skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of the explanations are easy: It costs a lot of money to build a physical last-mile network that serves a large number of subscribers. Municipal broadband projects would, rightly (in my opinion), be expected to serve the entire city that's funding such a project but that build out would be expensive. Cities with city-owned electrical systems, like Seattle, can mitigate some of the costs by having their power operator run the physical wires through city-owned conduit. But, let's take Seattle as an example, not every part of the city has city-owned conduit and several discrete parts of the city have buried utilities that aren't even in conduit.

All of that work has to be paid for and most large cities have other pressing budget needs. There's a movement in Seattle to get municipal broadband done in Seattle but it is slow-moving because, again, money.

(Nothing in Washington State law prohibits a city from running its own Internet/cable/phone system. The RCW that a lot of people, falsely, quote as banning muni broadband in WA only applies to public utility districts. Tacoma has its own municipal system, called Click!, that seems to be well-received.)
McLuhan is fascinating to me. A lot of the criticisms people level against him are correct- much of his writing is composed of terse declarative statements that sound deep and insightful, but aren't really backed up by much.

It's like reading a series of bombshell opening statements about different topics, but instead of following up with arguments to flesh out those statements, he just moves on to another bombshell opening statement about some other issue that also doesn't get fleshed out.

A lot of people take that to mean that's it's all fluff, but I think that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He was known to keep track of ideas on index cards- something interesting would occur to him, so he'd make an index card for that concept, and flesh it out with more thoughts on the topic, sketches, etc. He would then pick out a related set of index cards as the basis for a book. So, his process went a long way towards defining the structure of his books.

So, it's true that his books tend to be a loosely-connected series of concepts presented in an evocative and profound-sounding manner, but never fully fleshed out. But they're often great food for thought- maybe he doesn't go into sufficient detail, but they're full of nuggets of intellectual goodness that are great starting points for thinking about modern media and the flow of information in the modern world (even if the end result is coming to the conclusion that he was wrong about something).
better sales targeting
Great, we needed something to counter the domestic propaganda that was legalized in 2013: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130715/11210223804/anti-...

Oh, it's about foreign propaganda? Never mind...
It's always tricky to tell if commenters here are from Europe, the US, or elsewhere, but on the off chance that you're not from the US: the US federal government has virtually no control over the US media industry, and can't prioritize any particular kind of content in it.
I believe[1] this isn't necessarily about broken files. There is a lot of variation allowed by the spec. One example that I've seen in the wild is extra-long (> 60 seconds) periods between I-frames. Seeking to an arbitrary point either requires searching backwards from the seek-point for an I-frame and storing a massive amount of RAM. As this usually isn't possible and would require decoding hundreds of frames, decoding may cheat and make do with as many P and B frames as it can handle.

[1] I haven't actually read most of the h.265 spec. It's possible these are technically invalid files.
How to live to be 100 – TED talk
Here's an example of Microsoft Office killing off backwards compatibility for some older document formats:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/01/01/137257/office-2003-...
This (2016) bill is extremely silly. But so was that Techdirt story. Can you identify the government "propaganda" we've been subjected to since 2014 that we weren't subjected to in (say) 2007?
If you find yourself searching lots of haystacks, and your needles are just text and not a regex, a better approach is to stuff all the needles into some kind of index, then chop up the haystack into overlapping tiles (of variable width from the smallest needle to the largest), then search each tile against the index of needles. This effectively searches all the needles at once and turns the operation from O(n) where n is the number of needles to O(m) where m is the number of tiles in haystack.txt.

It may seem to be a trivial difference, but then you can search multiple haystacks at once fairly easily, and this approach scales to hundreds of millions of needles at once. The code for it isn't very difficult either, heck you can just use an in memory SQLite dB to get a searchable, temporary, index and rely on using some of the most tested software in history.
Agree completely that our space program needs a new significant mission to stay relevant. However, I don't think going to space matters as much as it did last century. During JFK's reign catching up in space with the soviets was more than about going to space, it was about being able to defend the country. Today I think our new Moon Mission should be about solving climate change. That's an issue the country and world need to come together on to solve.
Definitely agree. From what I can tell so far (I've only just unlocked the Perpendicular Bisector tool), it strikes a great balance. Just-in-time helper prompts, a nice drag 'n' drop style UX that naturally lends itself to mobile, and clear instructions.

I like that it uses the concept of Photoshop-style "tools" for drawing points, segments, circles, etc. A very natural digital extension of the physical pencil, straight edge, and compass, with some nice abstractions built on top.
Not really arguing with your points, but it seems Microsoft has a lot of lessons learnt from maintaining backwards compatibility.

It'd be wonderful if their architects collected and codified these somewhere, ie "we did X because of Y, it didn't work, because Z ends up happening"

Mostly as a lesson for the rest of us not to fruitlessly repeat.
While it would be hard to call any kiloperson organization a hero, it is remarkable how people on the Windows team keep old software working even if it does not deserve to.

