halfninety

For the sake of arguments, let's just assume Windows is perfectly secure. Then if child pornographers or ponzi scammers use direct, encrypted links instead of emails to exchange information, what will the FBI do? Is it reasonable for it to hack into the computer of a suspect to gather evidence? Is it reasonable for it to force Microsoft to implement a hole in their OS so that they can do that? Is it Microsoft's fault for implementing their OS in such a way that it's difficult for the FBI to (lawfully) intercept its users?

Maybe we all blamed Microsoft unjustly, maybe they were forced by law to create all those holes, and maybe they were forced by law to not disclose the fact that they were forced by law to create all those holes.

Isn't any software with a goal of eliminating security holes essentially "specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals"? Should all software providers be forced by law to implement backdoors so that the FBI can intercept its communications, just in case Snowden uses the software?

He says people will have less motivation to improve performance because they can afford losing the job, you disagree. Then you go on and say that people will have less pressure to comply with unethical demands because they can afford losing the job...

I would argue that actively avoiding to mention a horrible event will cause it to be forgotten and wouldn't help prevent a similar event from happening again.

I feel sick when I see people taking analogies as equations, because I like doing analogies myself. Analogies are intentionally exaggerated (but still being logically valid) to make the point stand out. I thought Hacker News readers were better than that.

You are talking about bias in the "article level". There could possibly be a "topic-level" bias in the article, that is, if one side is currently winning the edit war, and the author (belonging to the other side) tries to spoil that by exposing the tricks used by his opponents. Heck, he could even be trying to conceal his "topic-level" bias by intentionally displaying "article-level" bias in the opposite direction.

Disclaimer: I'm only talking about a possibility. I'm not familiar with this topic. And BTW, I'd say this article is fine if it only has "article-level" bias.

You can have the best of both worlds, just backup your feature head before rebasing.

Search what people are likely to say when discussing this topic, it may be in the form of a question and maybe not.

We have unfortunately already occupied much of our neighbor's garden, should we destroy our farms and cities and return all these land to animals?

Try using promises, and a small utility function to convert library functions that take callbacks to ones that return a promise.

Democracy is a way to guarantee human rights in a developed or semi-developed country, it's not a way to develop your poor country. Installing democracy in a poor country is like installing Windows 7 on a 486: you gain the benefits of the new system, but you have to live with the accompanied slow speed, caused by the fact that the minimum system requirement is not met.

How do Apple get away with including iCloud in the OS without having companies like Dropbox up in arms? And they do call it "sync".

My opinion is the exact opposite. I don't think the 5C is an appealing middle tier, I believe it's a dumb middle tier, and maybe intentionally so, to make the premium offering stand out more.

1. If it's intended to be appealing, why call it "5 Cheap"? Okay, Apple didn't call it "5 Cheap", but everyone thinks so, and in marketing, what consumers think is the truth. Additionally, Apple didn't try to correct people when everyone thought it would be cheap. Who is gonna buy a phone that is "cheap" but not cost effective?

2. The 5C isn't that appealing against 5. Yes, a new product is a new prodcut, but a flagship is a flagship. In emerging markets, why do people spend a month's salary for a phone? Because they want to show off to ohters, or at least so that people can't show off to them. Which one do you think have more "show off" power? The previous year's flagship (people don't know when you bought it) that looks identical to this year's flagship, or the "cheap" alternative?

3. The colorful back is suitable for really cheap devices, not seemingly cheap but actually expensive ones. They are liked by young people, mostly students, and new graduates. They don't have much money, and prefer cheaper devices. The 5C isn't cheap. Premium products are never colorful, for a reason.

4. The 5C is a worse product than the 5, technically. It probably has only about 10% larger battery capacity, but is 18% thicker and heavier. I can imagine how many cheap materials are used to make that happen.

5. If you look at the big picture, the trend is smaller and smaller differences between generations of iPhones. And because of the diminishing differences, people are more and more likely to choose an older generation for a cheaper price. According to one source[1], the 4S commanded 90% of all iPhone sales immediately after launch, and almost 75% a year later, before the 5 was launched. The numbers are 70% and 50% for the 5. Unfortunately, the difference between 5S and 5 is far smaller than that between 5 and 4S. Therefore, the appeal of the 5, if it were not discontinued, would only surpass that of the 4S in the past year, and maybe even able to seriously challenge the 5S in sales. The problem of the middle tier is not that it's not appealing, it's maybe that it's too appealing, making the flagship device not able to stand out. Maybe Apple acted this turn not by improving the quality of the flagship (they can't), but by lowering the quality of the middle tier.

6. If the 5C could generate similar earnings per unit as the 5S, why is it bad for Apple if it eats too much into the 5S's market? Because the success of the flagship relates closely to Apple's brand image, and Apple's success is closely tied to its image. People don't care about the middle tier, the success of the flagship is what reflects the company's technical prowess, and this is a battlefield in which Apple can't afford to lose.

I guess the sales numbers will tell who is right:), whether the 5C performs better than the 4S did in the last turn.

[1] http://macdailynews.com/2013/07/22/iphone-5-accounts-for-hal...

