skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault.

They do want it, but for free. And while they still consume it, for free, they hide behind some non-sense about tracking or privacy, even though if those two issues were resolved they would block it any way because it's not convenient to white list a site. Duckduckgo is perfect evidence of that.

> No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product.

And much of the time it isn't.
Merely looking at ads aren't enough. Purchasing behavior must ultimately be effected somewhere down the line, to the extent that someone can determine changes in sales were due at least somewhat to ads. If someone can't find a causal or predictive relationship between ads and customer behavior, then they will lose cause to invest in some advertising venue.

If a site is consistently staying alive only through ads, it means that money is somehow flowing from some people to the ad-supported content. We are all already paying for content through some convoluted pathway.

We should just start paying with minimal middlemen, since ad companies bill our attention and build profiles about us from our behavioral data.
Don't people go to their sites for shopping purposes anyways?

What's the point of these sites if not to tell you what to buy?

People used to pay money to buy magazines like Computer Shopper just for the ads...
I generally agree, though I'm not sure financial incentive is the reason. Open source has really shown that financial incentive is (A) complex and (B) not the only thing that motivates people.

If you look at open and closed source across a lot of categories, I think it's more common to see OS "win" where the product is more objective. When it come to more subjective problems like UX, it seems to be more difficult.

If your goal is something fairly objective OS is really amazing. Take VLC's "play everything everywhere" goal. Fantastic, objective goal for and OS project that really plays to its strengths.

Linux is, I guess, the canonical example. It's fantastically successful relative to closed source competitors on every front that is objective. But, its consistently been unsuccessful as a consumer desktop.

That said, I don't think IRC is dead either. Some people/communities prefer IRC.
> Most content is worthless.

Which is why ads are the only way to monetize it and be able to actually have it somewhere.

> The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material.

Except nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it. If it's not ad networks and if it's not donations (again, mostly because most content is worthless, and probably also because most people are greedy), who will pay for it?

> Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life.

How old are you? I'm 23, my youth was spent on the internet learning. I wasn't able to pay any content at the time. The website I was reading from were living out of ads, some of them made by minor, that were later able to make a decent living out of it. Yeah we have a bunch of website getting enough donations, but they need to be in the top 100 to actually survive from it.

When Youtube Red was announced, I was freaking happy (except about the fact that I'm Canadian and I won't be able to enjoy it), most arguments I've seen against ads was that there was no alternative... except now people are simply complaining that Youtube is simply being greedy and that they can already get that using adblock...

It's probably too late to make people realize that content isn't free, that offering it isn't free either. We are in a world where ads and huge investment gave us the opportunity to share and produce really cheaply and it seems like it's all free... you remove the ads, you remove any way to pay for that cheap but existing cost.

I still have a little hope on donations though, seeing the amount some live streamers are able to make on Twitch, seeing how Patreon is a way to make a living, seeing how some crowdfunding is able to produce some really decent content (Tabletop, Conman, Fallout Nuka Break and VGHS to name a few), etc... I hope it will grow and allow us to keep at least the same amount of content as before.
I'm for nuclear power, and think it's the height of idiocy for groups opposed to global warming to have supported the removal of nuclear before coal.

I was just pointing out that there is a cogent rationale for why this time could be different. Perhaps we could replace fossil fuels, but we haven't, yet. And until we do we're still in the same 200+ year energy cycle that started around Malthus' time.

The poster I was replying to seemed to think there was literally no reason that Malthus might be right. He's not certainly right, but he's not certainly wrong yet either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482678
A high-level IR implements the semantics that the programming language provides. You can only share it if the semantics are reasonably compatible.

This would be akin to asking why do we need a C++-specific AST and a Swift-specific AST.
> but you draw a much bleaker portrait of IRC

I'm being brutally real. IRC is a brittle, aged, poorly designed protocol even by the standards of 1988 academia. You could design a more robust centralized service just by using off the shelf components today.

Seriously. Use off the shelf Google Container Engine stuff along with some modest websocket work and even relative neophyte will end up with a more robust service with better scaling characteristics.

Really, that's why stuff like Slack and Hipchat exist. Becuase it's not really all that hard to do a much better implementation than what IRC can feasibly do.
Show HN: My new Game on Android and iOS
I call FUD. Something to the effect of "Please people, don't drive cars, they are not FOSS".
My company pays for Slack and we get a ton of value from it. Kthxbai!
Disclaimer: I work at Google on Compute Engine.

