skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to avoid commenting on App Engine related posts because I'm afraid that, despite myself, I will end up writing a long angry rant and come off hateful and bitter. When I have a bad experience with a given technology or providor, I can usually stay balanced, recognize the history and context, and show gratitude for hard work and good ideas, even those that didn't pan out. Not so with GAE, their demonstrated negligence and arrogance preclude that.

See, there I go.

Reading your rant (and the extended version below) definitely gave me a misery-loves-company sort of smile though, so thanks.
I agree with this completely.
I hate that we now have SO many competing protocols that do basically the same darn thing and NOBODY wants interoperability!
solid pr
And be replaced with what, exactly?

The call to arms over privacy, attention and security is getting old. Not because its wrong, but because it's never accompanied with an actual solution.

But that's moot because the ship isn't going to sink. Enough people will not use adblock to ensure that companies like Google and Facebook will always make some money off advertising.

So rest assured, the Titanic's will continue to float along. You are simply guaranteeing anything smaller won't. Including any potential competition for the Titanic's.
My company runs our own private IRC server on an EC2 instance and once it was set up I don't believe we've needed to touch it since.
I don't think I have an interesting opinion about whether it is insider trading (meaning I don't think I could predict the legal outcome).

I think it would be loudly argued that the person receiving the information was aware of why it was valuable.
This article is just blog-spam, with no details. As per HN Guidelines[1], please submit the original source:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/10/21/why-...

[1] "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
There cannot be such a happy medium as long as ads are increasingly "targeted" and "third party". "Targeted ads" means surveillance, profiling, tracking, massive privacy invasion. "Third party" means poorer performance and having no control on your main source of revenue (see the stories about google censoring content on google ads based websites).

Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.

The issue here has two sides: on the practical side it is much easier to block all ads than to maintain a white list while on the attitude style a website that tells its visitors "I could not care less about your privacy and your browsing experience" by showing ads and running third partu tracking scripts should not be surprised when a growing portion of visitors return the favor "we don't care about your failed business model, we do care about our privacy and browsing experience though" by blocking said ads.

If adblocking wasn't a game changer revolution, we wouldn't be reading the IAB telling us "we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." http://www.iab.com/news/lean/
Re-Architecting Nodester
He was a human being who was sick and needed help, but they treated him like a malfunctioning machine to be decommissioned. Clear enough?
Yeah, I missed the paging.
Scans as a case of the "I like X better than Y, therefore X is objectively better than Y" rationalization fallacy. Someone else could easily use the same set of facts to argue the opposite case: "irc doesn't support code snippets, so ....". The political argument that you shouldn't use a closed-source product also irritates me. I use a tool because it's the best tool for s job, and FOSS is very often the winner there. But if the FOSS option isn't the best choice, don't tell me I should be using it anyway. I don't attach moral weight to a choice of licensing model.
It also gives people in the C-suite perverse incentives especially at large publicly traded corporations, as if they do not already push for short term gains as much as possible.
If you don't care losing the chat history after 10,000 messages, then Slack is free. 10k seems a big limit but it's only a few days away if you start integrating bots for GitHub, Bitbucket, Frontify etc.

On a project a customer of mine disabled all those integrations because we couldn't go more than one week back into the past. Thery were not willing to pay Slack and we were losing track of decisions and accountability. When that happened we started writing down more things into Google Docs and the conversation shifted naturally from Slack to the comments of the docs. That had the (IMHO positive) side effect of reducing the time spent chatting about the project and of increasing the time spent to actually build stuff.
I have about 5 years experience with both AWS and Google Cloud (App Engine, Google Compute, ..). I agree that AWS has more services to offer than Google. Initially Google took the route of the App Engine and fell behind AWS. However, recently its Compute Engine and other related services like Container Engine, Datalab (IPython, Jupyter as a Service), Big Query, Dataproc, Pub/Sub and more started outshining their AWS counterparts. Google's network is way faster than AWS. AWS network is too slow and flaky. For anyone taking the route of microservies, Google Cloud offers a huge advantage. Google new cloud console (which is still in beta) is sleek and sexy. Google's cloud services are a pleasure to use compared to AWS (other than a few pain points). I recommend small and medium Cloud-based shops to relook into Google Compute again. Google Cloud is adding services to its arsenal at a super fast rate (much faster than AWS). Just take a look at their engineering blog: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/. In a year I see google Cloud overtake AWS in terms of the capability.
That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be.

