dreamfactory

> For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.

You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.

I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in.

On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do we representatively govern otherwise - the alternative is to cede governance to global corporations). Google is particularly sensitive to the latter as it has a huge de facto monopoly and has become part of our infrastructure - it is absolutely a huge target for regulation wherever it has traction.

Talking of competition, is there anything viable in the shape of an open source effort where the algorithms and indexes could be crowd-managed - perhaps indexing via browser plugins?

> what some bureaucrat has decided

That is precisely my point.

(And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)

Disagree. The sanctions that Google applies indicate that it is unable to effectively index a free web and is instead relying on editorial control and favouritism.

As a user I care whether Google finds me the most relevant results from the biggest haystack or whether it editorialises those results - it's a big distinction. By that measure I'd say they definitely _shouldn't_ be penalising sites for finding loopholes in their algorithms but should simply close those holes up.

About a year ago I tried it for receipts due to the OCR but at least half the scanned images got lost (some in transit, some after they had been viewed in evernote). Shame as I'd have have gone for at least one paid account if it had worked.

google docs?

Seems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).

demographics and dwell time

That's precisely why they are usually legally worthless, where they act as a restraint on trade for the individual concerned.

> every despot on the planet sees that and can say "Well America does it," and have firm ground to stand on. That's why we need people like Snowden, to keep the American government in line...

Whether styled as a despot or not, when it comes to the exercise and maintenance of power, nobody is ever saying anything remotely like 'well America does it' - it's just irrelevant. It's never a moral question, but one of what power can be assumed (both at home and abroad). That's the interesting thing about Snowden - he just acted and took the upper hand. (And even more so that he further consolidated by maintaining it, despite huge efforts to bring him down a peg or two.)

Think about any big project you've been a part of. With the benefit of hindsight, is it not true to say that you might well not have taken them on in the first place if you'd known what would be involved?

I take management blaming here to mean that this is a systemic problem that can can only be solved at an organisational level (rather than blaming a caste within that org).