skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Netflix streaming wouldn't exist for you to <3 if ISPs had prohibitive data caps when they were new. Do you want to freeze the internet as it is today, blocking out new entrants and innovations, so long as you get your Netflix?
Because "internet" isn't a physical resource like electricity. Nothing is being consumed when you send 0s and 1s down the wire that's already been laid and paid for. When you load this webpage, it hasn't cost your ISP any additional money, so why do you want to pay them additional money?

ISPs' costs are a combination of fixed costs (hardware, labor, facilities, etc) and peak bandwidth capacity. They bill us in pricing that's a combination of a fixed base cost, and upgrade tiers that correspond to different peak bandwidth capacity. That's closer to "pay what you consume" in reality.
Making a critical mistake can get you killed but doing anything awesome won't make your lifespan infinite. So, the natural tendency of human brain is to avoid mistakes for betterment of survival chances while not giving too much importance to any positive stuff happening to them.

The downside is too much and the upside is not that much.
(2012)! I analysed Iron's code base (based on little modified Chromium), if you remove a few default bookmarks and change the default startpage it is fine.
Generally speaking I'd say it's far healthier world when we don't think we're all dependent on billionaires to make the world a better place. Also far healthier world when billionaires don't actually believe they're responsible for illuminating the world's path to salvation.

IMO the criticism is warranted, and there is a clear path Zuckerberg could take to quash all of the bad publicity. While he may be surprised people are calling him out, I say good for them. Why let anyone pull wool over your eyes voluntarily?
To me the obvious solution is to make it illegal for ISPs to get to get into a conflict of interest. So they should only be allowed to sell Internet access and not do anything else, especially not sell content. Given that they are running some of our countries most important pieces of infrastructure I think that's perfectly reasonable.
Approximation of integer programming problems (what the author is talking about more precisely) is actually pretty well studied. From Wikipedia:

> NP-hard problems vary greatly in their approximability; some, such as the bin packing problem, can be approximated within any factor greater than 1 (such a family of approximation algorithms is often called a polynomial time approximation scheme or PTAS). Others are impossible to approximate within any constant, or even polynomial factor unless P = NP, such as the maximum clique problem.

> NP-hard problems can often be expressed as integer programs (IP) and solved exactly in exponential time. Many approximation algorithms emerge from the linear programming relaxation of the integer program.

It turns out that shortest paths finding (via Bellman-Ford), dynamic programming and linear programming are all interrelated. Figuring out how your linear program can be represented as some other problem, like shortest paths finding, directly yields to generic approximation.
Ummm... no. The last 15 years have been anything but a full-scale war-to-the-knife strategy, ala WWII.

While the United States may not be willing to do that sort of thing, others may (cough...Putin, aka the honey badger of heads of state).

Also, such policies have a way of changing if the perceived threat level becomes high enough, as the former inhabitants of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden could attest.

I am not arguing (or interested in an argument about) whether those things were justified or not. I am merely pointing out that those things can and do happen.

Generalizing from Afghanistan is also not justifiable. Many have tried (and failed) to conquer and hold Afghanistan (in no small degree because there's not really anything there worth owning). Syria, by contrast, has been successfully conquered, and held, many times.
Are you a Tesla owner?
Best board ever.
well, now you've gone and ruined it
Let's say you pass that law. Comcast splits off Xfinity as a separate company to sell just internet service, with low data caps. Comcast and Xfinity enter a deal to exempt Comcast's streaming service from the caps in exchange for some millions per year. Comcast gets some billions per year in subscriptions, because Xfinity customers can binge on all the Comcast "Stream TV" they want. New high-bandwidth services, like a young Netflix competitor, can't afford to pay off the ISPs, so they never get to compete with the incumbents. The situation is no better than if Comcast wasn't split up.
Rugged chromebook with handle; No need for case, Carry it like a briefcase $149
> France never reverted to the kind of excesses that the set of Royalty at the time of the French revolution practiced.

> And yes, you're right the effect wasn't a direct one but it definitely became part of the DNA of France. For instance the role of the church before and after the revolution are tremendously different and aristocracy never managed to get the same strong grip on France as it did before.

If you mean it was the end of the absolute monarchy, then yes, absolutely. Charles X (second French king of the XIXth century) hadn't got the memo, and his attempt to go back to the good old days cost him his life. However, Napoleon's empire wasn't particularly different from pre-revolutionary France in terms of political liberties.
Versioning makes it significantly more powerful than just an editor on top of Route 53 API. With Traffic Flow one can migrate records from Policy v1 to v2 or to AnotherPolicy v8 with zero downtime. DIY approach wouldn't be as trivial.
So when the TPP says:

> No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.