Sorry about your experience. It sounds like you were mostly burned by App Engine, and the unfortunate situation of a migration from old to new consoles (we have a multi year deprecation policy in some cases). The old admin console was truly awful, however within just the last few months the final nail has been driven into its coffin: you can manage your App Engine custom domain settings and SSL from inside the Developers Console rather than go through Apps.

As someone on a side thread mentioned, we even have a refresh of the new console in Beta for the next month or so (want to make sure we didn't suddenly break some user flow). The integration between products is vastly better than it was 12 months ago and with gcloud (the CLI) and the Developer Console gaining maturity and scope, even three months ago the experience wasn't as good.

tl;dr: Your comment is fair, but things are changing (and have changed) quickly. Take another look with a free trial account?
To be clear, I don't think it is "trivial." I am technical and I definitely don't think setting up and maintaining a usable IRC server is trivial.
Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done.

The company I work for uses Slack, and luckily there is an IRC bridge to connect to so I can keep my workflow in Emacs rather than having to use a clunky web interface, but there are many special Slack things that they don't render correctly in plain text form so I feel like a second-class citizen. If this is the future of text-based communication, I don't want to participate.

I like IRC. I like that things aren't centrally logged by default. I like the bots that I've been interacting with for many years (that I find to be better than whatever Slack bot I've come across, by the way.) I like Freenode as an IRC network. I like the variety of clients available (I prefer ERC, a client written in Emacs Lisp.) Could we use some sexy web clients to get less technical people on board? Sure! Should we use a proprietary, centralized, surveillance system until someone else fixes IRC issues for us? No way! We must reject Slack because it isn't a tool for the people, but a tool for profit.
See http://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2015/10/25/whats-the-harm...
Wow this is excellent, thanks for posting.
Sweden, and in the case of not knowing you were dealing with stolen goods but still found guilty it seems the worst case scenario is six months in prison. [1]

[1]: https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K9P7S1 (Text in Swedish.)

This wasn't always the case, but I can't quite remember when the law changed. It used to be that you could claim you bought the goods "in good faith" in which case you'd be free of liability unless there were other hard evidence to connect you with the crime – even if you bought that high-end watch off of some dude selling watches on the street out of a cardboard box.

These days however, it's much easier to convict someone (whether selling or buying) because of a clause that includes anyone who didn't know but had reason to believe the goods were stolen. It's easier for the prosecution to prove the latter, and probably gets rid of most "it fell off the back of truck" arguments. That high-end watch from that shady dude on the street would probably get you a fine these days. (Putting people in prison is costly, after all.)
Potential buyers want sources to learn about products, compared them, have uninfluenced and honest reviews to help them make decisions.

Vendors want their products reviewed. And I think they understand that reviewers need to be financially independent to be believable, so directly paying reviewers does not work.

Both sides will find a way to get what they want, there is clear financial motivation to keep the review business alive. Money is not the problem here, only how to distribute it. I do not worry about this kind of content.
Lawrence Summers on Diversifying Workforce
How very lucky of you.

I hope you have a repeatable provision, AMI, static IP linked to a tcp loadbalancer and autoscaling group in the event AWS rotates out your instance.

And of course, the same goes for your logging and search and file sharing infrastructure. And of course, similar caveats exist for the database said features use.
I don't understand how a company this small doesn't get the public opinion matters. I am will to bet they are not going to be around much longer.
Not entirely. In fact, one of the main "insights" brought by Stalinism was the rejection of the necessity of the Marxist international revolution in favor of Socialism in One Country.
Or they could just block you and others that use ad blocking, and work on the audiences that don't block them.
Can you guys explain what you mean by a sentinel order?
How Treasury's tax loophole mistake saves companies billions each year
> What test?

The test for bias proposed by pg and modified by yummyfajitas.

> before-the-fact EV

Why are you bringing in before-the-fact EV at all? That's not a component.

The test is based on comparing the minimums, yes. So, for example, what is GPA of the worst female and male students. What part of that requires expectations?
http://thewirecutter.com is a website that does something like this. They do in-depth reviews of all kinds of things and, as far as I know, make the money for the site off affiliate retailer links for the products they recommend.

It helps, though, that their articles can have thousands or tens of thousands of words comparing and contrasting different products in the same category in depth, including clearly outlining the flaws of the products they consider the best option, while Guru3D seems to have articles that are badly rewritten press releases and/or bullet points copied from the back of a game box.
Just to be clear, that essay is not about daylight savings time. It's a humorous essay about people sleeping late.
> They do want it, but for free.