I'm not a huge "free-market" proponent. But markets exist, and they aren't magic. They smove to solution(s) that the market wants / willing to "pay" for. Pay in broadest sense, money, eyeballs, time, etc. As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.
Somewhat tangential but relevant, what the hell happened to XMPP, period? Wasn't it supposed to be our one communication account we do groupchat, video calls, IMs with persistence, and file transfers over? Why did it just up and die with nobody working on it and nobody using it?

http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html exists. Its groupchat, it could probably be amended to support inline code, and its persistence model lets a server chose to broadcast the message history or not.

And it is incredibly more user-friendly to make an XMPP account through a GUI client, have username@server, then join group@server for groupchat. No /join, no /register, no port management or #channel management. Hell, any reasonable XMPP client would default to your current server for groupchat so when you click "join chat room" you get the server part prefilled and you just enter the group name (or pick it from a list of groups - the protocol supports channel announcements).

I get that XMPP is a horrible format (XML) and horribly bloated (committee) and horribly old (1999?) but if its that broken why can't we make another protocol for peer to peer realtime communications? Why isn't webrtc becoming that transport? Why do we keep getting these one shot web startups trying to replace open protocols every other weekend for a quick buck?
Good luck with the CFA! It's a great program. I didn't expect it at first, but the best lesson I got out of it was that it taught me how to study and teach myself a subject comprehensively.
That's odd, their domain name suggests they are based in the small island nation of Tuvalu.
How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service
> What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good".

It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric.

> I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

Not really - fools like me already worked around ads almost 20 years ago because they wasted bandwidth (proof: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html - no longer functional though amazingly still online). Piggyback ads are an anomaly and people will always try to avoid them, whether they're text (to be confused with valid search results) like Google's or flashy, crashy animations.

> Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.

Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...
Information isn't property, and erroneously applying property law to it has obviously disastrous consequences.
This is my new channel on YouTube
Hot-Carrier Perovskite Solar Cells Could Bounce to 66% Efficiency
A lot of IRC usage used to be purely social. So the fact that that are lots less users isn't really indicative of anything in the context of FOSS development.
The MG 42's issues were more logistical. It was designed for an idealised situation (e.g. shooting range). Not as the article describes it "total war" where you have to carry everything you need to the battlefield. That meant issues like weight, complexity (for field repair), and replacements became a real headache.

But the whole idea of the General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG), which I'll note everybody adapted after WWII, was to make a lightweight "heavy" machine gun. No water cooled barrel, no requirement for a heavy tripod, in the light machine gun use case it was fired from a bipod, and could be put into use quickly.

Those extra, quick change barrels were a feature, not a bug, such a German infantry unit was organized around the GPMG, one guy would carry it, others would carry spare barrels and ammo, their job was in part to keep the machine gun running and protected from the enemy.

Issues like the high rate of fire were a tactical choice the Germans made, shared by no others to my memory (I believe the theory is that you would seldom have a good target for long, so you had to make the best of it while it existed). E.g. I see in the Wikipedia page that the post-WWII Austrian version has a much heavier bolt to reduce the rate of fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_42 And the Germans are still using it in the adapted for 7.62 NATO MG 3 variant.

Accuracy is also a tradeoff, there are many modes of machine gun fire like plunging where you want a degree of dispersion.

That said, yeah, feedback from the front is slow, can take a whole war to result in real changes. These things don't get put to the real test until real war; e.g. aside from the earliest M16s, none of these issues are a patch on the string of problems that initially crippled our Mark 14 torpedo used in WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo
> The Soviets were constantly afraid of what USA might do, and nearly every action they made was a response to that fear. Thus it was the actions of USA that drove the cold war.

