"Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet"
It sounds like you got up in arms because you thought that chrome now auto-syncs when you sign in to gmail, and wrote the blog post draft. Then you learned that this isn't the case but you kept your arms up anyway, added that unsubstantiated "- yet" and hit "publish" anyway, despite nothing really having changed.
(Disclaimer 1: I used to work for google, so I'm likely biased to give them more benefit of doubt.
Disclaimer 2: This is a shared HN account (the password isn't exactly hard to guess), so not all of its comments or posts are written by me.)
DuckDuckGo is mostly a skin on Bing search results. By using it, you're saying you trust Microsoft more than Google. If that's your intent, cool, but you're not really getting away from the big tech companies by doing this.
> But it brings users within an accidental click of sharing their bookmarks and browsing history with Google.
It's two clicks, you need to be really explicit about it. The first click opens a huge "You're about to turn on sync" dialog, where you have to click "Yes, I'm in" again.
I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but the article isn't factually correct. It's also by the same person who misunderstood the recent chrome changes and wrote a long blog post triggered by them misunderstanding what was going on (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyny83/google-chr...).
Don't self-destruct. This may seem obvious, but surprisingly many people get this wrong. There will be moments where you have incomplete data on some situation, yet feel strongly about it, and have a strong urge to do some symbolical career-limiting step as a reaction -- for example, threatening to quit over some minor technical decision made by someone more senior that even turns out to be correct a few years down the line, or leaving a product that's on an exponential growth curve because you don't like to see the team changing as it grows (this is valid concern, but there's also significant upside to being an early member of a successful product). If you're in a situation like this, it's usually a good idea to wait a month or two before doing anything; usually the urge is over by then.
That was 11 years ago. All other big tech firms are doing business in China, by China's rules. Google used to be better than that. It's very sad that that's changing, but again it doesn't seem like something that's relevant for the House.
"When Google acquired Boston Dynamics, it ended the company’s military contracts. Now that the company is owned by SoftBank, Mr. Raibert said, it could also return to military work."
It's because the notation is pronounced "order of", which is also the vocabulary used when you do Fermi estimation: you don't care about exact numbers, but you want to guess the order of magnitude / power of ten correctly. It's linguistic overloading if you want.
The GP is factually wrong, this isn't "semantics". Your comment moves the goalpost to "well the aerodynamics help". This is true: The slipstream moves at the speed of the car ahead, so it's like she has no headwind slowing her down. She still needs to accelerate 84 MPH (on top of maintaining 100 MPH). Think of doing this on a gym bike where you don't have headwind either. This is very much an athletic feat.
It's also an engineering feat, but again TFA: "As they targeted the overall record, their team revamped the same dragster that was used to set the men's record" -- they're reusing last time's engineering.
From TFA: "Mueller-Korenek sat on a bike with gearing so steep that she needed to be towed to around 100 mph before taking over under her own power." So no, she didn't just maintain 184 MPH.
DDG is an ok skin on bing search results, but their pushy and misleading marketing is a huge turn-off to me. And I'm very very sympathetic to the "we don't track you" cause in general.