skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was just as much a natural monopoly historically as it is now. The last mile cost you talk about is the barrier to entry I mentioned. Again, it's not a very good example because (historically or not) it's a market that lends to less competition by default.

Even Google is having problems with this natural monopoly:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/15/12492890/google-fiber-wire...
I think that is a bit of a skewed sample. Stuxnet infected mostly Iranian computers, not a lot of US AV companies there. Duqu and Sauron also infected mostly Russian companies, which are far more likely to use Kaspersky Labs than a US AV company. Similarly, most of the reveals of Russian state-sponsored malware is done by US AV companies, for instance the DNC hacks, because Russian state-sponsored malware will tend to target US entities.
Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they please.
> Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter...

Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, NPR's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said.
I know someone running a company that aims to solve exactly this problem, and they were attempting to sell to NPR, too. Last I talked to them about it, they said NPR seemed interested but has the typical years-long enterprise buying cycle. So, this news is really too bad.
Yes, but DBS is categorically different than what they are trying to do here. DBS is designed to excited/inhibit entire brain regions. What they are proposing here is to interface directly with the circuits and modulate activity at the level of single neurons.
Ubuntu will still be very compatible with Debian, which provides second-only-to-Redhat levels of compatibility and package availability. The problem is their internal application ecosystem; instead of contributing Wayland and GNOME/KDE, they decided to reinvent the wheel. Yes, they have Samsung and other corporations on-board to support their vision, but it doesn't contribute to Linux/GNU overall.

I dumped Ubuntu when the Unity Netbook Edition switched from the (beautiful) EFL libraries to Qt, which added significant performance penalties, and then the main distro adopted the new interface. It felt like everything could've been built upon Plasma 5, but because it wasn't controlled by them, they had to make their own in order to be XKCD-927 Compliant.
A few things:

- The interface is overwhelming. While I understand that you aim to surface power, I think you're not targeting a specific power well enough to cater to a user's needs. For example, if you aim to help a user find deals, you should develop an interface that targets that super power.

- Related to ^, I'm wondering why a user would ever need some of these features... like why would I want to search by hidden keywords?

- Re: branding. I feel like you haphazardly went for a 5-letter dot com, when you could have done something more memorable like amazonhunter.com
I think Reddit is what they want to avoid.
>There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from discussion boards to individual story commenting

Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.
In fact isn't shared hosting the most common type of hosting? Any larger sites can afford paid certs anyways so letsencrypt is especially suited for smaller sites like mine, that can't afford the cert but also don't have the luxury of a dedicated machine/vps.
Rude reader comments can warp people's perception of what was being reported.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-...
I'm surprised not to see a single mention of coffee. I've used it as a drug plenty of times (not drinking it because I want to, but because I need the caffeine boost to meet expectations), and so has pretty much everyone I know. Does the discussion change because something only comes in pill form or is synthetic?
I've been meaning to write a "Dark Souls"-style comment/annotation system for the web, via browser extensions, for some time now. What better use of the web is there than annotating a site like "goatse.cx" with the message "Be wary of but hole"?

Genius is almost there now, but last I checked you had to open a new page (on genius.com) to annotate the page you're on, which ruins the immersion. And you can write freeform, which spoils the fun :-)
Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.

Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.

I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging.

On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.

I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.
For someone only driving 50k miles a year paying over $1000 a month in maintenance for a Subaru is also questionable unless Subarus are really that unreliable. What kind of car needs at least two rebuilds within 330k? Now he's done the same with the Tesla at only 100k.

This taxi driver must be a race car driver in disguise. Or this article is indeed questionable.
A lot of it has to do with the sloppy tricks people are trying to implement to get multimedia ads and whatnot on their sites. We are bombarded with ads in our day-to-day life and people's attention is more-and-more difficult to grab. Unfortunately they don't realize form follows function and their function is getting fucked. The internet is more about money and less about spreading ideas nowadays.
"do you really need to talk to your computer?"

Yes, and we've been waiting decades for it.

And we've been waiting for Minority Report for a decade and a half too.

The future is late.

Btw, please skip the part where you try to explain why no one needs it. You simply lack imagination.
Because its not in the list of exclusions?

