First of all, there are many ways to create a viable tablet. Apple's approach to enumerate the challenges/problems associated with the new form factor and then to solve them not come up with an ad hoc hack and to protect their unique patentable solutions.

At the same time, other companies were creating netbooks because they were to lazy to figure out how to design a fully functional computer and cram it into a notebook form factor.

Probably one of the key breakthroughs was their realization that it didn't need to be a full computer. Seems so obvious now doesn't it? Also that they needed to augment the current state of the touch based UI. All very obvious in retrospect.

If there is prior art then it will remove some of the violations. If you are going to post stuff like this, do the necessary research on when the iPad IP was patented.

Its appalling to see companies blatantly copying better technology and then selling it. They should respect it, either license the technology, develop their own or work on something that Apple hasn't done yet and isn't in the process of doing.

This isn't news, its just a random rant. I agree that as OS X adds complex features we lose flexibility in other areas. Many of these are are not frequently visited but its still annoying and unacceptable. Fortunately, if Tim knows where to find these files and really wants to delete them, an "rm -rf" from the offending directory would do the trick - I'd like to think that 99% of the people reading this forum know this. Ditching mail.app for GMail? Seriously??

There are a million way to fail with a business venture. But this has to be one of the silliest ways I have ever read.

1. The search space is all possible abstract syntax trees. That is a large search space.

2. The correct solution must also satisfy all test unit tests. Basically the bug fixing is driven by the fitness function that determines if the bug is fixed and the program still satisfies the specification, i.e. the unit tests.

If you have a complex program the challenge will be coming up with a complete specification of the program's behavior.