jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
That means AT&T or Comcast could block a service like Google Maps and charge for their own.

McDonald's could serve french fries that taste like gravel! Malls could charge you $1 to go to the bathroom! Circuit City and others could sell DVDs that self-destruct after 48 hours! Apple could offer singles only in an onerously-DRM-protected format rather than MP3s!

There are plenty of awful products that are possible. What protects us from their infinite variety is not the FCC/FTC/FBI/FHA/etc., but competition and consumer sovereignty.

The spook-scenarios of net-neut advocates, like the oft-repeated 'internet sites charged like cable channel packages' (appearing again here), probably wouldn't even be tried. But if they were tried, they'd fail in the marketplace. Perhaps immediately to consumer ridicule, like the case of disposable DVDs mentioned above; perhaps after a few years, like the case of Apple and DRM'd music.

Further, it's important to let this battle be played out. The give and take generates information about what people really want, at what prices. Preempting it with regulation based on scary bedtime stories, such as this page, means parts of the solution space that could be exciting for consumers die in uncertainty over legality or as collateral damage of overbroad rulemaking.

(My favorite hypothetical: why shouldn't an ISP be allowed to offer a free service that's a measly 128Kbps to the 'whole internet', but 6Mbps+ to preferred partners, as a way to extend basic connectivity to households that can't pay otherwise? Is such cross-subsidized non-neutral service, which could 'bridge the digital divide' and 'serve underserved communities', so self-evidently evil we need to ban it by law before it's even tried?)

All the long-term trends are for more access, cheaper. The internet already defeated a slew of walled-gardens and then gardens-plus-internet (classic AOL, CompuServe, others). Bandwidth to every point is increasing. The ability for upstarts to launch giant challenges to incumbents – in bandwidth and services – is increasing. The techniques for putting any traffic in any 'pipe' – bits is bits – are growing.

Don't believe an infographic written at an elementary-school level that tells you the internet is a delicate flower about to be trampled. The internet is a rampaging monster. Its logic will crush the DRM, bit-discrimination, and pipe-monopolization schemes of corporate dinosaurs – if we just let it. The worst thing to do is move any discretion at all into the DC 'halls of power' where AT&T, Comcast, and other big lobbies have disproportionate voice.
But spreading FUD about decentralized/p2p systems is OK, right?
I see, thank you very much for the explanation.
Interesting article, but I'm not sold on the benefits of N rack mini-apps vs a rails app w/ multiple controllers, the author even mentions that each mini-app is, in-essence, a controller. It honestly mostly just sounds like more of a pain in the ass.

I like sinatra, it's great for small apps, especially ones that do need to be embedded in other apps (resque-web, the resque control panel for example). However, I think a lot of people just end up making their own shitty version of Rails with it.
Why is that so hard?
(sigh)

Do you bring anything to the table? I mean come on, my mother has ideas AND friends. And she is really a mother-type, not just "sort of" a mother type.

As a non-hacker myself, here's my suggestion:

Figure out the bare-bones alpha version of your idea. Spec it out as detailed as you possibly can.

Now take that doc and pitch it to a developer in your town, in person. Meet them for coffee, buy them a beer, whatever. Just get them in person to pitch them on the idea.

If you can't get a single programmer to meet with you...you're not really a "business-type".

"business-types" can close deals and convince people (yes, even programmers!) to join them.
I had same painful AT&T experience, although i was able to log into the modem and it displayed connection speed in the advanced menu.After frontline hell, second tier support fixed the problem.
Good ol’ core competency theory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency

Google’s mission is…well, that depends on how cynical you are. But, whether it’s organizing the world’s information or spying on us with ads, it sure isn’t “develop boring payroll software, and maintain that awful boring software forever”.

Also, without knowing the exact nitty gritty of what this particular bit of payroll software does: does it manage international employees? Because just doing US compliance would be bad enough, dealing with regulations for N countries sounds like eating a bucket of bees.
“An analogy might be chess with derided "computer moves." The aren't necessarily more complex that existing human heuristics, especially at the grandmaster level, but they lack at least one of several traditional "aesthetic" attributes.”

I think there’s a possibility that’s cultural. Generations of chess players grew up learning certain heuristics.

Now, computers show those heuristics aren’t as good as we thought they were. It’s possible that new generations, trained more by computers than by older generations of chess players, will develop new heuristics.

You see something similar in math. Sometimes, when a human discovers a new way to look at a problem, whole avenues of proofs open up, and what was incomprehensible becomes much easier not only for that human, but also for those learning about his work.

On the other hand, I think computers sometimes make moves humans won’t make because they don’t have any notion of fear.