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/m...
FWIW, cPanel just announced Let's Encrypt integration with their AutoSSL feature: https://blog.cpanel.com/announcing-cpanel-whms-official-lets...
Kobo Aura ONE (ebook reader)
I feel like that almost proves my point: the Chinese government is very reluctant to allow foreign companies to own a majority of any dominant technology in China, while the inverse is simply never even discussed.
I would accuse you of trolling, but I suspect you're actually serious. I find that immensely entertaining.

You ARE aware that discussion of an article can happen on a different forum, right? Like, say, Hacker News.

But then, I work at a news source, so what do I know.
Those aren't really an option for me, I use shared hosting without command line access. I realize this is an issue specific to my case but I know many other people that have their own small sites running on similar hosting as mine.
You know what Target does? They help out law enforcement and even have a top-rated crime lab: https://corporate.target.com/article/2012/02/an-unexpected-c...

A friend of mine was a Target store manager. According to him, Target had a more symbiotic relationship with LE, vs Walmart which just seems to suck resources dry.
It could be that at least some of those waiting in those long lines at Wal-mart might value their time as much as you do but lack the spare income to trade for time that you have.
Isn't Reddit trying to get rid of comments, too?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation#Cri...

"Due to the need to consider complicated case coverage, formal proofs are very complicated and error-prone, even for OT algorithms that only treat two characterwise primitives (insert and delete)" - Du Li & Rui Li - "An Admissibility-Based Operational Transformation Framework for Collaborative Editing Systems"

There's also an interesting comment there from the author of ShareJS, I think that might be you?

The other critical difference between CRDTs and OT is that CRDTs work offline, in a distributed setting, whereas OT cannot. OT requires a central online server to coordinate, which as far as I understand is the cause of the classic UI freeze in Google Docs whenever the network goes.
What are your thoughts on incentivizing constructive comments? I've seen publishers (The Guardian, if memory serves) select thoughtful comments and re-print them as micro-articles in their own right. This seems to solve part of the problem by setting an established, if not mostly-objective, standard for comment quality: journalistic publication standards.

As such, bias and opinion is welcome, provided that it's analytical, verified by fact to a reasonable degree, and respectful of common etiquette. The genius in this approach, as far as I'm concerned, is that it manages to preserve the original purpose of comments: scalable content-generation!

Clearly, moderation is a Hard Problem, but one that I think benefits from an economic/incentives analysis. One conclusion I've drawn is that restricting comments to paid-consumers makes banishment and sock-puppetry costly enough that moderators can mop up the rest by hand.

To ask a specific question: what, exactly, remains "hard" with this approach? Do you think "free to read / pay to comment" is viable, in principle? Do you think the promise of publication is not a good incentive? Why?
If your entire point about Victim's rights was simply that they don't have a right to bring a private criminal prosecution, I misunderstood and that is correct. There is no right for individuals to bring private causes of action in criminal court, at least that I am aware of. Moreover, the prosecutor represents the State not the Victim.

Though in practice Victim's rights in the criminal context are more than sentiment and bluster, just one example, before accepting a plea a Judge will have the Victim testify at the plea hearing or at minimum confirm on the record the prosecutor has conferred with the Victim regarding the offer and that the Victim has no objections.

Also when talking about Victim's rights, you can not focus entirely on the criminal context you have to look at the civil too, if for no other reason than the standard is different, beyond a reasonable doubt vs a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not). This is how you see cases like OJ, acquitted in the criminal murder trial, but guilty in the civil wrongful death trial.

Additionally, there are even civil causes of action, that in my opinion, tend to blur the line between civil and criminal because of the liberty interests at stake of the Defendant. For example, in this case aside from the Defendant being able to sue civilly outside the criminal prosecution, should could also bring a petition for restraining order in civil court. Such an Order enforcing the Victim's rights would limit the rights/liberties of the Defendant all outside the criminal context.

