281–290 of 290 posts
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They've now replaced it with "You can make money without doing evil". https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/ (point 6) Presumably the written bit is "but that's not to say we won't anyway".
Yeah, or "but why take any chances?"
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...unless Larry wakes up and realises Facebook isn't going to kill his business Or is it? Actually I agree with you. But I also believed Microsoft was exaggerating his fears of Netscape. Now I don't know what to think. Maybe it's better to err on the side of paranoia after all.
" But I also believed Microsoft was exaggerating his fears of Netscape. " Microsoft is still in the same position as it was pre-Netscape. It still effectively owns the OS and office software markets. It just wasn't entirely able to take over a couple of new markets. That failure was pretty bad: MS is no longer seen as a "hot new thing", or a producer of hot new things. But in terms of doing damage to Microsoft, nothi…
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What does all this say about Larry Page? He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research. From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness. Reminds…
Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.
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Lucky you! (and I mean it). I more think about it this way--and hey, if I chose the wrong word, do correct me. When we are changing the world with our technology we don't really stop to think about all the people who will be put out of work by it. We don't as a community really care much about the impact of our companies on our communities (giving to local arts organizations and volunteer efforts in SF are not rising…
I don't think religious attendance necessarily means moral education. Some people do get that out of religion, many do not. Some in fact get ammunition for frameworks of immorality. My feeling is that, today as a hundred years ago, the bulk of moral education comes from watching and interacting with other humans. Parents, teachers, friends, and neighbors hurting you, helping you, being hurt by you, being helped by yo…
If one wanted to, one could argue the baby boomers were pretty amoral and self-oriented; leading to millennials seeing and adopting that.
What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would. Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substanti…
>What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? It's because Google is now an established corporation and has run out of "startup cred." Now that they've become a stable, profitable, publicly-traded member of the corporate scene, they're the antithesis of the HipsterNews crowd who want to keep making webapps with no marketabilitiy over and over again. The Bay Area startup crowd are the definition of hipste…
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It's sad that the Armed Forces are now looked upon with disdain by hackers mere decades after the West wrested the world from Germany's grasp. Say what you want about the military industrial complex, but lets not forget that should any of our countries be invaded, we will be very grateful that those guns pointing at the invaders.
Disdain is inappropriate, but so is automatic praise. The media wants to paint this picture that members of the military choose to serve for altruistic reasons and that we need to celebrate them all. This may be true for some, but I think the majority are in the military more-so because they think it's their best option for starting a career. Additionally, the justness of military conflicts these days is far more que…
Er, what?
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I work at Google, have done for about 7 years now. This is my first comment at HN. I think your comment about "not coercive" is insightful. The biggest change I've seen over time here is that at the start, people never talked about what users should or should not do. They were treated as people who would use our products, or not, and that was A-OK. The subtle trend that underlies a lot of this recent outpouring of di…
...unless Larry wakes up and realises Facebook isn't going to kill his business Or is it? Actually I agree with you. But I also believed Microsoft was exaggerating his fears of Netscape. Now I don't know what to think. Maybe it's better to err on the side of paranoia after all.
And much in the same way: you can't really defeat a technology. As we now see with Microsoft, very slowly, responding to the threat by providing its own offerings, despite the considerable revenue threat this creates for the company. As with other fallen tech giants, it's turning increasingly to patent revenues and other forms of extractive revenue rather than productive activities.
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Google fascinates me. I think it is possibly the first organization in history that embodies concepts from dystopic fiction. Putting a real face to those dystopic ideas can give us a sense of what a true dystopia looks like (short answer: it looks deceptively nice; the horror reveals itself only on close inspection). You mention work. As you say, Google does not just want their employees' time. They want their comple…
I was reading this today, and it's surprisingly relevant to your comment. How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
In short, neither scientists/mathematicians/engineers nor historians/literary critics are stupid (well, most of them aren't). If this is your starting point, then if before dismissing the other discipline you realize that it's being studied by smart people who know what they're doing, and give yourself time to understand the premise, you might actually learn something. The writer of that article simply does not have the tools necessary to determine whether a "reading" is bogus or not, because he does not know what "non-bogus" or "true" is in the framework he has tried to explore.
Having said that, there was very little deconstruction in my interpretation of "don't be evil". In fact, I think it's a pretty straightforward interpretation once you've decided to interpret the motto seriously. It is a literary failure on my part to interpret it so unimaginatively, but it's only meant as a starting point.
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> Google-hate of late It's just gotten hip of late. The lack of faith institutions is accelerating, almost as if by design.
Please do not include google in statements about 'lack of faith in institutions'. When people bemoan the declining faith in institutions, they're generally talking about the legal system, the legislative system, journalists. Institutions that are supposed to represent disparate social groups with at least part of their mission to make the society and the world generally a better place. Profit driven corporations are…
> Less faith
Disappointed, even though they have been indoctrinated into an ideology that "Government is [always] the problem"
> The profit-driven corporate person, in other words...
The profit-driven person.
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it looks like you answered your own question (at least partially): "GMail's [new] interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating" ... but there is many other reasons to dislike Google's choices... I still miss the - and + operator when using Google search for example (this change happened when they started to push Google+)
- still exists, and + is now "". That is, "foo" forces foo to appear exactly, just as +foo did.