Signing up wasn't so simple back in the days. I still remember when I wanted to see the full text of an answer, Quora asked me to sign up, so I went to the signup page, and it said something like Quora is in closed beta, you need an invitation to sign up.

I have been hating Quora all along for this, and wondered whether this constitutes cloaking (because they serve different content to Googlebot and the user), which is against Google's TOS.

The following are excerpts from Google's First Click Free (FCF) program page[1]:

    If you offer subscription-based access to your website content, or if
    users must register to access your content, then search engines 
    cannot access some of your site's most relevant, valuable content.

    Implementing Google's First Click Free (FCF) for your content allows 
    you to include your restricted content in Google's main search index.

Apparently Quora's answer to this is: "Wrong! We don't need to implement FCF to get our restricted content into Google, we simply cloak!"

    To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find 
    a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of 
    that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see 
    that content. The user's first click to your content area is free.

So clearly the program applies in Quora's situation, yet Quora doesn't follow the program's guidelines to show "the full text of that document". I see this as strong evidence that Quora's actions violate Google's TOS, because otherwise what's the point of the FCF program?

[1]: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Wrt the "the E you use to calculate P/E should actually be the long term expected earnings" comment I made..

I was not trying to say that the standard financial metric called P/E ratio should be calculated this way. Rather I think that ideally or principally it should be calculated this way, because what matters is "how many year will it take for me to recoup the money?", not "how many years will it take for me to recoup the money assuming that the company's earnings remains the same?".

But obviously you don't know the company's future earnings, so to make an actually computable metric you can only use the current earnings as an estimate.

"The P/E ratio is, quite literally, the number of years required to pay back a stock's purchase price at constant dollars and earnings."

Yes, this is what I mean. I'm no expert on stocks and am not familiar with the terms, but the principle should be there.

Say the "normal" P/E is around 15, which means that people think it's fair to be able to recoup the stock's price in 15 years. Now why Apple's P/E is only 10? That's because people think its future earnings will drop (in statistical sense), so that the current price will still be recouped in roughly 15 years. Similarly, Google's P/E is 20+ because people think its future earnings will rise, so that again the current price can be recouped in roughly 15 years.

Amazon's large P/E isn't that abnormal if you consider that there are plenty of companies which are losing money yet still have a positive stock price. Maybe they have lots of assets, and maybe people expect them to return to profitability soon.

For struggling large companies this can even be a gamble. If you think the company has a 5% chance of returning to glory and earn big, and 95% chance of never earning a profit again, the company can still have a pretty decent expected future earnings in statistical sense.

I think it's quite easy to understand Apple's low P/E. Smartphones isn't like other industries, it changes quickly. The fact that Apple earns so much money now doesn't guarantee it can still do it in 5 years, much less 10. Just look at Nokia, RIM, etc. The market thinks that Apple doesn't have a lot of headroom for growth but has a much larger danger of a huge decline, so its long term expected yearly income is lower than its current one. And the E you use to calculate P/E should actually be the long term expected earnings.

Well, not necessarily. The guy who stole $6M worth of bitcoins with his pyramid scheme used 'Pirateat40' as his id.

Geeks (include those here) tend to admire and trust those who call themselves hackers (not those mainstream media call hackers), perhaps partly because of your theory, that "real" hackers don't like to call themselves hackers.

Aside from other considerations, I'm afraid that abusing a good move (the $15 waiver) will discourage similar moves in the future.

I can't stand the mob, sometimes I feel that they are insulting my intelligence. But no revolution is possible without them. When intelligent people come together and try to make a deal, that's called dirty politics.

Indeed. Public money should pay for the function of entities like JSTOR.

The public already paid 99% of the money for public research, yet only 1% of them have access to the fruits because those who paid 1% (for maintaining an archive) want it this way.

Oh really? I thought universities and companies paid for JSTOR so that they could redistribute those academic works for profit. If not, why would they care if someone else gets access without paying? And if the universities and companies didn't care, why would JSTOR, a non-profit, care?

Nice list, but I think it can be condensed into one:

Use your own site and make sure you don't hate it yourself.

Looks like I'm one of the people you are referring to. Like anyone with a healthy dose of curiosity, I'm interested in anything that is, well, interesting. I'm excited to meet people with expertise in various areas and ask them questions. I don't expect to understand their answers in full but in most cases I can still grab part of them. Based on my partial understanding in the first answer I can ask a better question the next time, and after several cycles I can probably learn something valuable (at least in the sense of satisfying my own curiosity).

The point is, if you don't ask questions in areas you are not familiar with, you will never become familiar to these areas. Well, unless you learn everything from books and Wikipedia.

I'm not sure how many people see me as an annoyance, but at least I'm consistent, in that if other people ask me questions in my expertise, I'm happy to try my best and explain.

Oh, and if it's just impossible to reasonably answer my question in a way that makes any sense to me, I expect you to just say it, and I'm happy with this.

A bug report from last year on the plugin compatibility problem:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=691336

No one ever cared.

I remember reading about it on TNW that it came from an acquisition. While most of the domain names Google owns don't redirect to google.com, this one is an exception (you'd wonder how it relates to search in any way). Google wants some free traffic from its little enemy?

Didn't Apple do the same thing themselves with Siri, albeit it was free?