Unicode Character 'Slice of Pizza' - <AUTHOR> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/index.htm

<comment><USER2> I don't think Unicode emoji make sense in the long run - even if they're handy in SMS, and fun to scatter around normal text boxes, it would be better to use chat protocols with their own sets of consistent emoticons (as, indeed, many mobile messaging apps have). Why?

(a) Details matter. It doesn't matter if my 'A' displays in a different font on your phone, but the difference between Apple's colorful, pixelated, Space Invaders-like rendering of <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1F47E/index.htm> and the server- generated image's outlined round tentacle monster is fairly significant.

(b) Emoticons (at least those beyond the core set) are things of fashion: we always want more, but old ones go out of style. Though depictions can change, we're going to be stuck with the current list of Unicode emoji forever.

</comment><comment><USER3> Emoji is such a weird thing. On one hand, I use them constantly for IMing. A quick 👍 is 10x better than the single-character "K" response in terms of expressiveness and playfulness.

On the other hand, the symbol coverage seems very random to my western brain. For example, there are three different mounds of rice, but no tacos. Nine different commuter trains, but no motorcycle. Also, the seemingly random assortment of flags.

I know this is a result of their Japanese origins, but if I had my druthers, emoji would be a little more inclusive, and then phones would have a little emoji-editor where you could edit your keyboards so they only included the symbols you wanted to use.

<comment><USER4> For anyone else who just sees a square: <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f44d/>

<comment><USER5> _Why_ do I see a square?

It is because of the encoding format on HN? Or because my browser's built in fonts don't have all the Unicodes?

<comment><USER6> It's not a character set issue. It's just that _none_ of your fonts have that glyph.

I'm on Linux, but after installing the symbola font (Arch package: `ttf- symbola`) and restarting firefox, the square turns into the proper thumbs up sign.

<comment><USER7> What do I install on Ubuntu 10.04?

<comment><USER8> On Ubuntu, try:

       mkdir -p ~/.fonts && wget -O /tmp/symbola.zip 'http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola708.zip' && unzip -j -d ~/.fonts /tmp/symbola.zip Symbola.ttf

Restart Chrome. It should work on 10.04 or later (and possibly in earlier versions as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fun story about emoji and unicode:

I have a writing app I've developed for iOS, and a while ago received a bug report from someone saying the app crashed every time they tried to open their document. I couldn't figure out what was going on but after eventually receiving a copy of the document, I discovered that the crash was due to my incorrect handling of emoji characters.

Most string classes, including NSString in iOS, typically represent strings as sequences of 16-bit characters. With 65,536 possible combinations, this is perfectly adequate to support the characters from all major languages in use worldwide [1], plus emoji. Unicode does however allow for values outside of this range, which are represented by "surrogate" pairs of 16-bit values in the range D800-DFFF. It was these I was handling incorrectly, and had missed in my testing.

But if there's space in the 0-65,535 range to represent emoji, why would it be stored outside of this? Well, it turns out that the initial implementation of emoji in iOS used the "private use area" of this range to encode the character values [2]. NTT DoCoMo also had their own (incompatible) way of encoding emoji in the private use area [3]. When attempts were made to formally standardise on emoji in unicode, they couldn't use the private use area, and ended up going with values above 65,535.

If unicode had stuck to representing existing characters and symbols and said no to requests for stuff like emoji and klingon, string representation in modern software could have been kept a whole lot simpler.

Joel Spolsky has an excellent explanation of unicode and encoding issues here:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

[1] To the best of my knowledge; correct me if I'm wrong

[2] <http://openradar.appspot.com/6402446>

[3] [http://web.archive.org/web/20080216230900/http://www.nttdoco...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080216230900/http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/pictograph/basic/index.html)

<comment><USER10> > With 65,536 possible combinations, this is perfectly adequate to support the > characters from all major languages in use worldwide [1]

It depends on how you represent characters. Korean Hangul represents each square shape separately so requires over 10,000 characters. If it hadn't been like that, Korea wouldn't have accepted Unicode for use because it would have multiplied the number of bytes required to represent characters from their existing system. There's 10,000 Japanese/Chinese Kanji in modern use, plus another less commonly used 65,000 encoded, and there's no consistent way to represent them as components.

> If unicode had stuck to representing existing characters and symbols and > said no to requests for stuff like emoji and klingon, string representation > in modern software could have been kept a whole lot simpler.

Klingon was rejected for encoding by the Unicode Consortium in 1997, and remains excluded to this day.

emoji was included as a political nod to the Japanese, who even today are the main holdouts to Unicode being the exclusive code for worldwide use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ive always found this amusing: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%F0%9F%8D%95>

<comment><USER12> I was staring at this article for 30+ seconds before I got it! <:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These are to support emoji symbols in Unicode. There's a lot in there beside pizza - party poppers, wedding chapels, game console controllers, "information desk person" and the ever mysterious "Japanese goblin".

PDF chart at

<http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf>

for the full glory of it all.

</comment><comment><USER14> Unicode needs a character for jumping a shark.

<comment><USER15> How so? These emoji characters are in widespread use. The initial characters had competing standards amongst Japanese providers. The unicode adoption allows indexing and searching without encoding problems. The competing standards also defined different glyphs, which feels like going back to the 80s or 90s with character pages.

Also, we can't jump a shark in Unicode, but we do have a few lovely 🐋 🐳 whales for you to jump if you'd like.

<comment><USER16> The only time I've seen whale here, it looked like this:🍣

I'm glad emoji have been standardized. Back in the dumbphone days each carrier had their own set of characters, meaning the smiley face you sent😘 might have come out as a piece of poo...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Counterpoint: <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm>

<comment><USER18> My first reaction to this story was "if you liked 'slice of pizza', you'll love 'pile of poo'". Good to see someone got there first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Might be a good time to plug <http://codepoint.tumblr.com/>

I haven't touched it in years as you can see, but it was fun while it lasted.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how many "unicode complete" fonts exist. It must be nearly impossible to meet the entire spec.

<comment><USER21> GNU Unifont covers the entire BMP. Every character in the BMP has an 8x16 or 16x16 bitmap in the font.

A "unicode complete" font is more of a novelty than anything else. For real work, pick a collection of fonts that cover the space you need. Good Arabic or Chinese fonts are not going to be great Latin fonts. For that matter, good Chinese fonts are not good Japanese fonts, even if coverage is good enough. In fact, the order of precedence that these fonts have will depend on which language is the primary language. If you're typesetting Japanese with Latin characters, then you can just pick a nice Mincho font, but Mincho has unnatural spacing if your audience has native English readers. (So if you quote Japanese in an English text, pick a Latin font and use Mincho for the Japanese; but if you quote English in a Japanese text, you can use Mincho for everything.)

It's hard enough just to find a good Latin font that also has a good set of mathematical symbols. "Computer Modern" of course, and "Times", but these sets are rare.

<comment><USER22> Adobe InDesign and Illustrator support composite fonts. Designers can mix and match Latin and Japanese / CJK glyphs, tweak them individually, and use overrides for tricky code points.

Web typography is a different beast because fonts can be bloat-y.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting. In Google Chome, I just see squares where the character should be. However, if I copy and paste it into the url bar, or anywhere else in OSX, I see a color picture of a pizza.

<comment><USER24> I see it just fine in OSX through Chrome, Version 27.0.1453.93

<comment><USER25> Which version of OSX? I'm on Mountain Lion and Chrome 27.0.1453.93 as well, and they are just boxes for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I find this unicode character more entertaining: 🏩

(It's a "love hotel", one character away from a regular hotel, 🏨)

<comment><USER27> <http://unicodelovehotel.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> <http://jsfiddle.net/eYCrN/3/>

</comment><comment><USER29> I recommend setting your terminal's hostname to an emoji for maximum fun.

</comment><comment><USER30> looks different for me here [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/browserte...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/browsertest.htm)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a personal fan of the STATUE OF LIBERTY: 🗽

</comment><comment><USER32> For the lazy: 🍕</comment>


Ask HN: What books should an entrepreneur read? - <AUTHOR> I am planning to quit my job and start an online business.<p>Please suggest any book on nay topic you want an entrepreneur should read. <comment><USER2> Firstly, don't quit your job without a plan.

