skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'd basically need to start[1] an equivalent movement to the GNU/FOSS/Linux movement, for cloud software.

Google's services, at least, are written assuming they are running on a million machines inside of a Google datacenter, with all sorts of dependencies on the infrastructure; worse (for the purposes of converting them to easy-to-install packages), they are written assuming the existence of Google SREs.

Everyone else is in the same boat, with software meant to be run on a datacenter and not a MacMini. You'd really need to start over from scratch, and first with a platform that can run on one to a million machines, then rewriting everything to run on top of it.

It's not impossible, but it's a lot of work.

[1] Such a movement probably already exists, in which case you should join it.
And in that same year you could get a sub-$600 machine that could do more than that C64 or Mac: the Atari 520ST! :)

of course the Amiga could do more than all 3 machines, but it cost even more than the ST (but nowhere near the cost of a Mac.)
I've found that there are only two reasons I like Go:
1) It's concurrency model was a revelation compared to anything I did in the C world.
2) It's opinionated.

Everything else is a bonus. In Go, there's only one way to format your program correctly, there's only one way to document your program correctly, there's only one recommended way to serialize to JSON, it only has one (IMO really awesome package management system) etc. It's remarkable how little thought I now need to put into those things.
It would except for the fact that "File Server" has been a commonly used term for a long time that hadn't ever been previously used to describe the technology that S3 actually is: an eventually-consistent distributed object store with a simple network API.

It's not like "Simple Storage Service" is weirdly obscure or anything.
> But the expense of extra lines of coke come at significant maintenance costs.

That is the single greatest typo I have ever read.
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If you think iOS 7/8/9 are hard to use, try Windows Phone 8. I had a Lumia 620 for a while and it was pretty hard to understand what was going on for some applications (aside from the fact that their back button behavior was something that was completely confusing). It's odd too because some of the non-Microsoft WP8 apps were very easy to use by comparison, but the Microsoft designed apps were the worse in terms of usability for me. So, I'm not sure if its the design aesthetics at play here or maybe just that some developers are better are conveying what certain UI elements do and what to expect from them. Either way, I think there has to be a middle ground between removing clutter from UI and avoiding what amounts to snow blindness for computers. In my opinion, the Material Design spec by Google is closer to the sweet spot than what I've seen so far (I think it needs more UI hinting of some kind and less empty space which makes it harder for me to focus on what's going on in an app).
Looking at it on the map, the warning signs are all there: suburban-rural interface, western slope, wooded area with no firebreaks, and a climate with hot and dry summers. Couldn't pay me enough to settle there.
Have you tried doing remote freelance work ? It can get pretty lucrative. Compared to local wages, in my country(Albania) a good wage is 500$/month. What I did is that I took a small-hastle full-time job and in the meantime I tried to build a remote-freelance career. Went from 2$-20$/hour (full time) job in 1 year. (i found jobs on odesk, the beginning was very hard but after you build a profile it gets easier).
Not to me. The absurd lack of plausibility and simply erroneous analogy makes the whole rhetorical technique distracting and misleading rather than funny and insightful.
Eh, no, it was controversial when it was being developed in the early '80s, a lot of respectable Lispers didn't like it, thought it was too complicated and easy to get wrong. But Common Lisp also has simpler constructs like dolist that aren't, to my knowledge, "controversial", except of course as you note this paradigm isn't a Scheme sort of thing.
But you don't really need that much bandwidth for all of these services. Dropbox's bandwidth would be the hardest to replicate - but even then, in general, once you get your first backup done, updates shouldn't require that much bandwidth. Music streaming works fine. Photos bottleneck is almost more processing power than bandwidth. Streaming video might be slow, but downloading, then watching usually is good enough for one's own videos shared with friends.