This means that requiring code audits is not allowed for any software, not just imported software, right? Because I've seen quite a few people misled into thinking that similarly worded provisions apply only to imported goods.

If TPP was a legit trade treaty I would expect it to have anti-protectionism provisions (i.e. treating imported and home-produced software the same), not legislation-preventing ones.

One provision like that is disturbing, 6000 pages of them is horrifying.
We don't need to decide to apply this rule sometimes but other times that rule. When we come to an ambiguous string, we apply both rules nondeterministically. Here's a pseudo-grammar that I think describes both possibilities.

Statement -> Type Op Var ";"
Statement -> Var Op Var ";"
Op -> "*"

I think the disconnect here is that most lexers would insist on feeding a different token to the parser depending on whether "foo" is a Type or a Var, and choosing one or the other means the lexer might feed it bad information. The pragmatic way to implement this in a real compiler is to add some logic to the lexer so that it's working with more information than just the syntax. Theoretically though, all that really matters is that both possibilities are syntactically valid. So another way to implement it would be to pass on both possibilities, letting the parser eliminate the one that doesn't compile.
Wonder if BWT can be improved (i.e. make it sort better) with a help of extra additional information. So it is not a choice of all (complete sort) or pure BWT but something in between. Maybe group things a bit better (close to a sorted order) but needed a little map/error-correction/otherthing..? to help it decode.

Idea came from seeing Kolmogorov right under BWT's section. Maybe the extra information is a small FSM in a compact representation that works before or after BWT.

Another useful thing in practice is ability to quickly recognize already compressed data. There are enough encoded images, sound and are already fairly compress. Outer compressor can be quicker if it quickly detects that.
> You know if you are paid enough by learning what other offers you can get.

Yup.

Instead of pouring an excess of effort your energy into your job, perhaps above and beyond what you agreed to do as per your employment contract, pour your effort and energy into investigating and cultivating your other job prospects. See if other companies are willing to make you a decent offer. It may take a fair bit of time to find a company that really wants you, that you'd be willing to work for, and will make you a strong offer. You are in a good position to look for other options when you are not rushed and are not desperate - i.e. - when you are already employed. Once you have one or more offers on the table, then you are in an excellent position to either take the offer, or begin negotiating with your current employer for a raise to a level that is competitive with the offer.

If you go to your employer and say "give me a 20% raise" - or even "give me a 20% raise because <reasons why you are valuable>" without having first cultivated a strong alternative option, and they refuse, what are you going to do? Keep working for them at the same rate of pay?

A few resources that I found useful are:

* the idea of a BATNA - Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement
* the ever popular Patrick McKenzie's salary negotiation advice
* the book: "getting to yes: negotiating agreement without giving in" by Fisher, Ury and Patton.

On a personal note, I'm finding it far more valuable to become better at business-y things than technical things at this stage in my own career, after spending years thinking about programming, mathematics, and technical things. I regret not doing this earlier.
I think you misread parent. You seem to refer to the excesses of the French revolution, not of the French monarchy. It's true that France would not know the same kind of mass executions all over the country again, but it would exert occasionally a ferocious repression during its wars (eg, in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars) or in its colonies (eg, the massacres in French Algeria just after the end of WWII).
A real-time journey through the Apollo 17 mission
Rugged chromebook with handle; No need for case, carry it like a briefcase $149
> (2012)!

Which only makes it sadder that it hasn't faded into complete obscurity by now. I always see it recommended by at least one person in any discussion about privacy in Chrome/ium.
Lucky. "America", ie the US, is pretty huge and empty. When I was in college, my friends would often drive about 350 miles one way to go home for the weekend/holidays. Public transportation is so much shittier here than many other "developed" countries I've lived in. Sucks because I've never owned a car lol.
Since there's still uncontacted tribes in the world that experiment could still be performed.
though it's worth mentioning that the greatest difficulties are never, ever technical, they're always about people and feelings, which can surprise a lot of new managers

I wholeheartedly agree, and would like to add that this surprises developers and individual contributors perhaps even more than it surprises managers.
> Tesla is an extremely expensive car. Especially if you consider its value-to-price

I'm not sure what you mean with "value-to-price", but aren't pretty much all Tesla owners in love with their cars? They seem to be valued very highly, and considered worth the price.
This reminded me of this paper on using deep autoencoders as a generative model: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5023-generalized-denoising-auto-... I don't think it's exactly a right analogy, but there's something there about the local flow of MCMC locally describing the manifold structure, and thus generating it globally.
Mega facepalm after I click through and read "Preet Bharara". Can we just make this guy a Senator already?
Curious which places are at the top of your list?
They've done this before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8986920
I think p2p streaming for chunks of a video would be interesting, and I'm sure people are working on it (and p2p in general, not just video). I saw some people talking about mesh networks in Bangkok, I'll have to investigate more to see how large it is.
I live in Brisbane, and my current internet plan is 'unlimited' (TPG).