To answer your question; here are many books I've enjoyed [https://www.productgems.io/library/](https://www.productgems.io/library/)

<comment><USER3> I really like your library page! What's the timespan of your library and how often do you read?</comment></comment>


Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-management-shuffle-points-to-retreat-from-alphabet-experiment-11575579677 <comment><USER5> As usual, I like Matt Levine's take. [1]

Page and Brin ran Alphabet as a highly funded system of moonshot programs with near-infinite runway to make profits, which is unusual or unique. Basically it only worked that way because Page and Brin were idealistic visionary gazillionaires who were bored of thinking about the somewhat dirty business of selling targetted ads. With a more standard corporate governance under a common CEO with the google ad business, the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline.

But read Levine's version; it has detail and humor and insight I can't convey in a summary!

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet- is-google-again)

<comment><USER6> That seems way _more_ idealistic somehow. More likely, with a more standard corporate governance Google will begin to rot from within. Apple certainly made more profits under Cook than Jobs, but innovation has slowed to a crawl and he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one product (instead he just added a bunch of accessory products and services). The last thing Google needs is to double down on ads, it takes 2 minutes to block them.

<comment><USER7> _> innovation has slowed to a crawl_

This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It's wrong.

The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an "accessory." It's a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It's dominating smart watches.

The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them super successful.

Latest OS builds included evidence of stereoscopic glasses in the pipeline.

Remember Apple isn't always the first with stuff, even smartphones. Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic.

<comment><USER8> > The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an "accessory." It's > a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It's dominating smart watches.

The Apple Watch is literally designed to be an accessory to the iPhone - <USER2> can't use most of its features without an iPhone. I wanted one for my Android phone but tough shit for me.

If you like it as a product that's fine, but it is absolutely an accessory to an iPhone because you can barely use it without one.

<comment><USER9> iPhones were originally an accessory to iTunes. What you complain about is all software. Software is changeable.

<comment><USER10> Not on these devices, it isn't. Without Apple's signing keys, they run whatever Apple gives you, until they are EOL'd and then they run nothing else, ever.

<comment><USER11> Yes but that's irrelevant to the point.

<comment><USER10> I thought the point was that "the issues you are complaining about are just software, and software can be changed/updated".

If Apple doesn't make sufficient changes and upgrades, nobody else can - <USER3> the device is back to being an appliance that has the functionality that it has right now and nothing further, and it's not "just a software upgrade away".

There's still no way to get the time display off of the face of my Apple Watch. You can customize everything except _turning off the clock_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google's attempt to be a modern day Bell Labs was the one thing that set them apart.

Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future.

Without the second part, the entire company changes.

We need another company to take the mantle:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation- and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html)

<comment><USER13> Looks like the product/engineering/creative focused time of Google is giving way to the metric/marketing/MBA/McKinsey people for a fully pedal to the metal push into their Ballmer phase.

When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus, and little research and development or innovative value creation, eventually it stagnates and sputters.

The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product.

As a developer, and investor, in Google this concerns me the move away from Alphabet, moonshots and research and development. The open mode is needed just like the closed mode [1]. The open mode is where value is realized, the closed mode is where it is produced [1]. Value is created in a state of play or creativity, this is usually the first thing to go in these phase changes at a company.

This happens at every company that creates immense value, eventually the research and development is hard to quantify the value so they cut and cut like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, eventually it is just a stump and all the grace and built up value is tapped.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g)

<comment><USER14> > When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the > value creation is more important than the value extraction?

When MBAs stop thinking that every penny has to be returned to investors.

<comment><USER15> Nonsense. MBAs believe the money mostly has to be returned to management--who get paid massive salaries and benefits for often mediocre results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Placing the head of Google, which contributes more than 99% of Alphabet's sales, at the helm of it could call into question the entire purpose of Alphabet

I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet

Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" ([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo- val...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-valuation- slashed-on-autonomous-vehicle-tech-delays)) which would make that 11% of the valuation and probably other bits of other bets are worth something too.

<comment><USER17> The market cap of Waymo is $0 because it has no market cap.

[edit: note that the parent comment originally spoke to the `market cap' of Waymo before an edit, giving context to this reply]

An analyst independently made up a number, likely to justify an outsized Google target number. There have been rumors that Google will seek outside investments in Waymo that might legitimize some valuation, but they haven't.

And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M.

So I don't think they're giving a false impression of anything. Google has been pouring enormous sums of Adword cash into Waymo and it's still a stuttering business ten years later.

<comment><USER13> Waymo is in the value creation phase, business/marketing/analysts may not value it as much but there is a goldmine under it.

Waymo may not be a revenue behemoth currently but there is immense value there not only to self-driving but to maps improvement and more.

I am not a fan of software patents but they have surpassed Toyota in patents [1] and there are hundreds of patents from Waymo [2].

Everyday in Arizona Waymo vehicles you see them on every block.

The value extractors may not like not being able to extract value yet, but the product, research and value creation is very high and contributes today to improving Google product offerings outside of Waymo such as Maps [3].

Waymo has waymo value than is being extracted because it is still emerging from the product value creation nebula that business/marketing/analysts can't see and don't value as much as product/engineering/creative people.

[1] [https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s- Wa...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Waymo- unseats-Toyota-as-automated-driving-patent-king)

[2] [https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo- llc](https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc)

[3] [https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo- mapp...](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapping-los- angeles-driverless-taxis)

<comment><USER18> That's a long way of saying Waymo isn't making any money.

<comment><USER13> Money making products don't start making efficient money day one. Value creation in this area takes time and it is not quick when dealing with physical/driving products. The patents alone will probably be worth more than the effort.

Google is a data/information company and you are completely disregarding the impact Waymo has on that especially for the Maps product.

Waymo is also already a market leader in their space.

Just because it isn't registering big enough revenues to McKinsey level value extraction only MBAs like CEO Sundar Pichai and Wall Street doesn't mean anything. Most of those in that space have no idea how to create value, only extract it.

This type of 'it isn't making money' thinking is similar to how Jeff Bezos at Amazon was attacked for putting all profits back into R&D, or how Elon Musk at Tesla/SpaceX pushes products, or even when Jobs came back to Apple. The bean counters do not understand value creation and do not have product/engineering/creative mindsets.

What product/engineering/creative people do is value creation that create the engines for 'making money', the engine doesn't just pop in, there is a concerted effort of play, production, design, creativity, engineering, crafting and refinement that takes value creation to get that engine running which results in value extraction.

The business/marketing/managers should just stay out of the engine room and just make sure there is enough runway.

The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product.

<comment><USER19> Amazon retail is still a low margin, low profit business and is not a good example.

AWS on the other hand is printing money.

Google hasn't had a non advertising based hit besides maybe Android since it's inception and even that has only made $23 billion a year in profit from its inception until the Oracle trial where the number was revealed.

<comment><USER13> The low margin e-commerce led to massive innovations and improvements including their services architecture that became their biggest product and the first to market in the cloud.

AWS was created out of the continual re-investment by Bezos back into Amazon.

Amazon also has many acquisitions from it and associated to all their businesses: IMDB, Twitch, Zappos, Whole Foods, etc.

Google with search, maps and mobile won some intense battles via innovation and a better product in many cases. Google became the biggest OS on mobile with Android and beat out Microsoft that really should have been better positioned and won (Windows Phone was probably better as well). Google also beat Microsoft at their own Office game and storage with Drive, Docs, etc. That was huge. Mobile is a massive victory within the last decade, search the one previous, others in play. Those wins shouldn't be discounted.

> _only made $23 billion a year in profit from its inception_

Yep, only $23 billion, horrible. /s

Microsoft also gets a chunk of that with their Android used mobile patents [1].

In a way I wish Microsoft didn't get a chunk of Android devices and instead we had three competitive mobile platforms. Android is fine but it isn't the best development platform, iOS and Windows Phone both better (was in the case of Windows Phone), Android was just positioned well and timed right.