Further, there are other types of actions, that I would define as quasi-criminal, but are clearly civil in the jurisdictional sense. Take Qui Tam lawsuits, literally meaning "on behalf of the King", these are triggered by the Whistle Blower Statute(s) and provide a private individual the right to sue civilly and collect money on behalf of the Government.
China is strangling competition from outside of China, not the firewall. The firewall isn't what was preventing Uber from competing in China, for example.
Those are huge organizations with commensurately large developer resources, and they simply work at a different scale than most people on HN. "It works for Google" is not an argument for anything.

Monorepos come with their own challenges. For example, if any of your code is open source (which means it must be hosted separately, e.g. on Github), you have to sync the open-source version with your private monorepo version.

Monorepo are large. Having to pull and rebase against unrelated changes on every sync puts an onerous burden on devs. When you're remote and on the road, bandwidth can block your ability to even pull.

And if you're going to do it like Google, you'll vendor everything -- absolutely everything (Go packages, Java libraries, NPM modules, C++ libraries) -- which requires a whole tool chain to be built to handle syncing with upstream, as well as a rigid workflow to prevent your private, vendored fork from drifting away from upstream.

There are benefits to both approaches. There is no "one right way".
> Maybe parents should

> Cab fares should be included ... detailed plan before they decide to raise a child.

You simply don't have the necessary perspective here. Come back to this conversation when you're a NYC parent.
"When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise."

Those were your users.
Baiting him into saying Fox or Breitbart or whatever?
"Kid's at people's desks is a terrible idea"

I really, really hope those are just terrible stock photos.
Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup focused.
While I think there may yet be some sort of NLP/ML-based filtering that can improve the signal to noise ratio, the fundamental problem is that the effort is incredibly asymmetric.

It takes an author far, far longer to craft their work than it does for someone to heckle it.

If people weren't driving up page-views by coming back to the same article to see if their comment was liked or replied to, I think this would be a very easy decision for most sites: at some point you are responsible for all of the content on that page.
Detroit Hiring Talent in Silicon Valley for Race Against Google
Headphones for Kids?
I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call in.

What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?
Several shared hosting services offer native support for Let's Encrypt now. One of many lists: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/web-hosting-who-support-...

It looks like current versions of CPanel now have native support for Let's Encrypt: https://features.cpanel.net/topic/provide-support-for-lets-e...
95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.

The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.

Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.
Maybe.

It feels like the quality of online discussion is related to the narrowness of the topic/community.

For example: I find the comments that make it to Reddit's homepage humorous, but not really that helpful/insightful/smart. Most of the subreddits I frequent offer much better discussion, assuming the source topic is interesting. I.e., I don't expect much from r/cats. Although, even r/cats has much better comment that the homepage...

HR is a great aggregator, but still fairly narrow compared to NPR, CNN, HuffPost, Fox News, etc. And most of the commenters on those sites don't have any direct experience or insight to offer to those discussions. Until that problem is solved, the comments aren't valuable.
It's going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.
It is conflict free in this sense if no change is rejected, and if the result eventually converges (e.g. if two parties receive the full set of changes, they will end up with the same result, but they may diverge locally until all changes have been synchronised to all replicas).

This does mean sometimes producing something that have "application level conflicts" or something that a user will consider a conflict even if the application is perfectly fine with it. Depending on how good the heuristics for determining which changes to keep are, this may be obnoxious or appear perfectly reasonable.

E.g. two users start with the same empty document. They each type a sentence. Merge happens. Did they intend the document to have just their sentence, or do they want both? User A wrote that their mutual boss is an idiot; user B wrote that their mutual boss is a genius. Now what do they want to remain? There's no way for software to resolve that automatically which doesn't have disturbing implications.

But there certainly are some alternatives that are better than others. E.g. you'd probably prefer to retain both sentences, so you can agree on which to keep. You'd certainly prefer to keep at least one to deleting both.
>On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.

When was the last time you used Facebook?
a[-2] is valid R syntax. A negative index means that element is omitted from the result, so a[-2] is a without the second element.
"theretical computer science" .. who needs a proof reader ...
In parent's formulation, the phrase "no code" acts as a polyseme, carrying slightly different meanings each time it appears. It seemed like an attempt at word play, which I thought could be improved by pitting that interpretation against another strictly monosemous one that would be tautological once the ">" relation was changed to ">=". However it seems I've been overruled.
>>> Apple, Google, and Amazon currently

So in your world 2 wrongs make a right... because "everyone else" is doing it is a justification for you?