And bandwidth, like HD space, is always increasing.
Totally. Scientists typically aren't given Nobel prizes until decades after the fact. And while I don't have any numbers to back it up, I suspect that more mostly-retired 70-year-olds have time to pick up a hobby on the side than the 35-year-olds in the heat of their career. Controlling for age is critical to relevance in a study like this.
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That image fails at making its point however. Even without the brackets, who considers "cond = 1 ag ad recurse carry augend addend 1" a beautiful line of code?
From memory that looks very much like B...
Always set up an LLC or Corporation before doing any kind of business that could involve such liabilities. The $500-$1000 it costs to do that is obviously well spent money, but most people don't realize that till they're facing bankruptcy. Think of it like health insurance for your business: if you don't have it and something goes wrong, you're fucked. Then again, lots of people who could afford to pay skimp on health insurance and put themselves at risk of bankruptcy every single day, so it does take a little bit of awareness of reality.
I agree with you about the quality of this article, but I find it odd that for many people here and in SV culture, the moment anything in any industry behaves in a way which you don't approve of or don't understand it's immediately "ripe for disruption". Maybe journalism is just genuinely hard and there are plenty of very smart people working hard at NYT but it isn't always perfect, and "disrupting" the industry -- a weasel word which means nothing except "I am a libertarian and I support new things so long as they completely exterminate a non-libertarian established power structure" -- isn't smart, possible, helpful, or in fact any of the three.
Show HN: Front-end content publishing for WordPress
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Show HN: Nes Circus Charly in HTML5
This would truly be a great thing. I've been trying for years, and it's really kind of painful, even with some good working knowledge of network infrastructure.

Here are some decent software I use. Not all OSS, unfortunately, but they still let me posses my data.

- Subsonic (music) http://subsonic.org/

- OwnCloud (files) https://owncloud.org/

- BitSync (files, begrudgingly) http://www.bittorrent.com/

- Apple Server (webserver/VPN/SSH)

- Lots of nice blog/web serving software once you get the web stack up and running.

Email's rough. Photos are also rough between either thumbnailing/cacheing all your photos, or multi-second processing.
Here is a snark free reply.

Yes, there is a logical explanation. Maybe this single incident is just bad luck. No racism.

I would say the odds are 99% bad luck and 1% racism.

But it isn't the first time a Chinese scientist ran into bad luck. Do you remember this high profile case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee#Indictment.2C_impri...

Now it's more like 89% bad luck and 11% racism.

There is also strong anti-Asian sentiment in general.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236377590902105

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Vandalism-hate-crime-cha...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/10...

59% bad luck vs 41% racism.

Not to mention the countless stereotypes.

http://www.bustle.com/articles/106467-jeb-bush-donald-trumps...

49% vs 51%.

And all of the BS from my co workers, classmates, and random people in public places. Oh yes, so much ignorant, racist BS. The odds of racism is much greater now. Because of the racism I have experienced and witnessed, the benefit of the doubt is rarely deserved.
The usual rebuttals are: Overhead rails are smaller and cheaper than highways for the capacity, standardized pods can be lighter and smaller-scale, and the automated guidance allows shorter timings for acceleration and braking.

However, when transit planners run the numbers, they come up against a different problem, which is that building this isn't really a substitute for a new metro line. The peak capacity is still more along the lines of what a highway can provide, and that wouldn't do much to improve the rush hour commute - plus, if they wanted a highway, there's always funding around for those.

So the PRT approach has mostly been implemented, to date, in airport systems and private campuses.
Ask HN: Is VMware Doomed?
I just installed Hyper-V for free in my free Windows 10 update. A VM with Ubuntu Desktop is installing right now.

Before realizing Hyper-V was included in Windows 10, I rechecked VMware Player and it is not free anymore so I planned to follow the typical VirtualBox alternative that I like but it's behind VMware in graphical user experience. It is important to note that I had a VMware commercial subscription before but this subscription didn't enable me to receive major product upgrades while my MSDN subscription gives me access to all the Microsoft software.

So, while Microsoft is making free software in the virtualization sector, VMware is restricting customers (and the VM community) access to the latest software. This is why I think VMware is doomed and this is not a criticism of their software quality. There are also other market factors that don't help.

What do you think?
Except that if you'll want to search by those tags, using an array, instead of a one:many means you'll need a bigger and more expensive index.

It's good for some kind of list that you won't search by. That's very limiting, but not an empty set.
Sorry to hear about the fire. We need more efforts to keep phone history alive. So much of our computer science is rooted in telephony -- information theory, Unix, C etc.

The telephone museum in Ellsworth Maine is still open. I took my retired Telephone Man father there and he thought it was great.

Http://thetelephonemuseum.org
Once you send an email to someone, that content is no longer yours. I understand why you might want it to be. But at its core, email is about sending content to another person, and giving them control of what they can do with that content. Ignoring etiquette, there is nothing stopping them from copying it, forwarding it, printing it, publishing it, etc. Indexing it for their own searches is hardly a bigger step beyond what they can already do with any email provider.
So instead of Google, fastmail have all of your email. Big improvement ... I guess.
Ask HN: Testing free-speech app intended for activists. Anyone interested?
Berkeley based non-profit looking for local folks (Berkeley or SF) interested in helping out test a free-speech app intended for activists, $25 gift card for 30 min of your time and chance to win new tablet. For more details see flyer: https://goo.gl/XExw4L
Yeah, it's weird how non-vendor apps take their design cues from Apple, Google, and Microsoft but they tone down the obsession with empty/negative space separation which makes it wholly easier to use.