[1] [https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft- makes-5-to-15...](https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft- makes-5-to-15-from-every-android-device-sold/)

<comment><USER19> Google didn't "beat" Microsoft at Office by any definition.

As far "winning" mobile. $23 billion in 7 years and they still pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the primary search engine on Apple devices. Apple has made more money from Google than Google has made from Android.

Android definitely didn't "win" against Apple. The entire Android ecosystem is a profitless race to the bottom.

As far as Google Drive, like Jobs said about DropBox, storage is just a feature - not a product. MS gives away 6TB of One Drive space with the $100 a year Office 365 subscription. Office 365 has much deeper penetration that Drive.

<comment><USER13> > _Google didn't "beat" Microsoft at Office by any definition._

They beat them to online documents, spreadsheets, storage by years. Google Docs launched after they bought Write.ly in 2006. Lots of teams don't even use Office anymore and use online office like Google.

Yes lots of places still use Office but there is no denying Google beat them online and it was Microsofts share to lose. Microsoft really just got their online offerings put together nicely finally in the last maybe 5 years, they didn't want to cannibalize desktop Office and that delayed them immensely.

Before Google Docs there was only Office, OpenOffice and LibraOffice but people really only used Office. That has changed, I rarely use it unless I work with a company that is Microsoft-centric. It may change now that Office 365 is finally decent but they still want large purchases of licenses that really only is enterprise focused.

> _As far "winning" mobile. $23 billion in 7 years and they still pay Apple a > reported $8 billion a year to be the primary search engine on Apple devices. > Apple has made more money from Google than Google has made from Android._

There is immense value in controlling the platform which Google has. There is even more value in controlling the hardware and software platform like Apple.

Because they control Android they don't have to pay another mobile provider to be the search provider.

Don't leave out Chrome either, that was a big thing for a long time. That really came from Webkit and KDE that Apple open sourced to become Chromium and Chrome.

> _Android definitely didn't "win" against Apple. The entire Android ecosystem > is a profitless race to the bottom._

Android won against Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows Phone in terms of market share. There is value in being the biggest market share, ask Microsoft with Windows.

> _As far as Google Drive, like Jobs said about DropBox, storage is just a > feature - not a product. MS gives away 6TB of One Drive space with the $100 > a year Office 365 subscription. Office 365 has much deeper penetration that > Drive._

Drive is still bigger than any effort of Microsoft. OneDrive did not compete for a long time. Dropbox even beat Microsoft. Google Drive and Dropbox pretty much own this space except for Microsoft Teams or enterprises that used Office.

Nadella fixed lots of issues in Microsoft and finally has Office 365 online in a good way, Teams, free IDEs/editors (VS and VSCode) and their new OS is really Azure which was his baby.

Microsoft is doing well in lots of areas, even Surface Pros/Books are probably beating Apple laptops right now in terms of growth. Apple doesn't want to cannibalize iPads so they don't have touch screens on their laptops still, Microsoft does and it is a solid device. Hopefully they re-enter mobile one day but right now they are too fat and happy off of profits from Android patents.

I like Microsoft, use them plenty and do lots of .NET. I also like Apple and develop on Macs/iOS devices. I also like Google and use Android and develop for that platform. They are all good in different ways.

However, you are really downplaying what Google has done.

Again we didn't even mention Chrome which did take the web by storm, which they are starting to abuse now with the ol' Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish but they still did win the browser wars as well from an entrenched IE/Microsoft and over Firefox which was an early developer favorite of Netscape origin.

<comment><USER19> _They beat them to online documents, spreadsheets, storage by years. Google Docs launched after they bought Write.ly in 2006. Lots of teams don 't even use Office anymore and use online office like Google. Yes lots of places still use Office but there is no denying Google beat them online and it was Microsofts share to lose._

Being first is just a nerd victory like saying Apple was the first desktop operating system with a GUI. "Winning" in a for profit business is profit.

 _There is immense value in controlling the platform which Google has. There is even more value in controlling the hardware and software platform like Apple._

We know the value - $23 billion over 7 years. The fact that Google still pays Apple $8 billion a year shows that there is more value in a platform that attracts people that can afford to spend money than people who only spend $240 on a phone.

 _Drive is still bigger than any effort of Microsoft. OneDrive did not compete for a long time. Dropbox even beat Microsoft. Google Drive and Dropbox pretty much own this space except for Microsoft Teams or enterprises that used Office._

A "bigger effort" doesn't put money in the bank and DropBox not only has never been profitable, they have repeatedly said that they don't know when or if they will ever be profitable.

<comment><USER13> > _Being first is just a nerd victory like saying Apple was the first desktop > operating system with a GUI. "Winning" in a for profit business is profit._

Before Google Docs / G+ suite there was really _only_ Office. Now everything is Google vs Office 365. Most small/medium even startups use Google Docs as it is good enough. Yes like I said, entrenched Microsoft companies use Office and Office 365 is finally good and is winning in businesses because business/marketing like Office. But Google made it to 'versus' level with Microsoft.

We also glossed over Gmail, that has been immense for attracting people to Google apps.

Apple is also in this space but the desktop market share is so low that they don't compete here.

> _We know the value - $23 billion over 7 years. The fact that Google still > pays Apple $8 billion a year shows that there is more value in a platform > that attracts people that can afford to spend money than people who only > spend $240 on a phone._

If Google has to pay Apple $8 billion for mobile search. How much would they have to pay another mobile platform if they didn't run it? Probably $5+ billion or more since it is bigger, there is still value in the platform. I can't even believe I have to state that. Apple also shows this by what Google has to pay them, platforms are value as they bring in revenue opportunities.

Android OS and devices were shoddy for a long time, but they are immensely better now. Apple does own the high-end market but that won't always be the case and there is value in the market share even if it is less per phone.

> _A "bigger effort" doesn't put money in the bank and DropBox not only has > never been profitable, they have repeatedly said that they don't know when > or if they will ever be profitable._

Dropbox is probably in a more precarious situation than Google or Microsoft in terms of storage competition. To compete they probably can't make a profit for a long time and will probably end up getting purchased maybe.

You can simply not deny that Google Drive was first and is mostly winning the storage battle.

OneDrive is rarely used even in enterprise settings even at Microsoft shops. Yes entrenched Office based companies probably use it like they used sub-par Sharepoint.

For storage though, most are in Google Drive or Dropbox. Branding/usage also creates value in marketing and cross over products, obviously more for Google than Dropbox as the latter is boxed in and can only raise prices or push people to business plans.

<comment><USER19> * Before Google Docs / G+ suite there was really only Office. Now everything is Google vs Office 365. Most small/medium even startups use Google Docs as it is good enough.*

GSuite is losing market share.

[http://www.cloudcomputing- news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3...](http://www.cloudcomputing- news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-365-usage-goes-and-leaving-g-suite-behind- says-research/)

And if DropBox is "winning" and losing money, isn't that a Pyrrhic victory?

 _You can simply not deny that Google Drive was first and is mostly winning the storage battle._

Being first is again, a nerd point. Where is the money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any investor in Alphabet for the long term would hope this isn't the case. It also doesn't make sense at a time when some of their moonshots are looking as though they could pay off. (Eg. Waymo)

That said, it makes sense from the Page/Brin perspective, perhaps. It's a lot more difficult to 10x a company that's already worth $Y billion. Perhaps better to start the ventures separately in a way that is more exciting to investors.

<comment><USER21> I've been a Google shareholder for more than 10 years, and I would love it if Alphabet spun off Waymo so I could dump my Waymo stock.

My view is that the market undervalues Google and overvalues Waymo but unfortunately Mr Page and Mr Brin force me to invest in both.

<comment><USER22> Funny, I'm sure a lot of people think the opposite, and that only proves your point more.

<comment><USER8> As someone intimately familiar with the world of self-driving cars (and their investors, and their enthusiasts) - yes. There are many people who believe Waymo is going to be ridiculously valuable because they are certain (almost always based on being wildly misinformed) that it is going to magically blanket the planet in robotaxis in a handful of years.