Every newspaper, every magazine in the USSR had the "Пролетарии всех стран, соеденяйтесь!" printed above the title. Which roughly means "Working men of the world, unite!" and refers this Marx's quote:

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!"
It's the other way around: Mattermost has a ridiculously small userbase, compared to IRC. IRCv3 is compatible with IRC2.1. It's a lot easier to extend the IRC spec than it is to write competing software.
Show HN: Swiss Panorama – Real Webcam Memory
But doing this in C already exists and works well. I don't understand the point of it. Although, in this day and age, rather than use the standard Unix toolset, people invent their own tools as if they are new. "Make" versus "npm" for example.
Learning Crystal and making useful stuff with it. E.g a Sinatra like web framework with 10x performance https://github.com/kemalcr/kemal
Probier mal bei meinem vorigen Arbeitgeber: https://www.testcloud.io/de/jobs/

Die suchen guten Entwickler und ich weiss sie wären bestimmt an sowas interessiert. Wenn du noch mehr Infos willst, kannste mir gern eine Email schicken.

Viel Gluck
I hear a lot of people talking about the problems with IRC, and I truly wish someone would enumerate them. It works great for our needs but I'm very curious the ways it isn't working for some.

We use a self hosted IRC server, along with an IRC bot written in Go for everything from automated deployments to chat logs to weather and traffic and bus schedules.
I am not a lawyer nor a German, but Wikipedia says that German law has no strictly liability [1], which would seem to imply that knowledge (or at least belief or a willful lack of knowledge) that the goods were stolen would be necessary to prosecute that crime. Is that wrong?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)
It’s questionable why Amazon would use someone who is best known for punching a producer as public face in all their ads, though.

I’d argue that this – he’s now in ads on every TV channel, every website – is even encouraging people to be more assholes.

Society should discourage people acting as assholes, and this seems like it does the opposite.
All under 100 employees. I suppose some things might not be up for negotiation at larger companies but I bet not as many as you think.
New Battery Could Help Make Charging Electric Cars a Whole Lot Less of a Pain
>It wasn't theft.

The insider had no right to divulge that information. I don't care whether it's technically theft but it is definitely immoral, and should definitely be illegal.

If I'm busting my ass off in a startup I sure as heck don't want my buddy to sell or give away our trade secrets to the competition.
The article mentions his hiring college graduates.
According to Russian media, he has scanned the document an replaced passages in a graphic editor (like Photoshop).
The Female Ginkgo Tree’s Acrid Smell of Success
I don't know how widely accepted this interpretation of events is, but seeing how incredibly slow progress can be, progress that looks simple and 'obvious' from the far side, is always amazing.
I don't see Blabr as a tool for problems that take a long time to run.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that we can only aspire to minor problems in the browser. For instance, [0] solves a famous nonlinear PDE (which was a heavy computation not that long ago).

So, yes, Blabr is for "interactive exploration". But, I believe that allows a large (and increasing) range of interesting problems.

[0] http://blabr.io/?37642ee8c920dcb69ac1
You can use Quassel (http://quassel-irc.org/). It's like ZNC without the setup
The two faces of Airbnb
Yes, treating dialup sources as likely spam sources has been done since long before Google became a significant player in email. In earlier years the main approach was to try to convince ISPs to filter outgoing port 25 by default on their dialup IP ranges. Later, people started compiling lists of dialup IP ranges (later expanded to DSL/cable/etc.) to block them at the recipient side, since there were too many ISPs who weren't filtering. Recipients disliked email from dialup IPs because ISPs seemed unwilling or unable to police their customers and respond to individual abuse reports, and so little legitimate email originated there anyway that it was easier to just cut them off.

I don't think the bigger end-user providers have been very involved in developing those kinds of policies. The NANAE crowd was/is mostly administrators of smaller and university servers, not Yahoo/AOL/Hotmail/Gmail administrators.
No type safety? Not on the JVM, CLR, or C++? No statistical libraries? No FIX implementation?

In my world (derivatives market making) those four make the language complete non-starters. Firms in the trading world are quite risk-adverse, even F# and Scala can be steep asks. It's a shame though, Erlang would make a really nice home in the finance world.
Thanks for your reply. It's clear that you've put a lot of thought into it, but I'm still struggling make it useful for me.

> These days there is more than several handfuls of different ways to approach this. I recommend chef or ansible if your new to configuration management.

As far as I can tell, neither ansible nor chef really help me with answering questions like "can I deploy service X in version Y to machine Z, or are dependencies missing?". Or do they? If yes, how? Or did I misunderstood what exactly they should help me with?
> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat.

subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed.