Seriously, I don't know why but every time I use the Google Youtube App it's hard for me to focus on what I'm doing. I'm not sure if it's all the empty space or the lack of any explicit separator between items (videos and what not). But it's just harder to use the app than to just open the web browser and get the video that way. :/
When the wiretapping scandals started to get more attention, I got really paranoid. I decided to go full gear into privacy mode and the end result was total frustration with poor tools and way more friction than necessary. Then I realized I'd like just _some_ of my stuff to be positively private and I didn't care much about the other 95%. So that's where I focus my attention, much like the author. If I had endless time and money, sure, I would love to have everything super private and secure, but I don't so.. a more pragmatic approach is needed.
Absolutely and it's quite simple: Synology NAS.

It can run OwnCloud, Docker etc and already has iOS/Android apps for photos, docs, notes, media streaming.
This actually makes a lot more sense that it did a decade ago. Mail servers were needed in a time when we were not always online. Now that we are, we can technically run everything that's done by a server on our own PCs. The bandwidth and processing power now exists. The resulting setup would be a peer to peer network with nodes connected via address/name servers.

For those times we're offline, it may be possible to spin up a temporary cloud instance which downloads everything back to us and dies once we reconnect.

The only question that remains, then, is backup.
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This. There is an American mindset which needs to change. We have a lot of businesses complaining about regulations, yet other countries with more regulation seem to conduct business in a profitable manner. In fact, it could be argued that the businesses operating in a more regulated environment, are probably more robust than their American counterparts because the regulations add stability and reduced uncertainty.

A lot of American business owners complain that their business is "hanging on by a thread". This is because they are operating at the lowest energy state which provides little safety margin for failure. If there were stronger regulations in America, then fragile business models would not be able to attract investment.
Canada must reclaim its role as a world leader
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> It's not like the author is the ultimate source. The text is.

On what the author is trying to communicate, the author is the only source we can rely on.

> An author can add symbolism also subcosciously

He could, but since we can't reliably say anything about that, it is meaningless to make claims about it.

> Sometimes a banana is just a banana. But we've also have works were the majority of critics agree on their interpretation, including the author.

Whether or not a majority of critics agree is totally irrelevant to me. If the author agrees, that is a different matter. The problem is that so much of literary criticism happens without bothering to even try to check with the author. Unsurprisingly, authors quire regularly express surprise or exasperation at how literary critics interprets their works.
If you need more tests to cover the "extra lines of code" resulting from the explicit nature if Go code, then your prior tests didn't sufficiently cover all the edge cases. So Go's verbosity is a win.
See the (open source) OX app suite: https://www.open-xchange.com/en/ox-app-suite

https://mailbox.org/en also provides a (very reasonably priced) hosted version of OX
Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? IT and the Future of Economic Growth
Actually the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Ben is the real deal in terms of Leaders. I saw him make many, many tough decisions, many of which were not popular, but were right for the company. About the only mistake I've ever seen him make (that couldn't have been avoided) was after the catastrophic layoffs when Loudcloud went public at the same time the market tanked (an awesome achievement, in itself), when he was rallying the leftover troops (that hadn't gone to EDS, or lost their jobs), he stated "No more layoffs, not while I'm CEO." - he was pretty passionate about that, and was trying to make a commitment to the leftover 100 or so employees - but no CEO should ever make that commitment to their employees.

(Though, to the best of my knowledge, he honored that commitment while CEO of Opsware - so who am I to judge...)
I'd contend that abstraction is perfectly fine, so long as it's an abstraction that people reading the code are likely to be familiar with. In Haskell, I'd prefer someone just use a monoid when appropriate, rather than reinventing the wheel. That said, you might want to avoid some of those Haskell niceties when writing Scala (as my co-workers keep reminding me) because those abstractions are less familiar in the Scala community.

As always, the key is to tailor your message to your audience. That's just as true when writing code and choosing your abstractions.
> It's a shame that Google Maps is inferior to my iGo tablet running Windows Mobile from 10 years ago. And it didn't need to have continuous wireless data access. ... How was iGo capable to deliver superior maps so many years ago?