I would love to short Waymo. And now that Sergei is no longer there to shield it from Ruth Porat - who is well known for hating risky bets - I don't see a bright future for the company. And working conditions there have already deteriorated to the point where most talented people don't stay (just check glassdoor reviews if you don't believe me).

I'm pretty sure Larry and Sergei wanted their legacy to be Waymo. I'm pretty sure Ruth Porat wants her legacy to be killing Waymo.

<comment><USER23> > And now that Sergei is no longer there to shield it from Ruth Porat

Both Larry and Sergei are still on the board, so I don't see what changed? If you are thinking along that route, wouldn't it be more important what Sundar Pichai's opinion on Waymo is?

<comment><USER8> I think Larry and Sergei have been slowly removing themselves from Google/Alphabet over the past several years. You're right about Sundar having a large say in the matter, but he seems focused on search and AI (Waymo is not AI - I am too lazy to argue why right now). Ruth Porat, however, has always had it out for the projects at X - and Waymo is the big one that hemorrhages money (even by Alphabet standards) and makes pathetic revenue (even by non- Alphabet standards).

The screws are definitely going to tighten, moreso than they already have. The majority of the original talent that made up Waymo left years ago - <USER4> doesn't happen when you're on the brink of an actual breakthrough that can truly transform the world for the better. If Waymo can't pull a rabbit out of its hat, it's going to the Google graveyard. This isn't going to play out immediately, it will take a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're having trouble reading it: [https://outline.com/pGLZ6U](https://outline.com/pGLZ6U)

<comment><USER25> I dont know how what you did is legal.

From [https://www.outline.com/dmca.html](https://www.outline.com/dmca.html)

Notice to Users If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:

you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder.

If we find you repeatedly submitting content that does not meet the above criteria, we will block you from using our service.

<comment><USER24> We have different views on this topic. Surely Outline is capable of taking a reasonable sample of what they are serving up, and seeing that the vast majority of it violates their terms. Throwing up a disclaimer page doesn't change that. Their policy is also contradicted by the "about" blurb on the bottom of the page _" Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles."_ As far as I know, most news articles have a copyright.

Also, sites that want paywalls are technically capable of doing that in a way that archive.is, outline.com, etc, can't scrape them. They don't, though, because they want the best of both worlds. Want to charge for your content? Fine, do that, but you lose exposure from search engines, HN, Facebook, etc.

Curious how they are going to "block me" though. I don't have an account with Outline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Larry and Sergey still holds more than 51% of voting stocks. IMO, this is the only thing that matters unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. Although I expect "other bets" to be forced to evolve into more realistic businesses but no radical structural changes.

And another thing to consider is that a significant portion of Alphabet's value already comes from potential growth of "other bets" (e.g. Waymo). The major driver of digital ads' growth has been cannibalization of traditional media ads budget. This is no way sustainable over the next decade so the growth will be eventually saturated. Unless Google can find another strong driver (Maybe Cloud?), it's pretty natural to keep investing "other bets".

<comment><USER27> >unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar.

My understanding from the rumour mill is that's essentially what's been happening for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It has always seemed strange to me that Google become part of Alphabet, instead of vice-versa.

It seems like a much more honest approach would always have been for Google to be one company... for Alphabet to be a separate one... and for, say, Google to own 33% of Alphabet, for Larry and Sergei personally to own another 33%, and outside investors to own the rest and be the ones principally determining its own, separate valuation.

<comment><USER29> Given that Alphabet was basically Larry and Seigei's personal pet projects and the goal was for Google to fund these projects, it's easier to funnel money up instead of out.

<comment><USER30> Wasn't YouTube a separate entity under Alphabet, and not a part of Google? That alone would be a $100B company

<comment><USER31> It would be. But it doesn't make money. Someone has to pay for it still.

<comment><USER28> Do you have a source for that?

All I can find is that, as of 2019, nobody knows [1]. (Unfortunately I can't read the full paywalled content.)

Also, it might not be profitable but could still be break-even.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube- doing-11...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube- doing-11556896078)

<comment><USER31> Nope no source. I've tried looking as well. I assume since it costs so much in infrastructure that Google lends for free to YouTube, and that they have never been able to announce nice numbers for YouTube, ever, that it likely doesn't make a profit or break even. Especially after accounting for all the freebies Google provides YouTube.

<comment><USER28> I guess I just have a time believing it's in the red, considering the sheer quantity of advertising they show and the fact that video hosting itself isn't all that expensive (relative to the cost of showing an ad), and even cheaper given how cost-efficient Google's datacenters are.

But also, given YouTube's astronomical growth over the past 15 years, I can also see it operating similar to Amazon -- not technically making a profit, but only because it continues to massively reinvest what would otherwise be quite profitable, for even greater future eventual profits.

Of course all this is conjecture...

<comment><USER32> > video hosting itself isn't all that expensive

I would not be shocked to hear that video encoding is actually the biggest cost of running Youtube, much more than the hosting cost itself, at least when you factor in their close connection to Google's networking infrastructure that probably brings bandwidth cost way down.

<comment><USER31> Yeah that's why I assume almost no other company could handle running YouTube without massive losses because they won't have the infrastructure. The two major Chinese co's and ~5-7 American companies could probably handle running it without costs going out of control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If they had assigned a new CEO for Google it could of not looked this way. However this looks bad especially when you hear "We the People" talk about how some of these tech giants need to be broken up. This is not going to help them. I wonder who the next Bell will be.[0]

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)

<comment><USER34> why is it assumed they wont appoint a new Google CEO in the next 6 months to a year?

<comment><USER24> If I were Sundar Pichai, I'd probably view being the Alphabet Chief, and not the Google Chief, as a downgrade from just being the Google Chief. That was fine for Larry and Sergey with their founder's stock and deliberate desire to be somewhat disconnected. I don't think Sundar has either of those.

<comment><USER34> IF his forte is operations, more Ballmer and Cook to a visionary, it makes sense. Put a new visionary in charge of Google, and start focusing on turning the other bets into self sustaining companies. Maybe split google up a bit too, make CGP its own bet. You could even make the case for Youtube, Nest/Pixel, Doubleclick, maybe Android. Refocus google on being an information sorting and calling tool, whether that be search, shopping, maps, gmail, photos.

Google could benefit a bit from the Bezos API memo AND a bit from the Jobsesque "singular vision not kitchen sink of requested features" refinement. Paring google down and giving sects more singular visions, while encouraging cohesiveness might need a Bain Capital type chopman, but after that is said and done, Alphabet Chief should be more important than Google Chief.

Pichai's job should be demarcing responsibility and org chart, giving focus.

<comment><USER19> A "visionary" without any operations expertise is useless. Cook has as much to do with the rise of Apple as Jobs. Jobs wouldn't have had the supply chain experience to manufacturer 100 million iPods at his height or all the products that it ships now.

<comment><USER34> and Pichai would still be there. I fully 100% agree, Cook is who scaled Apple.

Whoever else decided to allow iTunes onto Windows should be shown a lot of respect as well. That was a very uncharacteristic and forward thinking move.

Putting a visionary in the drivers seat of google doesnt mean that operations should be thrown to the wayside. And part of that pretense is paring down and refining what "google" is. GCP obviously needs a more salesman/finance/trustworthy leader at the moment. One who can walk into a Fortune 100 company and say "trust us to be your foundation." That div reinventing itself shouldt be hampered by Google needing to become truly innovative again. The worst part about reinventing search specifically, is that if done right, its a bit of a thankless endeavor. Google search is so seamless and chromeless, that when it works you dont even notice it. It's job is to present other information.

<comment><USER19> That's true about GCP. I don't care how good GCP is technically, I wouldn't bet my career on it as either a person spending time developing on top of it or as a potential decision maker.

While I haven't worked with Azure specifically besides what is now called "Azure Devops", MS's enterprise support is legendary.

I work for a company now that has AWS business support. I use the live chat all of the time as an "easy button". Not when something is wrong, just when I don't want to spend too much time trying to figure something out. They are excellent and batting close to 100.

<comment><USER34> >Not when something is wrong, just when I don't want to spend too much time trying to figure something out.