See I was taught from a young age that just because my friends did something incredibly stupid, illegal, or immoral that dis not give me license to commit the offense.
So all the talk about the "new" Microsoft has been for nothing.
Would you be willing to work overtime for free, to compensate for those interruptions and inefficiencies?
Facebook Comments (e.g. TechCrunch comments) are a secondary product for them, with even fewer features for publisher control and worse spam detection than Disqus.

Posting with your real identity does surprisingly nothing to stop trolls/flame wars; it arguably makes it worse as now there is a target.
I wasn't referring to the OPs opinion, I was referring to the fact that all their comment contained was a generic and useless complaint that we've all heard about 10 million times about "the media."

If you or anyone actually wants to post a comment that has a substantiative content to it, feel free. I'm sure if it's so obvious as to how NPR is slanted that there's plenty of objective resources you can draw on to enlighten us all...
Oh, so it's my privilege if some parents fuck up at telling their kids how important education is and mine didn't? What a strange way to reason. Everyone complains about privilege but nobody takes responsibility for mistakes.

The only people who have my sympathy in those regards are the working poor, that is, people who have to hold multiple jobs, more than full-time, just to get by and not starve. These are the people whose potential to excel in mathematics (or anything, really) is undermined.
If you run the math its only roughly 170 continuous horsepower running thru those power cables, assuming 100% efficiency etc.

If they added another order of magnitude or two to that charge rate, then it would be impressive.
Yes, but it doesn't scale up easily and it doesn't scale down at all. If you are doing exactly that amount of traffic on a predictable basis the fixed server makes sense.
Facebook isn't the only social option. Twitter replies are an opportunity for anonymous or semi-anonymous commentary. But, also an opportunity for garbage.
The same holds for LaTeX stored in git, yet a lot of people use this combination without problems.

It is a hack, in a sense, but one without serious consequences.
Amazing! I was at a play recently and Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) was outside during the interval... Inconceivable indeed!

P.S. I did manage to resist (just) saying the line!
You're citing the time period corresponding to the varroa mite epidemic.
I upgraded willingly so the deceptive upgrade practices, while deplorable, didn't really affect me. What does affect me is that Microsoft refuses to let me control my computer.

- If you turn off Windows Defender Real Time Protection it explicitly tells you "You can turn this off, but if it's off for a while we'll turn it back on". It turns itself on upon next reboot, it seems.

- You can't turn off Windows Update. It will always end up downloading new updates.

- Once an update is scheduled for a restart you can only delay a few times and it will then force the restart.

- You can't remove worthless apps like Microsoft Groove and OneDrive integration.

- They are continuing to try to weasel the Windows Store into my life by buying up or forcing exclusives (games), with all the drawbacks of UWP.

Microsoft, I promise I know what I'm doing and the risks and benefits of each action I want to perform. I own my hardware, I'd like to control the software I licensed. I am well aware of other OS options and I use Linux & OS X often, but neither can compare to the gaming library available on Windows which is my primary use case for my desktop.
The structure of what I had in mind was going through a laundry list of aspects of code (functionality, style, structure, functional decomposition, algorithmic efficiency, test coverage, use of libraries, blah blah blah), and making specific positive comments about the things that are already good. Personally I don't glean much value from that i.e., the compliments aren't something I'm concerned with and the feedback isn't something I can act on anyway.
Do You Know the Importance of Having a Website for Your Business?
Who could forget hoodwink'd[0]! It was such a neat experiment, I miss it. Been thinking of doing something similar in scheme.

[0]: via mousehole http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh... / http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...
@Achshar: VPSes have gotten exceptionally affordable lately. DO and AWS -- some of the current market leaders for cloud instances -- both offer reasonably-performant setups with high uptime for about $5/month, and that includes command-line access.

I'd argue that among people who know about Let's Encrypt, VPS hosting is more popular than cPanel-style shared hosting.
Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content.

HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote-intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment driven.