Wouldn't that make them entirely beholden to search engines that rely on ad revenue to pay Chrome? It doesn't seem to change the underlying incentives very much.
I'd say there's a big difference between having one primary customer and literally being owned by that customer. I would bet that a significant part Chrome's development is built around feeding data to other parts of Google, which would be more difficult and less appealing as a separate company.
Plus, there's no rule that says a browser has to get most of its revenue from selling Google Search placement. That just happens to be the case for the single independent browser that exists right now, one which isn't exactly renowned for great business leadership. I think if the Chrome team had a reason to explore self sustaining revenue models there's a good chance they would come up with some solid innovations.
It currently is completelly owned by Google (Alphabet) so your comment would be more of a "there is a possibility that they would end up still relying on Google's ad revenue".
In 2018, 53% of votes for Wisconsin State Assembly went to Democrats, and Republicans won 64% of the seats (see https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/blogs/wisconsin-voter/20...). So in this case it's not true that "if that party stays in power, it's because a majority of the people in that state have voted for that party".
This. I thought everybody for sure in the USA got A grades for everything. If you were not then you get extra credit to let you get the A Grade.
In England, A Levels have gotten to the point where each year more people get an A for a subject than the previous year. This is analogous to the Soviet harvests beating each preceding years. Not they have A* grades or some such derivative to say that it's a "real" A grade.
I agree, but the current situation in the US is more nuanced than the graph suggests. A lot of the growth is driven by the energy industry, like fracking, not building products like phones, computers, clothes, furniture, etc. We import 3 tons of steel for every ton we produce. Cars we manufacture in the US are dependent on imported components.
Finally, I’d especially like to thank all the people who wrote “considered harmful” essays over the last few years. Without the degree of annoyance you collectively created, I might never have bothered to write this essay.
Similarly, "Why we did ___", "How we did ___" or "How I did ___ in ___ time" formula blog titles are starting to get on my nerves seeing how popular they are here on HN.
It never attracted a giant user base. I miss Reader (especially the pre-G+ integration version) and I wish it was still around, but it's not mysterious why it got killed. If it had hundreds of millions of users it wouldn't have died.
This: Google's scale of operation doesn't work well for a free service with a small number of users - the legal, localization and support overhead is disproportionately expensive on a very small service, unless it's a paid one.
This is a very reasonable question. One way to get at the question of whether the reduction is real is to look at crimes where it's hard to game the statistics and see if they follow the same trends as other crimes.
One of the best crimes to look at is murder, since it's much harder to reclassify or not report a crime when there's a dead body involved. Looking at the statistics for murder and non-negligent manslaughter from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States seems to support the idea that the reduction is real--the rate has been cut in half since 1990, and the reduction is broadly similar to the reductions in other types of crime over that period as described by that article.
The principled way to avoid bad worst-case performance for quicksort is to select the pivot using a median of medians approach. That gives you good asymptotic performance even for adversarial inputs, but in practice it tends to be slower. Which fits well with the theme of this article.
You can trivially achieve bounded worst case performance with minimal overhead by doing median of medians only, say, one time in 5.
In the average case you do the expensive median of medians on a small fraction of the data and so only pay a few percent average penalty. And in the worst case you still get n log(n) performance.
The median-of-medians approach is also somewhat tricky to implement (avoiding array copies and so on), although it admittedly looks neat on the slides of the algorithms lectures.