That is how support should work in general. Support has become so much "thats outside the scope of your contract" or "blame other vendor" instead of a shortcut to training. If my provider has already seen a problem I've run into, its in _their_ best interest to get me moving again, so I can use more of their product and extend their tentacles further into my business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Google is simply an ad company with a search engine that monetizes all your data. They exist to serve ads. The rest is window dressing.

</comment><comment><USER36> [http://archive.is/zBtGp](http://archive.is/zBtGp)

</comment><comment><USER37> This is why without a technological background or acumen, you'll never be able to find the investments that succeed based on innovation.

Because there's no financials to analyze, the companies that succeed this way basically go from making nothing / losing money for many years before all of a sudden becoming exponentially profitable. The signal doesn't exist on the financial side, which is why so many people in Wall Street often fail so badly when valuing hard technology companies.

It's why a company like Waymo will in 10 years be valued more than the entirety of Google, yet many in finance won't even have an inkling of this in the present day.

Also, by the way, this is why I believe the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley was able to uniquely succeed in the beginning due to a heavy concentration in extremely technical investors compared to the rest of the United States and the world in general (i.e. the VC capital of the world is in Silicon Valley and not New York for a reason).

</comment><comment><USER38> That Google pretty much remains a one-trick pony after billions of dollars thrown against the wall speaks volumes about the glorification of "success" (or misattribution thereof) and the value of all the hagiographies in its wake.

<comment><USER39> I wouldn't call Google a one-trick pony. They've created a bunch of wildly successful products -- Search, Maps, Android, Chrome -- that help feed their ad business.

What should be scary if you're at the top of the company is that Google has not had a home-run product in a very long time. It's a strong signal that wherever made Google special in the past is gone (though that doesn't mean it couldn't come back).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if Google's project Sidewalk Labs in Toronto would be affected as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> sounds like a good time for a "traitorous 8" group from google's vast AI teams to jump out of advertising and start monetizing their plans.

</comment><comment><USER42> Alternatively it could be seen as retreating from the Larry and Sergey experiment.

</comment><comment><USER43> The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet- is-google-again)

<comment><USER44> And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience than the typical non-AMP experience from Bloomberg.

<comment><USER45> A forced redesign, in this case motivated by AMP, is what gave you that better mobile experience. It is not something inherent to AMP, and in other ways AMP is incredibly harmful.

Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.

<comment><USER46> The selling point of AMP is that it's a mobile-friendly web component framework. If someone uses AMP for their website, and as a result you get a better mobile experience, it's hard to see how that's not inherent to AMP.

<comment><USER47> I turn on the faucet and fill a glass of water. Taking a drink from the glass, I feel less thirsty. If someone turns on a faucet, and as a result feels less thirsty, then that that thirst-removal must be inherent to turning on a faucet, right?

This is obviously silly, but follows the same reasoning that you have stated. Drinking water reduces thirst, not running water from a faucet. Redesigning a website to be less bloated results in a better mobile experience, not designing around AMP. It is possible to redesign a website without using AMP.

Causation does not imply necessity.

<comment><USER46> I think it's fair to say that thirst-removal is inherent to turning on a faucet. It's true that there are other ways to reduce your thirst, and it's true that turning on the faucet has other effects (such as increasing your water bill) that have nothing to do with how thirsty you are. It's even true that the water company behind your faucet might be doing bad things that it ought to stop.

But it doesn't seem helpful to analyze faucets as being a monopolistic plot by Big Water rather than a technology for letting you drink when you're thirsty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> First the Reader, now the Alphabet.

<comment><USER49> It will never stop.

After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G. Watching them build legit software, gain users, and then dissolve those services over and over and over again had the effect of suffocating any further curiosity towards their products.

Like a Skinner mouse, they literally train you not to give a shit anymore.

<comment><USER50> >After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G

I never used Reader, but did anything else come along to fill the void? I ask as I am curious on the market when G kills a product. When G kills off a product, does the rest of the world just assume that if G couldn't make it work then it must not be worth doing? I know HN readers were vocal about the death of lots of G products, but HN readers are edge cases in the grand scheme.

<comment><USER51> There are other RSS readers but RSS as a stand-alone thing that people use (where "people" was always somewhat of a niche) has largely withered in the face of social media. Much as the tech crowd likes to complain about Reader's Denise, it was at least in part a response to RSS's decline not the cause.

<comment><USER19> RSS has not "withered". True very few people use it, but every site still supports rss where it makes sense.

<comment><USER51> Very few people using it seems the very definition of withering. Yes, a lot of sites and blog software etc. still default to offering RSS feeds. (Which I take advantage of from time to time and it's presumably used behind the scenes for various purposes.) But that's hardly a ringing endorsement of the role of RSS in today's world.

<comment><USER19> Why do you care if other people use it as long as it is available?

<comment><USER51> Because when things aren't used, organizations such as, say, Google tend to stop supporting them over time.

<comment><USER19> It's been over a decade since Google abandoned reader. RSS is just a check box in most CMSs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google has got it wrong again - <AUTHOR> http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/google-penguin-2-0-live-domain-crowding-emd-still-prevalent Looks like a big update but it looks like Google is not focusing on some basic issues like domain crowding and exact match domains.<p>Small businesses seem to pay for the dirty tricks of big boys... <comment><AUTHOR> Google keeps on hurting small businesses, the big boy who keep on abusing its guidelines are fine, after every single update.

Also, they are not fixing basic issues like exact match domains and domain crowding.

Here is a relatively good example

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=care+homes+in+essex&aq...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=care+homes+in+essex&aq=f&oq=care+homes+in+essex&aqs=chrome.0.57j0l3j60j62.3082j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)</comment>


Are You Wasting Time With Test Driven Development? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.architexa.com/2010/08/wasting-time-with-test-driven-development/

<comment><USER2> For all these points, the real answer is "you're doing it wrong." TDD is supposed to, over the course of the project, allow faster development, allow easier and safer refactoring, and overall allow you to feel confident in the system you've built.

My personal experiences have shown the following:

* If you're not allowing yourself to write prototyping / exploratory code without tests, you're doing it wrong.

* If the first thought when writing tests for a method / class / etc is "What do I need to mock", you're doing it wrong (mock over-usage is the worst TDD mistake I've ever seen).

* If the tests take too long to run, you're _definitely_ doing something wrong.

I've run the full gamut of extreme white-box testing to full black-box testing. There are merits to both, and there's a time and place for both, but anyone who adheres to strict ideals isn't developing good software, they're doing Agile masturbation.

That said, anyone writing production code _without_ a test suite is making an even bigger mistake than doing any of the above. Building a good test suite is a very hard problem, and you really need to tailor what you build and how you test with your team and your product.

<comment><USER3> James, I agree with you point, but I don't feel the answer is in just saying that "you're doing it wrong". I think we need to figure out the main cases of such failing TDD instances, document it, and raise awareness so that we can be vigilant - if only to make sure that an inexperienced developer does not make these mistakes.</comment></comment>


Distributed tracing in the service mesh: four myths - <AUTHOR> https://linkerd.io/2019/08/09/service-mesh-distributed-tracing-myths/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here! Happy to answer any questions people might have.

<comment><USER2> How is the topology discovered without tracing? The article mentions that metrics are used. Could you elaborate on how you go from metrics to the topology?

<comment><AUTHOR> The metrics data includes upstream and downstream calls for each service, so you can pull those together to draw the whole topology. Don't need end-to-end traces for that.</comment></comment></comment>


Launching Docs.github.com - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-07-01-launching-docs-github-com/ <comment><USER2> Remarkable post of ms. Jean Leaver on Launching docs.github.com [https://github.blog/2020-07-01-launching-docs-github- com/](https://github.blog/2020-07-01-launching-docs-github-com/) Femene genius soured into IT marks the end of open source, as we know it. The flagship of big data pillars behind marvelous github platform had announced deprecation of the idea that it was built upon.

Try fetching long and painful history of github's docs evolvement through the last decades.

pff, — it's gone.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping to see competitor for Readme.io where documentation is exposed as a platform to users of github.