When humans get into a minefield position where almost every move is clearly losing, but that do have one winning path through it, they may not choose that path even if they see it because they fear they’re overlooking something.
But does it matter that much...Most schools are using Win7 (or, sadly, Vista) at this point and I would wager most set IE as the default browser. As most educational networked software targets IE. Many of the 'secured' browser based exam companies base their model around IE. And most schools don't allow you to change the default browser (at least in a way that persists across logins)
(Oil author here) Yeah I think you will run into many problems doing this in bash, and other people have.

A few people are working on similar UIs for shell, which I think is a great idea. I would like you all to get together and tell me what kind of API or IPC Oil needs to support it. And maybe hack on the code too :)

There is some nacsent / working code out there, linked in this issue.

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738

I also created this #shell-gui Zulip channel in December:

https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/266977-shell-g... (requires login, e.g. with Github or Google)

Oil has an extremely modular architecture so it should be able to support this (within the constraints of what the kernel allows)

Here I say that "Oil is to bash as LLVM/Clang is to GCC", which is accurate:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html#mo...

Many experiments in the same vein here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell
This is really cool! And those are some great insights. I just might send you an email.
I moved from chrome to FF and google search to duckduckgo search after prism.
Ada is pretty much still the only language that has this.
I suspect there is a correlation between welfare provision and protectionism around small businesses/anti-big business behaviour. This would lead to many more small businesses than the free market would support, but there is a bit of a question mark over how entrepreneurial and economically valuable this is.

I live in Amsterdam (cited elsewhere in this thread as being entrepreneurial): I appreciate having small independent shops and see the Dutch entrepreneurial attitude relative to other European countries in which I've lived. But I also understand why Hacker News readers would not believe the article is reflective: the majority of these businesses are not going to risk everything, change the world, or be worth millions/billions. Perhaps the count alone is not a useful metric.

edit: I'm European. Lots of neutral comments treated to downvote-disagree in this thread.
To offer a counterpoint to fit2rule's comment, I'm probably smack in the middle of your target demo (currently employed as a business analyst, technically competent but not a programmer, have entrepreneurial ambitions, etc...) and I think your price point and subscription model are abundantly fair. I've paid a lot more for a lot less over the years. Don't see myself shirking at $25/mo when it's (potentially) core to my business.

I haven't tried PencilCase yet, but it looks like a great product with solid implementation. Good luck to you guys.
How does my taking a company's advertising at its word and treating the unlimited service they provide as unlimited make me an asshole?

The real problem is these companies want to eat their cake and have it too. They want to be able to advertise as unlimited, but not actually provide unlimited.
"More" doesn't necessarily mean "more successful". It's not unreasonable that government intervention creates more entrepreneurs - as a Canadian I know I can go and get tens of thousands to start my own company along with some nice tax breaks - but it doesn't mean they would produce much value or amount to anything more than a barely afloat small business.
> I would say that's for historic reasons and the egregious amount of money you possess as a country rather than some in built ability to take risks?

Indeed. The US is very young, and throughout history, we had many temporary centers of innovation - from various parts of Europe to Middle East to deep Asia to Africa.
There is currently no native module for SQLite, but you can build one if you want. :-D

http://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/nativemodulesios...

We use a key-value store for most of our client-side persistence:

http://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/asyncstorage.htm...
Yes, the point of my post was not to argue for the serotonin hypothesis of depression. If you think that, might I suggest that you missed my point, and you should perhaps reread with an eye towards absorbing novel information and viewpoints rather than trying to classify literally everything as either on a FOR or AGAINST side in a binary argument?
Flash actually supports JPEG with lossless alpha (DefineBitsJPEG3). Just clipping a JPEG does of course also work.
I had to check because I was skeptical, but Bilateria actually does include the radially symmetrical echinoderms, i.e. sea stars, urchins, and other weirder creatures. They go through a bilaterally symmetric larval stage.
The ME and the FSP blobs have nothing to do with each other.
Some school districts have chosen this path (focusing on enrichment or review) because they're concerned about legal compliance, given that they are no longer able to provide all federally mandated special education programs.
Thanks for responding.

You might want to look at insin's comment above. In insin's code example, the conditional doesn't work on a component, but does on a normal HTML tag. Would that be a bug?

The lack of true conditionals is a turn-off for me. React's conditionals lets you build things like react-router without any extra semantics, in which the router picks up the appropriate component based on the URL.
This is cool. I had a similar idea in mind when I started working on my elevator project [1], but got a bit distracted with supporting multiple buildings.

[1] https://rawgit.com/joefreeman/elevator/master/index.html
I still remember the riddle on the cliff in Beyond Zork:
My tines be long,
My tines be short,
My tines end ere my first report.
What am I?

I got stuck on the game because I couldn't answer it. Spent months and then years thinking about it. Then one day the answer came to me, but by then we didn't have a Commodore 64 anymore.