Yes, this is relatively common. People will take something for free that they aren't willing to pay for. Other things they'll pay one amount for, but not a larger amount. Everybody decides for him or herself how much something is worth to them. If the majority of people decide that value is "nothing, not even looking at an ad", then that's what the value of that thing is. That's how markets work.
Isn't this roughly what people used to say about Apple?
I think these types of concerns may eventually be addressed by better and more consistent use of encrypt-in-place in application design. If your data is well encrypted, theoretically it should be safe from the NSA even if they get their hands on the files.

Encrypt-in-transit is well along in terms of culture and technology. "SSL everywhere" is something that, I think, most folks believe we can achieve. Google, for example, has said that eventually Chrome will start marking all HTTP connections as insecure.

But how many hosted apps being designed today will encrypt all their stored data from the start? I would guess almost none. Even though that is where the smart folks go to steal data: where it's resting. Just sitting there for anyone to grab once they get through the perimeter.

What if all data was encrypted at rest by default? It's an idea worth thinking about.
From past experience in the database industry, command logs are insufficient at maintaining data integrity after a crash. They capture the bare minimum information to reproduce a transaction, which is frequently not enough information. A log of "I'm changing field X from A to B" produces much more reliability in practice.
Possessing stolen property on Wall Street only appears to be a crime if you "knowingly possesses stolen property, with intent to benefit himself or a person other than an owner thereof or to impede the recovery by an owner thereof." [0] This ruling makes the insider trading law more like the law dealing with stolen property.

[0] http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article165.htm#p165.40

EDIT: Wikipedia identifies SAC as being based in CT, which has different laws.
The world's best office
Most non-technical users don't care how much memory their chat client takes up as long as it works. They also don't care what server they need to connect to as long as they can communicate with the people they need to — less is more in this case.

Slack has its fair share of flaws but design and ease of use are not among them.
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater Than Losses
I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.
Let me see if I got this one straight:

So puppet has some infrastructure for querying package versions (and other facts) (mcollective), and a way to store the dependency data (hiera), but the actual management still has to be done manually (potentially by trial & error in a dev/test/canary environment).

Right?

If yes, that's good to know, but still less than I was hoping for.
So, they make a CMS plugin that serves ads from same origin, instead of different origin.

How would that help your user experience? (it might.. dunno)
Why, and what consequences?
Of course it's not unique, that's a core feature of C++.
But back before the WWW saw non-trivial deployment, IRC was the #1 use of bandwidth on the internet! Something from the 90's must still be true today!
Well, it's not as though every random link on the internet has a Surgeon's General Warning-esque disclaimer: "Clicking this link will download 23MB of Javascript frameworks, tracking coookies, advertising iframes and uncompressed, full-resolution images."
A Look inside the education system: A Modern Jail
There's been a lot of research in fault recovery through message logging and checkpoint-based methods that could be applied here, e.g. [1]. Of course, you use "academic" as a snarl world, so I don't think anything will convince you.

The idea that the service manager would not be able to know the system and service states is completely false. Solaris SMF is a design that does, via its use of the configuration repository. Simpler designs can then deduce enough metadata from the persistent configuration in the supervisor tree. There's many possible approaches.

The idea that such fault recovery is implausible is a naive one that only one unfamiliar with the research literature could espouse.

If we take your logic to its conclusion, we should just run everything in ring 0 with a single unisolated address space, because hey, anything can fail. Component modularization and communication boundary enforcement is the first step to fault isolation, which is the first step to fault tolerance.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.52....
One example where I've found SFINAE useful is in using "type traits" to tag different classes, and then writing containers to handle the classes differently based on their tags (see [1]).

For example, in arena-allocation support for protobufs, we wanted to be able to skip a destructor call to a message object if the object used only arena-allocated storage (hence had no cleanup to do). So we added a "DestructorSkippable_" typedef to any class where this was true:

class MyObject {
private:
friend class Arena;
typedef void DestructorSkippable_;
// ...
};

And then the SFINAE use at the implementation linked below [1] can either register a destructor callback, or not, depending on the class (by providing two overrides to a function, one that takes a T::DestructorSkippable_* param and one that doesn't).

The essential thing about this is that it's resolved at compile time, so there's zero overhead (not even a runtime conditional-check) in the destructor-skipped case. When optimizations are enabled, constant prop and dead-code elimination can completely remove a feature that's "disabled" by a certain type trait.