They purchased data from a mapping company. Ten years ago, the two largest mapping companies in the world were Navteq and Tele Atlas. Google used to buy data from these companies as well, but they stopped paying and decided to build up their own maps data from scratch.

> Even Bing's Maps are more usable.

If you zoom to Sarajevo and look at the bottom-right of the Bing Maps window, it says: "© 2015 HERE. © 2015 Microsoft Corporation."

Navteq was bought by Nokia, got renamed HERE Maps, and has just been sold to a consortium of German automakers.

Microsoft currently has a multi-year contract with HERE Maps as part of their deal with Nokia. Also, Helmut Panke is on the Microsoft Board of Directors. He used to be the Chairman of the Management Board of BMW.
At least as a start, set up an e-mail and XMPP/Jabber account with a provider with whom you can use your own domain. That way you can own your own identity while still intercommunicating with others. Should the need arise to change providers, you can do so without sacrificing your network.

Of course Google et al. are working tirelessly to make this not possible (see Hangouts, FB Messenger, etc... all once federated XMPP services, now closed-garden proprietary services).
> You'd basically need to start[1] an equivalent movement to the GNU/FOSS/Linux movement, for cloud software.

Could you point out what in any of these services actually depends on the cloud?

Email runs perfectly fine on single servers (Gmail). Network file storage is a solved problem (Dropbox/Google Drive/YouTube/various photo buckets). What these things are missing are dynamic web 2.0 GUIs, not backends. And the GUI doesn't have anything to do with the cloud.

The cloud is a huge innovation, but it isn't an innovation that provides anything for us, it's an innovation for centralized businesses. The cloud has absolutely no value until you're trying to serve millions of users on one service. Federated systems like email are perfectly capable of handling everything that the cloud does for you and I.

We don't need the cloud.
Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research. The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open source model was based on.

Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented, it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research.

So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose results are less monetizable.

The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY! Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the profits will go to the private sector.

I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot further.

Replace patents with prizes.
You seem to be forgetting about all of the other unixes.

Because systemd does not (to my knowledge) support any unix other than Linux, we can say for certain that OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MINIX 3, Plan 9, GNU/Hurd, MAC OSX, et al. all do not use systemd. Add to that the fact that some Linux distributions do not use systemd (Including Slackware, etc), and you can easily come to the conclusion that systemd is (strictly speaking) in the minority, and therefore not the main unix init system these days at all.
ISIS hackers violated top secret British Government emails
Well, one is a small Australian company that make money from providing e-mail as a service, the other being a global company that use behavioral profiling to skew your view of the world.
Every programming language starts out like that though.

It's just that over time needs/requirements change and then suddenly you have another package manager, another JSON parsing library etc.
I have a FreeNAS server set up at home for most of those services. It's a FreeBSD based distribution focused on file services, but you can really run any service from the BSD jail system. FreeNAS comes with click'n run plugins for a lot of the services mentioned in this thread: ownCloud (files), firefly (music), btSync (files), Plex (video/music), Subsonic (music) and more.

Now a Mac Mini isn't the most fearsome server, so you won't get extraordinary performance, but it should perform good enough for for 1-2 concurrent users.
There are also some "commercial" symetrical links, meant mainly for small companies. They cost 2-5 times more than a normal, consumer-grade link, but I wouldn't mind paying that extra for the possibility of keeping my data safe.
What's interesting is if you look at gmail headers, they do indeed route via public IPv6 back to themselves for gmail-to-gmail transactions.

Or at least they log the ipv6 route within their own datacenter, or between datacenters.

So that is up for argument if it is traveling via their own intranet or "the internet".

(at least google uses AES TLS, yahoo still uses RC4)
My belief is if you can feasibly write your app with an ORM then you should just use Postgres. If you can't, because you need $feature that the ORM doesn't manage, then buy the most powerful database you can afford and actively look for opportunities to exploit every bit of the functionality that you've paid for. The truth is being database agnostic is wildly overrated; in practice any organization will go through 10 languages before they decide to change their database, and no-one in their right mind cares about designing an app that is "language agnostic". You wouldn't start out in a language that supports, I dunno, closures, then deliberately not use them just in case you wanted to switch to another language in a couple of years.
Because if you cared about privacy you would have used Enigmail and then no one cares if the encrypted text is stored on the google server.

And if you don't use pgp you are obviously OK with the recipient email provider reading your mail.
> In the US, trademarks are intended to protect the consumer, not the company.

They are meant to protect each in different ways.