The biggest problem I have isn't the quota / data caps available, it's the fact I can't get any better than 2mbps upload speed, even if I switch from ADSL2+ to cable through Telstra.
Usage-based-billing turned out to be not a complete disaster in Canada. ISPs were no longer incentivized to use deep-packet-inspection to interrupt or throttle connections. Regulations required incumbents to grant access to last-mile networks to smaller ISPs to encourage competition. Users had more choice -- plans differentiated on both speed and on bandwidth caps, so if you needed a small amount of data in a month but you needed it quickly, you could still save money by picking the right plan. ISPs were encouraged to build out their networks more, since increased speed led to increased usage led to more recurring income: if you wanted the fastest speeds now and could pay $200/month for it, you got it; if you didn't, you could get Internet faster than the average American "high speed" connection for something like $30/month.
Well it seems your opinion is already made but there are a few reasons why this architecture is gaining in popularity:

- Faster loading time. For most users, the bottleneck is the network and a JSON payload is typically a lot smaller than a fully rendered HTML page. This reduces the overhead (unless your users have crap CPUs and fast network connections - not the norm).

- Better separation of concerns. Your server becomes a dumb API and doesn't need to concern itself with presentation. Your UI can live in an entirely different repository and it doesn't matter which framework or language your backend is written in. Front-end developers only need to know about browser technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) to build the UI. This reduces complexity instead of "needlessly" increasing it.

- Thanks to server side Javascript, it's relatively easy to have a fallback mechanism in place to do traditional server side rendering for web crawlers or browsers with Javascript disabled.
Run swift in the browser
Interestingly, all envogue tech of today like ML and Bitcoin converge around this topic. In essence, PoW is just (partly) figuring out the seed of a RNG, which in return is compression at its finest.

Thus, the author has a point in saying "Basically, once we’re done w/ statistics, we’re done. But this mentality may be one of our biggest faults". Even seemingly random data can be represented by incredibly short descriptions (as in MDL).
I'm fascinated by compression since I was a child hacking in x86 assembler.
No, not really.

The right way to solve the problem is how Chattanooga, TN and other such places have solved it: either install fiber optics and maintain and bill them as a utility, or open the existing fiber lines and maintain/bill them as a utility. [0]

This solution is so good that incumbent telcos have successfully lobbied to make it illegal in oh so many places.

A second, decent solution is how -IIRC- either the CR or Romaina did it... string up a communally-owned wired network from building to building, expanding the wired network until you get enough "customers" that you can pool the cash (and have the influence) to get a good link to the Internet.

[0] This was more-or-less what the telcos were supposed to do back in the 1990s with the tax breaks and other incentives they were given. As you can see, they failed to live up to their promises.
Here - https://github.com/karthikb351/chennairains.org
To an extent this happened in 2006 with the UKs physical phone and internet infrastructure.

It had been run by British Telecom, a privatised government department who were originally the only phone provider. They were required to spin off infrastructure into a sister company BT Openreach.

That company is required to give equal access to anyone who wants to provide phone services, including DSL, and its resulted in a fantastic variety of providers across the country. You can get everything including near free 30Mbps services with data caps and an awful router, unlimited 76Mbps service, right up to bonded DSL over multiple backbones. There's also cable if you want a faster connection.
Thanks. Yeah I didn't really see VML as relevant after its very inception. True it was sitting there in IE for an extra decade or two but it never had some sort of resurgence or potential that I saw. Silverlight on the other hand had serious people saying "this is the future!" When VML first came out, it had to be taken seriously. Next to PGML, not so much.
Laws need to be created so that those who own the pipes can not unfairly compete directly or indirectly(split itself up and make deals with it's old self and or partners) with services offered on the global Internet and or interfere with the greater good the Internet provides society.

What Comcast is doing here is steamrolling the Internet for their greater good and I can't imagine this working out well for them. They are the most hated company.. this surely isn't going to help and I'm glad to see Susan Crawford publicize this.

Hopefully others like John Oliver will jump in too to further publicize this outlandish let's kill the Internet for our greater good anti-competitive move. They need their asses handed to them!!!
Mozilla has really lost the plot these last few years. Its time for a clean-out of those at the top and a fresh start
The ENQUIRE System (1980)
Not being able to find private space in your multi-million dollar open floor plan modern home is one of those good kind of problems to have. If you want to live in a home with private space it isn't exactly hard to do. Since when did twitter prevent you from keeping a diary if you so choose?