> 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™.

spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because there are so many options for servers, whereas Slack only supports one server.

> 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office.

webchat was invented for a reason

> 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc.

IRC has had mIRC-style colors supported and even adjustable by the majority of clients for at least 10 years. I don't know what "messaging" means. If you mean "private messaging", pretty much every chat software in the world has that. AOL and ICQ have that. You can put emoticons in your text manually if you want. It was on IRC that the concept of chat bots was invented, not on Slack.

> There is a reason why IRC, a widely-available, chat solution that has been available for decades didn't catch on. It has nothing to do with how well the software moves messages from one computer to another.

Yes, it is about how much money a for-profit company has to spend on marketing and copy as opposed to a standards organization.
By that logic, Libya probably has the most active startup scene of any country right now.
I was about to sign up, with about the same reason and interest level as the post author. How's Twitch for this?
That won't work for small sites that aren't going to have a million monthly views, which means you are effectively chocking of new websites, or forcing them to proxy the request through their own site, thus pointlessly driving up the cost.

I get that some people don't want to be tracked (I don't mind as long as I can selectively turn it of), but please at least be honest about what you don't like.
> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while stille being profitable.

So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads.

piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock.

So you are making an argument that is presently being implemented and still being blocked.
It's getting tiresome doing this.

"We understand perfectly that some of you might find ads annoying"
"Our pledge: we do not serve intrusive ads like pop-downs/pop-ups and takeovers."

From one page load of www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/guru3d-rig-of-the-month-october-2015,1.html this list excludes the dozen or so trackers and adverts that I don't have record of serving malware.

googletagservices.com (Angler, Neutrino exploit kits, to mention just the most recent)

doubleclick.net (Angler, Neutrino exploit kits, to mention just the most recent)

adnxs.com (Angler exploit kit, Flash 0-days on MSN.com)

openx.net (don't get me started on the cesspit of openx)

serving-sys.com
I live in Houston, and am moving to LA soon over NYC (finance + commodities background) or SF (fits current career path). I know NYC and SF can be really cool places, but you really have to stop pretending they are unless you really are pulling in 7 or more figures. The people and lifestyle in LA are way more conducive, intellectually and otherwise, to the life I want and the way I see things going. I see places like Houston, Austin, and LA outperforming NYC and SF for the time being.
Outsourcing is just the step before automation. The US lost 4 million jobs to China between 98-2004 in the same period the Chinese lost 18 million jobs to the robots. This trend isn't stopping, instead it will only continue faster and faster.

The tings that digitalization kills are things like the camera, the walkman, the video-recorder, the video-camera, the post-processing machines, instruments, the studio musician and I could go on.

These aren't jobs that then are created somewhere else. In most of the cases where new industries or new areas are made they either require extremely highly specialized education or they are very hard for most people to make any money in. The app store being a good example.

Your Cobol example isn't proving anything at all and your claim was wrong to begin with. You claimed accountants just became cobol developers which is simply a false claim. And the reason why there is a need for cobol isn't because of a new demand but because of a dwindling availability of an existing demand which is also going down until a new technology makes that completely redundant.
Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing.

If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…
So if you don't want to invest the setup and ongoing maintenance time, or get no pleasure from doing such , may I ask why you want a simple way to do all this at all?

I'm not the person you replied to, but among the potential reasons would be privacy, reliability and sustainability.
Are these limitations in the protocol, or just in the network, especially freenode? If someone were to run a paid, $5-a-month to run a channel with over 20 users IRC network, would they be able to address the difficulties of freenode and EFNet before it? Would SILC fix anything?
Well XMPP groupchat does in fact work (as you say). So the question would be; how does it compare to Slack? ... and IRC?
Even more simply put: "memory hierarchy exists"?
Considering World of Warcraft guild channels have a configurable "message of the day", I kind of assumed all WoW chat was IRC. I'm sure they break 1000 users in a channel without problems.
> with inside information, you're incentivized to keep others in the dark so that you can maximize the impact of your trades

This is true of all professional trading.

> borrowing money to short stocks in a company likely to go bankrupt, while telling people to buy

This would be fraud, which is illegal independently of any insider trading rules