[1] https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/pr...
Even if the personal targeting in bad_user's post is uncalled for, the point is still valid: right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism, and pretending that Buzzfeed and the likes are the only sites that will be blocked to the lower classes in a paywall-laden web is just demagogy.

In fact, Buzzfeed will probably still be available to the general public, since they already engage in "native advertising", where the content is the ad. It's sites that still maintain some editorial independence that will be most affected.
Linode Status
> Does that mean that HFTs do not generally make money from getting the information before everybody

In general this is somewhat true. Market makers would actually love it if prices were very stable. Just sit there and buy at 9.99 and sell at 10.00 and make a penny a trade all day long. They need to respond very very quickly not so much to make money, but to avoid losing money when prices change.
Halloween Discount on DigitalOcean via Cloudways
When those insiders represents a minority (in capital available to trade with), the positive effects of their trades from improved price signals can be far smaller than the negative effects from the bad incentives created. Consider a government administrator trading with relatively small sums, knowing what effect his unpublished decisions will have. He can make gains that are large for him, while causing significant losses for others that otherwise wouldn't have happened.
It's an observation in the context of the article in question, not a statement in an argument, you buffoon.

The article acts as if we just don't know the "benefits" of IRC and then proceeds to list a bunch of very questionable benefits.

I know all about IRC. I think it's a tire fire that won't go out. Sort of like perl, UNIX signal handlers, and systrace.
The only reason retail orders actually get matched up well is because they're flagged as retail, are known to contain less information, and are a statistically good bet to transact against. Fundamentally, this was around before HFT and still is. The funny thing is that even if it's helping them in this small way, the whole idea of retail investing is some of the best marketing in the face of contradictory facts I've ever seen.
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

Which services are you comparing? We (sadly) make our pricing table for Compute Engine (GCE) look a lot like EC2. Just looking at rates misses the advantage of per-minute billing for certain workloads (e.g. Batch compute or autoscaled anything) and our "sustained use discount" which gives you roughly the same discount as EC2 reserved instances but without having to do anything. As I said to someone recently, our model isn't super simple to "understand" but it's way easier: we always give you the best price.

The same thing goes for GCS vs S3, general network pricing, etc.

Have you tried our pricing calculator (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/)?
> Which is why ads are the only way to monetize it and be able to actually have it somewhere.

Why do we need to have it somewhere if nobody wants it enough to pay for it?

> Except nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it. If it's not ad networks and if it's not donations (again, mostly because most content is worthless, and probably also because most people are greedy), who will pay for it?

People who want to disseminate information will pay to do so. Hacker News doesn't have ads. YCombinator is paying for it because it serves their purposes to have an online community for hackers.

People write and create other content for a variety of reasons. Usually the best content is not created to maximize the amount of money it makes.
Thinking about it again, from my calculation below, if those packets are coming from RAM then you are bound to, say, 25GB/s incoming, 25GB/s outgoing.

Since Haswell L1 cache seems to allow a peak bandwidth of 64 byte loads + 32 byte store per cycle, so this would match the CPU throughput and then this suggests, if the lifecycle is "bring from ram" "copy in and out of L1 cache", "put back in RAM", then those copies may well be free given you are choking on RAM to begin with.
Not only is there IRC, which many people have talked about, there is also chat over XMPP, which is how I prefer to use slack. The alternatives are worse in connectability, because they restrict you to one narrow range of clients and protocols, instead of letting you choose the right client for the job at hand. People use services like slack because they don't want to have to give a shit about communications, they just have something that works.
Meanwhile, nobody on here complaining about those mutual fund fees that are orders of magnitude bigger than HFT haircuts for the savers themselves :)
Right, but as I say RPython and Truffle manage without.
RPython and Truffle essentially derive language-specific IRs from a specification of an interpreter, with RPython using meta-tracing and Truffle using traditional partial evaluation.

RPython's technique also only works for JITs, and neither Swift nor Rust use a JIT in their normal compilation pipeline. Generation of compilers by partial evaluation of an interpreter is interesting, but as far as I know it has never been used in an industrial strength implementation of a language.
If you pay someone to predict stock movements, and they come to you and say, "short Dell and do not ask me why," you would probably act on that information. After all, you're already employing them for their stock market expertise.

As a private citizen without an army of analysts, you would probably subject their claim to more scrutiny. It sounds like insider trading is only "legal" now if you own a hedge fund.
That's neat! Thank you for the explanation!