sprizzle

$1 per stop is chump change for a company like Google. I don't see how this fee will create any difference for what the protestors are demanding.

And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything.

Freakonomics article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...

I like how CTF is becoming more educational and less of a hacking competition. Can't wait to see what CTF3 brings.

+1 to this suggestion! Something that feels as seamless as Dropbox would make my dreams come true. And even better if it could sync to different providers of my choosing, e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. etc.

I believe F1 is the SQL DB that powers ads (AdWords, AdSense, etc.) and is used in production for consumer-facing apps. Dremel is more of a data/log analysis tool, but doesn't typically interact directly with consumer-facing apps. Dremel (externally: Google BigQuery) is still widely used at Google across all product areas; F1 is used in a few products but not many.

Is Presto meant mainly for ad hoc internal analysis or is it fast enough for user-facing features as well?

Tesla's still a young company and is bound to have some quarters ending in losses for various reasons as they try to reach economies of scale. As an investor, I still feel confident that Elon Musk's "master plan" (see: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-p...) for Tesla is starting to get underway with the latest developments on Model X (and I'm sure other models as well). The future is bright for Tesla, this loss isn't necessarily a sign of decline.

I agree with you for the most part, but I think the point the author's trying to make is that "poor" people may not see it that way; instead, to them, lavish riches create a sense of belonging.

I had a similar experience with my cousin, except with Chrome OS. His laptop died and he asked to borrow any extra laptops I had around, and the only one I happened to have was a Chrome OS machine. I was worried he'd need a more desktop-like environment, but it turned out he loved it -- everything we do is on the web these days and there wasn't really anything that he was missing. He moved from Excel to Google Spreadsheets without much trouble and didn't really need anything else. Just a browser. Amazing where the web is going.

I like this article as a thought experiment, but I think in practicality, it would probably be miserable to fly to-and-fro 4 days a week.

The main cost that was ommitted that would give us an idea whether the commute is worth it is the opportunity cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost). While it'd be difficult to estimate how much the author's time is worth, if we assume that he/she gets paid an hourly wage of W, and it takes H hours to commute to and from London, then the opportunity cost would be something like W x H. If that opportunity cost is greater than the 387€ in savings, then it would not be cheaper to commute from an economist's perspective.

Yeah that's absolutely correct. Google has more initiatives than they can produce internally and so a lot of work is contracted to external vendors/agencies, which can have security concerns. The withgoogle.com domain allows Google to host externally-created sites that do not have any access whatsoever to internal user data.

Arg, there should be asterisks after every period.

It's silly to use BeautifulSoup to parse the page when you could use a simple RegEx:

<td class=\"title\"><a href=\"(.?)\"(.?)>(.?)</a>(.?)</td>

The robots.txt file doesn't seem to disallow scraping. https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt

I only wish Hacker News could look that good.

I think Google prefers to support existing open source projects that are successful. Internally, a lot of Java engineers at Google use Eclipse, which is a great IDE for Java development. No need to re-invent the wheel, instead it makes more sense for them to contribute to the success of Eclipse.

FYI, Google also just donated $20K to the Eclipse foundation: http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/09/google-donates-20000-to-...