Then in the 90s they rereleased the games as part of Return To Zork. I eagerly raced back to the cliff to proudly intone my answer! A portal was revealed, and I ran inside to claim my reward...and was promptly killed by a giant slug.

Good times!
Btw, I'm sure many people on this list could reply with the answer to this riddle. I would invite you not to, to give others an opportunity to noodle on it if they wish.
Just like the iTunes-phone collaboration with Motorola in 2005.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cing...
As he should be. It's not about what Google is able to do, it is all about what they should be allowed to do and clearly they are disrespecting users wishes in spite of pretty explicit signals.
There are n different daemons that can clash over /etc/resolv.conf, or you could put the responsibility on the actual system resolver library routines by extending resolv.conf syntax a little.

This would also solve the network namespace issue.
namedotcom: We are working with the owners of this domain to address this issue as quickly as possible.

notionhq: Heya! Could you let us know where you're messaging us to address this?

https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1360238956772642818?s=20
....I wasn’t saying security by obscurity only applies to computers. I was saying it’s not the right concept for webspam.

Once an algo change is put into practice, it’s fairly easy for the seo industry to see what it is. It is no longer obscure!

But if you have advance notice of a change, you can react in advance, much like you can trade in advance of stock price moves if you have insider information.
It's one of those "no data caps but don't use more than 1 TB every month" kind of things.
> Nelson Mandela broke with history but so did Hitler and Stalin.

What do you mean by that? What does breaking with history means?

All three were subjectively sure they are righteous and in the right.
juicy little bit: "Apparently AWS has around 200 open job positions (!!) for developers working on Elasticsearch"
Personally, as a fan of retro games consoles (which are broadly in the same boat as retrocomputing hardware) I'm as interested in new independently-produced software as I am in the software released during the hardware's commercial lifespan. Original games aren't getting any cheaper as copies disappear into private collections, and the economic incentives don't exist for copyright holders to make new authentic cartridges.

As such, the vibrancy of these systems relies on writing new software being a pleasant experience, and there's a limit to how pleasant that experience can be when your only choice of non-assembly language is C.
Was it your startup? Were you vested? Or was it someone else's and were you paid for your time?
I think the bit I was remembering was the Terminfo Case Study on page 149 of the Art of Unix Programming - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62... - read it a long time ago though and re-reading now, it's not exactly what I was remembering but that's memory for you...
Soft skills. Make a point to talk to almost everyone.
Most companies are not meritocracies. If you wanna get ahead, you have to know how to schmooze.
Having lost over 150lbs and kept most of it off for about a decade, I disagree. Knowledge about nutrition[0] is insufficient. The only reason I was able to do this at all was that I was in a very low-stress period of my life at the start and after that I have had to put a whole lot of effort into not ballooning up again, to the extent that my behavior patterns were described as an eating disorder.

I am hardly unique in this. I would argue that to lose and keep off this kind of weight without chemical assistance (good fucking luck getting a doctor to help there) pretty much necessitates the development of an eating disorder. It takes over a significant portion of your life and is no fucking fun at all.

Give me an apatite pill any day.

[0] this is without even mentioning how difficult it is to find information on nutrition that isn't complete bullshit pushed by people selling fads.
Can you elaborate on how targeted ads are better for users? Do those benefits outweigh the documented harms and abuses, the risk of further harms and abuses?
It could be an important case, and it demonstrates how technically illiterate judges are.
Although I can see the problem with showing unfinished work, it sure is great to have user feedback before putting too much work into something that users won't want. It's always great to get early feedback. I hope the VideoLAN team sees this as an opportunity to see what users want and less of an attack on something unfinished (that might be undesirable when finally finished). There's a lot of software interfaces that undergo extremely costly UI revamps for the worse, I'm happy this is getting some public light earlier on than the final release. Some times the best path forward is "abort!"
I can't help you for AMD, but I have been using Blender with nVidia in Linux for a while and it's been identical to my Win10 experience with it.

Nvidia does have some caveats for linux machines in general, it is a slight pain in the ass to deal with drivers. But at least the support is there.

I think with all the cross-platform APIs maturing it's going to matter less and less, but that is me being optimistic.
This is Capitalism. Everything has to be family friendly so it can reach as wide an audience as possible. When you're waiting for customer support, you have to hear a fun jingle so you don't get upset. People have to be talked down to like children so they know their place in the wealth hierarchy. It's an ideology, not in the sense of political beliefs, but rather false ideas that dominate society that we all subconsciously hold to maintain the social system we built on contradictory premises.

I don't think I've presented the full picture, but you asked where this trend is coming from, and to me this is the only common factor and starting point of investigation.
OP's comment doesn't add anything of value in that case. In 99% of cultures out there, traditional roles imply that the women is a homemaker.