<comment><USER4> yeah or even an integration of something like docs.msft tooling

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know why I expected this to be a Google Docs competitor.</comment>


From Python to Numpy - <AUTHOR> http://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/from-python-to-numpy/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has used numpy for many years and written a great deal of production code using it, I was surprised when I read through this and saw some numpy tricks that I didn't know regarding the speeds of various operations! This is really a fantastic reference that provides a deeper level of understanding of what numpy does under the hood.

One thing I will highlight that the author just touched on briefly, is that numpy combined with numba is really a phenomenal combination for dealing with very computationally intensive problems.

The folks at Continuum Analytics have really done a fantastic job building numba (numba.pydata.org), which JIT compiles a subset of python functions using LLVM, and is designed to work seamlessly with numpy arrays. Numba makes it much easier to speed up performance bottlenecks and allows you to easily create numpy ufuncs which can take advantage of array broadcasting.

<comment><USER3> Can I ask how intensively you have used Numba and over what period? I'm interested in how Numba has progressed over the last few years, with a view to using it over Cython.

My team and I looked at Numba a year ago or so for optimisation of a fairly large calculation, and found that the speed-ups were impressive where they worked, but were not consistent or predictable.

We used Cython for large parts, and while there was boilerplate and incantations, the gains were achievable, incremental and certain. The annotation tools were also quite helpful for identifying bottlenecks where Cython code could be effective.

Incidentally, once we decided that Cython was our go-to tools, we often wrote simple looping code rather than vectorised code because it was simpler to transition to Cython, alá Julia.

<comment><USER2> Sure. I've used numba for the past 1 1/2 years, and I've seen it grow quite a bit. When I first started using it, there was a separate product called numbapro that did all of the gpu jit, which they've now included in numba for example.

Regarding whether it would be appropriate vis-a-vis cython really depends on your application

First, Cython is fantastic as well, and my endorsement of numba doesn't take anything away from it. Cython is much more fully featured and mature, in the sense that you can really develop your own data structures and control flows. Pretty much anything you could do in C, you could do in Cython. I've written Cython and it also plays very nicely with numpy.

In comparison, Numba is much more limited. You are basically limited to using numpy arrays and matrixes as your data structures, and you really need to understand exactly what is going to be used prior to the jit loop or you won't be able to use it in nopython mode (which is where you get the most benefit). It also doesn't handle strings really at all. One fairly recent thing Numba does is allow you to use a list of a single type within nopython mode. Under the hood it handles the malloc for you.

My endorsement of Numba really boils down to ease of integration with existing python codebase. For me the "killer feature" was the ability to simply comment out the @jit or @njit decorator and step through the code like I would step through normal python code, then just turn it back on again when I needed it. The other was that numba gained the ability early in our adoption to chain functions together, so while you can't generate a numpy array in the nopython mode, for instance, you can generate a numpy array in a @jit function (object mode) outside of the nopython mode, then call the looping function (nopython mode) from that jitted function, and numba handles that seamlessly and cuts out a lot of the overhead. For us, our speed of development of a custom algorithm has really been helped greatly by Numba.

The other thing I will mention is that when I first started, getting LLVM to work with numba was, initially, a nightmare on different OS's. That has completely gone away with improvements in conda package manager now.

All that said, you cannot go wrong with Cython, it just has a little more of a learning curve and was a little tricker to implement in our codebase.

>> once we decided that Cython was our go-to tools, we often wrote simple looping code rather than vectorised code because it was simpler to transition to Cython, alá Julia.

If you're used to doing this with cython, you might find it even easier to do this with numba. This is how I develop all the time with numba now. I find that it's incredibly beneficial to step through it as though it was just regular python initially during algorithm and test development, then once the algorithm is right and tests pass, turn on the jit when ready. You sort of get a sense for what numba will accept and still have performant no-python mode jitting after a while, and knowing those limitations actually tends to cause me to write more modular code to take advantage of the speed boosts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Immediately recognized the domain name. Months ago I was doing yet another search on how to do geospatial plotting with Matplotlib, the kind that mostly works-out-of-the-box in R/ggplot2, but, because of some latent fragmentation from Py2v3, was not well-documented anywhere in Python/matplotlib. And while I've come to really like and respect Matplotlib, the documented examples stray far from what they should for purposes of API illustration, and so learning it has been a test in patience.

Anyway, Mr. Rougier's Matplotlib was both informative, concise, and beautiful. Actually, I think my appreciation for matplotlib came from reading his guide: [https://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/teaching/matplotlib/](https://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/teaching/matplotlib/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The site is down for me, but you can see the content nicely formatted on GitHub: [https://github.com/rougier/from-python-to- numpy](https://github.com/rougier/from-python-to-numpy)

For cmd-f: mirror

<comment><USER6> You mean search? Not everybody uses a Mac ...

<comment><USER7> Yet somehow you figured out what he meant.

<comment><USER6> It was not tongue in cheek. I do not know what cmd is. I assume it is a modifier key in an Apple keyboard, since it is not in a Windows keyboard, which I have (although I am on linux).

Sure, I guess he means search, but he could just say that.

Or should I start talking using references to my keyboard shortcuts? I mostly use emacs, very often with custom bindings, or tmux, so it will not make sense to a lot of people.

But hey, it's a free world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd be very curious to know if there is any impact to choosing Numpy C ordered arrays or Fortran ordered arrays. As a long time Matlab user (since 1993) who moved to Python 3 years ago, I have always defaulted to Fortran order because it was what I was used to and seemed more intuitive. I did play with C ordered arrays but didn't find an advantage in my limited investigation.

<comment><USER9> There may still be a few routines that expect C-ordered arrays and so require a copy be made when given a Fortran-ordered array --- especially as you extend to one of libraries that use NumPy. For the most, part, however, Fortran- ordered arrays should work well. It all comes down to the expectation of the routine writer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have a recommendation for something similar to this but for Python itself? I have been trying to find something that is not necessarily an intro or crash course book but a book with tips, great explanations, and neat examples (which this e-book(?)/site has).

I see that the author has responded to a couple comments here. Thank you for your great work! It's always great to have a nice reference material with concise examples. I think this will be helpful to everyone(beginners and advanced python users alike)!

<comment><USER11> I would recommend Julien Danjou's "The Hacker's Guide to Python". He charges $29 for the PDF, but provides updates every year or so. I think it's a great book for getting more depth out of Python. :)

Topics include: modules/libraries, documentation, distribution, virtual environments, unit testing, methods/decorators, functional programming, optimization, scaling, RDBMS, and more.

[https://thehackerguidetopython.com/](https://thehackerguidetopython.com/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the suggestion! I downloaded the free chapter from the book and I'm going to check it out tonight. If I enjoy it, I might have to buy the physical and electronic copy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> this book is amazing! specially the authors sense of humor makes reading it fun.

> For example, can you tell what the two functions below are doing? Probably > you can tell for the first one, but unlikely for the second (or your name is > Jaime Fernández del Río and you don't need to read this book).

</comment><comment><USER13> I just check the first example from introduction to vectorization: [http://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/from-python-to- numpy/#id5](http://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/from-python-to-numpy/#id5), (add_python and add_numpy) and benchmark results are nearly the same: 75.4ns and 77.7ns accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone (author) know what was used to generate the cover image of cubes and shadows?

Edit: it's sketchup - there's a .skp file in the data/ subdirectory of the github repo for the book.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there an epub/mobi version?

</comment><comment><USER16> Does the book exist in PDF?

<comment> Nicolas-Rougier Not yet but I'm working on it (meanwhile you can try a rst2latex.py on the sources) for a very rough draft.

<comment><USER17> Amazing work. If you take a look at latex please consider also XeTeX for its beautiful font support. It can give a lot of satisfaction when packaging good content. Microtype is also nice if one sticks to pdflatex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > be warned that I'm a bit picky about typography & design: Edward Tufte is my > hero

And it shows, the theme is beautiful. Also some of the best ASCII diagrams I've seen. Worth a look at the source, even if you don't care about Python.

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't normally criticize website design, but since this came up... yes, the fonts are pretty and all, but on my humble 24" monitor the site uses barely half of my horizontal space and looks awkward (the table of contents especially). "Mobile-first"?