I do agree with the author that private space is important though. It's nice have time to reflect without the worry of interruption or judgement. In these "Open offices" it can be an actual problem, I seem to be the only person I know who would be fine with just a cubicle.
Indeed, according to this: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-teslamotors-cash-insight-i... Tesla actually loses money on every car, instead of what the author implies with "You don't sell many units, but you make a lot of profit per unit."
My concern is that the incentives are not aligned with ever-increasing bandwidth. If my ISP can provide 100mbps and then milk that deployed infrastructure with data usage caps, they'll do it, unless competition appears.

The EPA mandates fuel economy standards for cars. Imagine if your ISP were held to a similar, ratcheting standard.

"Imagine if your regulators were not held powerless by those they supposedly regulate?"

Ok. It's hard for me to hold on to hope here.
So if I don't care about Netflix but want to watch e.g. a lot of twitch.tv I have to shop around for an ISP that has a deal with them? No thanks...
Nice walkthrough of the process of going from broad to narrow and then trying to explore the odd outliers. At this stage -- the point where you've identified a noticeable spike in arrests on early Wednesday's evenings -- it's worth trying to ask the SFPD why this discrepancy exists -- if it's something related to the reality of arrests (such as drug bust patrols stepping up on early evenings) or even what the Date/Time field represents -- is it the time of the initial report, or when the booking has been made? I've looked at the SFPD data on various occasions and have never been able to figure it out (based on looking at the data alone) and I wouldn't be surprised if it varied depending on the crime and disposition.

One thing I noticed on a recent inspection (actually, one of my students pointed out) was that the arrest rate is lower in 2015 for certain categories of crime, compared to 2014...and one possible reason for that discrepancy is because the dataset is updated as the disposition of the incident changes...i.e. when an arrest is finally made, a month(s) later, then the record is updated in the dataset.

The SF crime data is certainly granular and lends itself to analysis (certainly more than what's released by the NYPD)...but it lacks the specificity that can be found in Chicago and Dallas crimesets, which, IIRC, have separate fields for recording the time of the report and the time of last update to that report, among many other fields (though all the various departments have their own flaws and inconsistencies).
In Russia a decade ago all the consumer internet was billed on usage. Like 40 kopecks per megabyte. Sometimes uplink was free and downlink was metered, sometimes more crazy schemes.

Guess what killed it?
Competition. If you allow cables to be slung on top of rooftops / utility poles then soon you'll have a lot of cheap operators.
Streaming video in the manner you describe is illegal unless you own the copyright or license it. ;)

But yes, you can do that if you are willing to spend $10k for a city block.
In my childhood I had the wishful idea that some sort of "1d" fractal could compress huge amounts of data based on much shorter inputs. Assuming the inputs to the fractal could be computed effectively, which I was fairly sure could only be done by brute force which was never going to be useful.
It is right, but you're thinking in the wrong direction. The climate shifts were due to ice ages, not greenhouse gas-induced warming.
Oh god. I agree that is really bad UX.
Unique Cover of Drunk in Love – Stelios
I have a compression issue much closer to my heart that is not being properly addresses: AES-256 encrypted plaintext files. Seriously! If you just figure out the 256-bit key, it would compress well with any compressor - there's a huge class of files which would only need 256 additional bits! Why isn't there any advance on this front? /s

Entropy is not a broken measurement - in fact, it's the perfect measurement (proof: Shannon's source coding theorem and its converse), its only downside is that it is only defined with respect to a model.

If you measure it on the output of one model (permutations) with respect to another model (i.i.d) then, duh, it's wrong. And general permutations are so rare, that they might bug the author but there's no incentive to consider them. Non general permutations - e.g., addition-modulo permutations, often ARE reasonably well compressed by markov/tree/fsmx model algorithms and their delta counterparts. (And they're still too rare to consider on their own).

Kolmogorov complexity is interesting, but it is too vast and complicated to consider as a whole (proof: equivalence of computing Chaitin's omega to the halting problem), other than as a very useful reasoning device. Therefore, like with the halting problem, we focus on specific subsets that seem interesting.

Frankly, this rant reads like "But I don't understand why they don't yet have a car that runs on water". Compression is math, and it's a part of math we understand quite well. BWT, for example, is an amazing algorithm - but if you take a step back, it's just an efficient implementation of a compression scheme that was known before. (IIRC, the last gap in understanding the equivalence was closed by Effros et al in 2002)
America Gun Problem
9 Sites for Finding Remote Jobs
For the actual implementation of a compiler (not design of the language itself), I'd recommend "Modern Compiler Design" by Dick Grune.
A lot more practical and readable than the Dragon Book.

About the language design itself, you might want to have a look to: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/so-you-want-t...
These are very interesting guidelines from Walter Bright, the man behind the D programming language.
Jason Scott: Suicide and the Creative Mind