Nobody reasonable assumes that women not counted in labor participation statistics are partying on the moon :-)

I.e.: we already knew what he's saying.
If a state actor really wants to do it and someone could get it past reviews, I am sure they could bribe any contributor from any country (including US). Why single out China? We never raised concerns with Russian contributors.
Stuff I'd add that I think is crucial, and all related to one topic: good writing!

1. Learn to write specs

Call it an RFC, call it a PRD, call it whatever. Writing out a plan for any project taking around a week or more is always worth it. Use it to establish scope and priorities. Keep a "Questions" section that you whittle away at as you seek out feedback. Make the body a hierarchy of design tasks and implementation ideas. Track revision history and keep it up-to-date.

You now have a great way to get sign-off from peers + management, an execution plan, a task breakdown for ticket management and historical documentation on what happened and why.

2. Be terse

Is that email looking a little long? Write a "TL;DR:" section at the top and then see what you can delete. If it's nothing, leave the "TL;DR:". Otherwise you may find you've included a lot of intermediate thinking and people only need to know the conclusions.

3. When learning something new, keep a dedicated list of "this looks like magic!" items

Use your "down time" to research items on this list instead of refreshing your favorite news aggregator. Ask your peers and mentors about them. Notice when tangental issues come up and spend a few extra minutes seeing how they're related and how that might yield some easier answers.

4. When you want to ask for help... defer clicking "send"

Whether its an IM or email, write it up on the side first. Start with your question and follow-up with what you've already done to walk through finding the answer to save the person the effort of starting from step one or pointing out the obvious thing you overlooked. Often this will lead you to answering your own question. If not, still wait 15-30 minutes (if you can) before sending it and work on something else. In that time you're likely to think of something you overlooked and avoid interrupting anyone.
The lack of privacy doesn't seem to bother you in regards to Bitcoin.
working at different organizations builds engineering and emotional maturity, no?
Is it not? Even if it's open source, I would view monolith frameworks as a form of ecosystem lock-in. We use Spring at work and I would certainly describe us as suffering from "lock-in" to the Spring ecosystem.
I couldn't agree more, that said, I believe the difficulty for new hires in software engineering typically comes from the relentless focus on coding interviews.
It wouldn't help with sanctions. As I said in the blog:

The US has long imposed broad sanctions on multiple countries, including Iran. These sanctions prohibit any US company from doing business with anyone in a sanctioned country. (These sanctions can also apply to non-US companies whose activities directly or indirectly involve the US, including merely having payments that flow through US banks or payment mechanisms like Visa.)
It's a knowledge problem. Most people don't know.
Despite Apple’s acquisition of PrimeSense, we're on track to fulfill all existing Structure Sensor demand and beyond. Interruptions are possible if we have supply chain issues, but we're optimistic that we'll be able to deliver Structure Sensors for the foreseeable future.
Appealing to the power/bandwidth/storage costs is a cheap trick and always has been. They are irrelevant. The issue is the cost of creating content.

Granted, it's not a continuous scale like water, but rather a massive one-time investment that gets paid off over time. Water is a poor analogy, but this scenario at least captures the fact that party A is incurring a cost and party B is reaping the benefit without compensating A.
> That wasn't Buffets point; his point is that those who followed certain strategies of value investing consistently win and he gave examples.

"Consistently win" is obviously false. If someone had an actual method (not a random unexplained event) with a description, that could be tested and that could consistently beat market averages, it would surely be applied and the market would collapse. The market didn't collapse, so there is no such method.

How is that so hard to figure out? There is no winning strategy, no secrets of the winners. There are people who make more than others in equities, but not because of a describable, scientifically testable system.

When a scientist encounters a description like this, he always assumes a priori that it's chance. That agrees with the null hypothesis and Occam's razor. It also keeps people from selling him worthless investment books.
The fact that people still kept funds in Mt. Gox is proof enough of the absurdity of this position.
> The lack of regulation is worrying.

What lack of regulation?

MtGox existed because it is nearly impossible to open an exchange in the US. Almost every other country is more Bitcoin-friendly in terms of regulation than the US.

Or are you talking about regulating the source code and running instances of the Bitcoin client?
Mtgox existed because

Only ways to get bitcoin:

1. Mine them (very very hard and getting harder)

2. Get paid in bitcoin for product/service

3. Buy them on an exchange for fiat

4. Be given bitcoin by early adopters

Until its possible to get paid (salaries), pay suppliers, pay taxes etc the exchanges are needed to convert traditional currency to bitcoin and vice versa.

Anyways the writing was on the wall for a long time, i stopped using them over a year ago, bitstamp are professional while mtgox were amateur cowboys with no support.
To this days I still use it now and then to add a little bit of spacing to inline elements if I am too lazy to have <span>s with margin all over the place.