<comment><USER20> > but on my humble 24" monitor the site uses barely half of my horizontal > space and looks awkward (the table of contents especially). "Mobile-first"?

That's actually a feature, as lines that are too long are harder to read ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length)). It's the same as why books actually have empty margins.

To me, the font is too thin to be easy to read.

<comment><USER19> I don't mind empty margins, but having 60% of my screen empty for no reason is excessive, and I do read slower because of it. If I want shorter lines, I'll just resize my browser, thanks.

I agree with you about the font being too thin, but the line length annoyed me much more.

<comment><USER21> Optimizing for super-rare users who have a deliberate desire for long lines is less important than optimizing for the vastly-more-common case that the browser's size is large as an artifact of content the user was viewing on a previous site, but the user still prefer a sane line length for text content.

<comment><USER22> Citation that these users are super rare? Almost everyone I've had conversations with on the subject bemoan too large margins on websites.

<comment><USER23> That's odd. I wonder if these people that like looong lines are mostly younger people that have read more from screens than books (but not so young that they've read more from phones than computer screens :))? A book with very long lines would be super weird.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. I'm specifically referencing wasted space. As I've gotten older, that "wasted" space gets replaced with zoomed fonts using ctrl+=. I've found this attitude and use isn't all that unique anecdotally, so I found the assertion that it's "rare" to be contrary to my own experience. I have no citation the other way though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really appreciated the problem vectorization chapter. New approaches require new thinking and this is often forgotten when teaching new concepts.</comment>


Smartphones are taking over... - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120309103802.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Smartphones abilities to track your exact location are becoming more and more capable. Think about the ways that this information can be used, both for and against us. It scares me a little bit that the little chunk of technology I carry around in my pocket could very well be reporting my location and everything that I say/do. The amount of information that companies collect about people is just mind-boggling, and with the apps that have been coming out and the user agreements you're forced to sign, you very well could be getting tracked. Being a law-abiding citizen, objectively I know that I don't really have anything to worry about, but the principle still scares me.

Has anyone actually read a EULA all the way through? I know this is slightly off-topic, I'm just following my train of thought.</comment>


Bitcoin vulnerability - <AUTHOR>

What if I use bitaddress.org to create 30000 addresses 200 times. Then I use a script to check if any of these addresses have been used on the network. If they have, then I have their private key.<p>Then I will make this script open source if its not really a vulnerability. <comment><USER2> Some basic calculations (based on creating 30000 bitcoin keys per second) tell me it would take you approximately 1.2239x10e60 centuries just to get through 1% of all possible addresses.

Math is fun.

<comment><USER3> You don't have to go through all possible addresses, you just need to find one that exists, no? Although my gut tells me that's not going to make much of a difference in terms of the size of the search space.

<comment><USER4> The point is that there is a staggeringly large amount of possible addresses, and that this space is incredibly sparsely populated by actual wallet addresses. You could generate an enormous amount of addresses looking for bitcoins, and not even come close to likely to finding any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is futile, the collision chance is unlikely low - the only thing that IS worthwile is doing dictionary attacks on brainwallets!

</comment><comment><USER6> You should try it, and update us with how many Bitcoins you were able to get this way :)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm sorry, I misspoke. Not centuries. 1.2239x10e60 millennia.

<comment><USER7> With a factor of 10^60 in there, the difference between a century and a millennium is down in noise anyway. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe you accidentally some math. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack by checking every atom in the known universe.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to digitize your paper records? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking at digitizing most of my personal paper records like tax files, large value receipts, important letters, legal documents etc. The plan is to scan them to PDF or TIFF using a feed scanner. I want a solution that encrypts and backs up to the cloud. Anyone doing this? Suggestions for a good system and tools for this requested. Thanks!<p>Edit: So far I've found Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) which seems like a good open source secure vault on top of my existing Dropbox/Google Drive storage. <comment><USER2> I had to do this when my wife and I moved from Austin, TX to London. My wife and I turned 2 filing cabinets worth of files into a dropbox directory tree. For the actual scanning, I followed the wirecutter's advice and found that the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Mobile Document Scanner worked well. It seems they are now recommending[1] a different scanner though.

For the actual organization, we had a naming scheme of "$(source of document) $(title) $(date %F).pdf". For example: "Texas DMV Toyota Sienna Registration Receipt 2015-05-16.pdf

[1] [http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-portable-document- scan...](http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-portable-document-scanner/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Did you bother with OCR and encryption?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently using a camera scanner app for iOS called TurboScan. I move scanned documents onto my MacBook and back them up with the rest of my files. In the past, I've kept security conscious information inside encrypted disk images with a local and remote backup just like everything else.

</comment><comment><USER4> I also use a ScanSnap. An S300 I got back in 2009. Completely worth it if you scan then shred all your documents.

Ever few months I'd pull out some old files and put a podcast or something and scan a few hundred sheets.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't. I generally keep them or shred them.</comment>


The Calculating Machines of Sir Samuel Morland - <AUTHOR> http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/Morland.html
<comment><USER2> I've always found it interesting that hobby machinists make much more complicated steam engines and locomotive models, but not calculating machines.

I wrote a perl script a long time ago to output the gcode to scribe/scratch out slide rule scales on my milling machine. Not very hard, once you can scratch out a regular ruler, you log / double log / triple log scale it. Never went anywhere with it but it was fun.

Took apart an ancient mechanical cash register when I was a kid to figure out how it worked, typical proto-engineer kid. Surprisingly simple, its all in the clutch design and some obvious gearing.

</comment><comment><USER3> These machines always look to me, like more work than doing it on paper.</comment>


Xfce bug: "default desktop screen causes damage to monitor" - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12117 <comment><USER2> The bugtracker seems to be taking a nap, omgubuntu have a summary of the "bug" here: [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/xfce-wallpaper-cat- bug](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/03/xfce-wallpaper-cat-bug)

<comment><USER3> _> The bugtracker seems to be taking a nap_

Sounds like it's a cat. No wonder the bug won't be fixed then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very strange. Neither of my cats have ever paid the slightest bit of attention to the contents of any screen on any device I own. Yet I know people whose cats like to watch television, so there's some thing going on where some cats see screen images as significant and others don't. I should go looking for info on that!

In any case, I don't see how this is XFCE's problem. Just change the wallpaper.

<comment><USER5> Cat eyes have a different refresh rate than human eyes. Some cats can see monitors just clearly enough to make out what's on the screen. Others see flicker. The color gamut is different too.

<comment><USER6> I can see this being a thing with CRTs (which basically 'flicker' constantly), but LCDs?

<comment><USER7> Some LCD displays use flicker to set backlight LED brightness.

<comment><USER6> Dang, TIL, I guess... but I don't see how that relates to the OPs hypothetis about cat vision. A phrase I never thought I'd be uttering here, or... anywhere, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember my early days of computers (not as old as some folks here, I know) when there was an intense debate on whether a software could cause damage to some hardware.

I remember programing a small .asm that would move the head of a floppy to a farther point and it stoped working. Probably not all models would fail, but one particular brand did.

Then a intense debate followed that I was wrong. Never talked about it again.

Fast-forward, now we have news that nuclear programs had malfunctions caused by cyber-attacks. Ok, not exactly the same "software doesn't damage hardware" we talked back then, but...

I'm willing to consider that using software to make some catware cause damages to the hardware should be acceptable too :D

<comment><USER3> _> when there was an intense debate on whether a software could cause damage to some hardware._

A more recent debate (TL;DR: yes, software can cause damage to hardware): [https://superuser.com/questions/313850/](https://superuser.com/questions/313850/)

<comment><USER9> As the person who wrote the accepted answer to that question, I'm flattered to see it linked here. (I'm also a bit embarrassed at reading some of my older rambling-style writing, but nothing beats experience :)

While my forray into malicious floppy disks didn't end with physical damage, I did manage to make one similar to DBAN. If you booted the computer with the floppy inserted, all drives would be formatted instantly, without any user input.

Fortunately, even in highschool I realized they probably imaged the school machines anyways. Probably...

<comment><USER8> Mine answer is there too but with much less points, the kill FDD thing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Long story short: the so-called bug -> monitor damage is not caused by code but cat - obviously NOT `/usr/bin/cat` ;-)

<comment><USER11> even if it was, all is forgiven /usr/bin/cat is too cute to be angry with

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Try Ratpoison ([http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/](http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/)) to get rid of the mice.

</comment><comment><USER13> Archived, as the bugzilla seems to be overloaded right now: [http://archive.is/s5HMf](http://archive.is/s5HMf)

</comment><comment><USER14> I suggest the patch here: [http://imgur.com/5s2hM0p](http://imgur.com/5s2hM0p)

<comment><USER11> In my house, that would likely result in graphical distortion due to slobber

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think those cats need some upgrade. If they are not compatible with XFCE that's rather not XFCE's fault.

<comment><USER3> What's easier to change? Even a single cat or XFCE?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slashdot effect on the Xfce bugtracker...

<comment><USER17> No one is viewing it due to irrelevance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Gosh I use Xfce when on desktop mode, reminds me it's time to get a kitten again

</comment><comment><USER19> Hacker News clearly knows how to DDoS websites.

<comment><USER20> And reddit. It was a top post recently [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60rzjn/my_cat_was_fo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60rzjn/my_cat_was_fooled_by_xfce/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> April 1st early this year?

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't reproduce on modern hardware (4 Year Old Black Female Cat, 4 Year Old Black Male Cat).

status:Wont Fix

</comment><comment><USER23> Heh, it's not April yet ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> Soon it will get a new licence: we are not responsible for cat damage.

<comment><USER3> And then ship a malicious /usr/bin/cat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just change the background? I don't think XFCE should change because cats are attacking monitors.

<comment><USER26> Really? Don't you think they have a responsibility to all thier cat owning users? It must be close to 100%!</comment></comment>


Show HN: My first iOS game – Lina - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lina-a-game-about-lines/id892154557

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I made this game with a friend, we've been working on it on and off (mostly off) for the past year or so. We were having trouble finishing it so we decided to release as soon as possible and removed a few features. I hope it's still fun to play!

Let me know if you have any trouble with the game, I'm especially interested to hear about the difficulty (very hard to get right) and if you got the mechanics right when you started playing.

Tech-wise it's a Cocos2D app, Objective-C all the way (it was our first time dealing with Objective-C too, so it wasn't always easy to keep performance rock solid. Good learning experience though.

</comment><comment><USER2> I like it. Love the concept, enjoyed the gameplay. I played it on an ipod 4th gen, so it being an older device and slow, I had some performance issues but it wasn't completely unplayable. Only thing I would like is to know what the other power-ups do.</comment>


Sun announcing up to 6000 (18%) layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aq_sEpeurux8&refer=home

<comment><USER3> Sun's current cost structure doesn't begin to be supported by revenue. It has ~32,000 employees, and makes $12 billion in hardware revenue, with declining gross margins (Dell, Rackspace etc. are commoditizing servers). Their "strategy" for growth is open source, but after 10 years, they still haven't shown how they will make money out of Java. MySQL is a $100 million a year business, respectable, but there is no way to see how it grows to billions without pissing off and driving away the very users that made MySQL successful.

If I were them, I would cut deep, real deep, like 50% lay-off, assume further drastic erosion in their margins (and plan to be profitable with such drastic erosion), and crucially, with a slim-but-sharply-focused R&D division, focus on coming up with innovations that people are willing to pay for.

Apple did it, Sun could. It has the heart of a great company faintly ticking somewhere deep inside, but alas, current leadership hasn't shown it is up to the job.

<comment><USER4> The comparison to Apple is apt. Back in their heyday, Sun combined the right hardware and software into a product that was perfect for the market, first scientific workstations, and then high end servers, in both cases, best of breed, premium priced, huge moneymakers. I don't know how you get back there, because they seem tremendously unfocused. But Apple was there once too - <USER2> the doldrums, failing to perform, all over the map. And they came back.

<comment><USER5> It's the tide.

Digital corporation: very profitable minicomputer business... until workstations were good enough.

Sun microsystems: very profitable workstation business... until microcomputers were good enough.

It's hard for a business to get back to where it was, when the very basis of its success is washed away. See "the innovator's dilemma" (actually inspired by the Digital story). You're right though, that Apple has done it... seemingly by shifting its weight to a different aspect of its business (consumer design) that was present all along. IBM has also done it (from cash registers, to mainframes, to minicomputes, to microcomputers, to today) - however, it seems now to be consulting-based (like Accenture), which is a different kind of business altogether, from IBM's traditional office automation _products_ , but which was always present (like Apple).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Schwartz has spent two years overhauling Sun, which posted five years of losses under former CEO Scott McNealy. The company continues to lose market share in servers, the computers that run corporate networks and account for almost half of revenue."

Convenient excuse for a company that was already in trouble. This way they can just say "oh it's the crappy economy" and hope to get a free pass for generally sucking (see GM)

Look, if they didn't make tons of money in the last 7 years there's something majorly wrong. I can understand if the last year was down, but the last 7 years? Please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Define sucking.

Sun is the only midlevel server company that innovates beyond buying mother boards and CPUs and assembling them. They make their own CPUs, their own OS, ZFS, serious storage solutions, etc. They foot the bill for MySQL and Java.And so on and so on.

Unfortunately, bad management can sink a good technology company.

<comment><USER7> Well, but if nobody else sees value in producing their own CPUs for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?

If everybody else is using a free OS for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?

Java, OpenOffice and MySQL are neat. Know anybody who's paid money for them?

Sun's decisions in the technology world have been so bad in the last decade that you could have become rich just by watching what they do and investing in the opposite.

<comment><USER8> "Everybody" is not using Linux for their mid-level servers; Solaris, especially OpenSolaris, is still a very viable option, and offers a number of features (most notably ZFS and Zones) that Linux isn't really close to, yet. Not to mention, Solaris has, in my experience, a much better I/O scheduler.

Linux is a fine operating system, but it isn't the end-all-be-all.

<comment><USER7> I meant all of Sun's competitors, you know, those guys that are eating their lunch.

The distinction here is between the quality of their product and their understanding of their market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't it strange that the same community (namely, hackers) who claim to hate the Windows monoculture (and embrace alternative desktop platforms like Apple's) seems intrinsically resistant to a server-side stack that isn't based on the cheapest Intel or AMD chips they can find, running the most bog- standard version of Red Hat or Debian.

I think it's an unfortunate sign of the times that the commoditization of hardware is threatening to drive one of the last truly innovative hardware vendors out of the server market.

Of course, it may all just be karma for the time when Sun workstations more or less killed the arguably much-cooler Lisp Machines way back in the 80s.

<comment><USER10> Well... I am quite unlike the community you mentioned. As much as I like Linux, I despise the PC architecture (the clunky x86 is remarkably elegant when compared to the rest of a common PC - I imagine there is even an ISA bus buried inside the chipset) my computers use. I would much rather have a MIPS or ARM or SPARC based notebook instead.

Unfortunately, those are not being made mainly because any pc-class computing device must be Windows-compatible.

There is hope. Canonical recently announced they have a complete Ubuntu stack compiled for ARM. Maybe someone can make a cheap non-x86 usable desktop or portable computer out of that.

As for Lisp machines, it would be very interesting to build one these days. Anyone wants to guess what a Lisp CPU would look like if it could have been done with, say, a 45nm process?

<comment><USER11> I'm no fan of x86, but the inside of these chips have kept pretty up-to-date. Also, they're pretty fast.

PCI & the Pentium's APIC took out a lot of the old kludgey stuff of the old PC arch.

IMHO, a removal of the older 16bit instruction set & 4 more registers would make many of us happy. Maybe Open Firmware :-)

Disclaimer: I use a Sun x86 box on my desk, and a mac laptop. So while I'm in x86-land, it's a distinctly different province than many others.

Anything else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The current economy offers every company a convenient excuse!

</comment><comment><USER13> who else is astounded that sun employs more than 30k people???

<comment><USER14> Not really. Like HP and IBM, they have a big professional services/consulting/systems integration operation.</comment></comment>