The most accessible documentation of this is Raymond Chen's blog. For example here's a piece written in 2007 about Windows 95 and DOS: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=...

While the herculean task of billion-device compatibility has not always gone off without a hitch, the idea that the past was all gaffes and trial and error at Microsoft does not ring true if you read the above blog from one of its more prolific public writers.
Name a language and someone will point out WTFs and subtle issues you might have never considered. The problem is the same when designing a language: computers think best with a large set of simple rules, humans think best with a small set of complicated rules, each having exceptions and different tiers of complexity for different levels of each developer's understanding.

I find C somewhat logical, but it has an easy-to-learn simplified version of itself that can be learned before re-reading the spec to complete your understanding of the language.
> I default to python in interviews even though it's my least favorite out of the languages that I use frequently.

Why is that ? I would image that you'd use the language you are most comfortable with and trust the most during an interview ? What makes Python a good 'interview' language but a less good bread and butter language for you ?
Agreed. Hickey, in that talk, claimed if you really did break backward compatibility, you should just name it something else. So in real terms Python3 should have been renamed to Pythonidae or something like that. Eventually the last folks working in the 2.7.* branch would notice that nobody else was in the room and hopefully figure out where they went.
It's true that you have to draw a line somewhere based on technical and business constraints, but an important takeaway of the names article is that you almost certainly don't need to do anything with a name other than treat it as an opaque string that can be displayed back to the user. For example, I'm struggling to think of a good reason why user registration would require separate first name and last name fields, and yet this practice is overwhelmingly common. For that matter, why do you want my real name at all, considering that it can't be used as a unique ID anyway?
The same thing is true in Baltimore (and really, most cities). The city has no money--no lobbying needed to preclude municipal broadband.
Jailbreaking MacOS: Patching AMFI to Allow Arbitrary Entitlements
Ostensibly fakenews is not state sponsored or it would be called disinformation. Also fakenews is different than misinformation in that it is intentional. So the question is really what is the source and target of the fakenews, and how is it being funded?

If it's a for-profit organization selling lies that aren't sourced by any government (domestic or foreign), I don't see how any existing law prevents it. Stupid people and businesses will end up paying for the spread of falsehood, which seems like an eventual dead end. But if they're being fed (dis)information from government(s) then certainly that should be illegal and should come with very punitive sanctions. Disinformation gets people killed.
Not even close. The Oregon Department of Transportation gets a ton of federal money as a huge part of its budget.
I'd love a Star Wars series rather than these filler movies to be honest. I enjoyed Rogue One as mentioned above, but agree it'd probably be more suited as a mini series than a movie. Same for the upcoming Han Solo movie. Just a different theme for a different season. Given Disney owns the franchise now, maybe it could happen...
Dead reckoning
I see that. I don't see a lot of urgency in our societies either. Perhaps you have seen this:

https://i.redditmedia.com/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46...

I blame the television and the media, they have sunk the population into a hypnotic stupor.
I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way.

Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait?

Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?

To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.
And here I was thinking 'At least he's consistent, I remember him saying the same thing years ago.'
I was considering writing roughly the same thing you did, thanks. There's a lot of terrible documentation in every language, but I think it may be a losing battle to show this as a counter example unfortunately.

I think it's just that the gap to get proficient with Haskell for an imperative programmer is a hurdle they are blind to (I was blind myself!), and they assume a few simple tutorials will bootstrap them into the language like it did the other handful they learned.

This is clearly an education problem, but I guess we still have a ways to go to get acceptance.
>I'd bet on GNU xargs being more likely to be installed than GNU Parallel.

Your bet is irrelevant in the face of widely implemented standards. POSIX will outlive GNU coreutils. I'd bet your system also probably has a package manager that makes it easy to mark parallel as a dependency of your software.

>many non-Linux systems

Linux is pretty much the only system that typically ships GNU coreutils. The only one that comes to mind is Hurd.
I work at a digital marketing agency and recently had to deal with this. (I also wrote two blog posts on it, currently unpublished). I have access to ~50 properties in google analytics from work and personal accounts. About 35 of them were affected. I couldn't discern a pattern on size or type of website. Very interesting how widespread this was, but very very easy to filter out. It takes 2 seconds to filter this type of spam from appearing.

A side note though, the author is incorrect on point #3 of how he expects future spam to behave. This spam is not sent with bots clicking on links acting like user. Spammers use the measurement protocol [1] to post data to randomly-ish generated universal analytics ids. So they take that referral/utm data and continuously post it to random UA-IDs until they are successful, then hit that ID much harder.

Previously you could get around this by making your first property (GA structure is a tree, account > property > view, where you can have multiple properties and views) a shell. You'd never use the first property and only the second or third because then your UA-ID goes from 5575393 to 5575393-2. That "-2" previously wasn't attacked.

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
From this point of view, Swift language is doing right. It is irritating to have to fix a project every few months because Swift language is changing under our feet, but it is still better than having multiple active flavors of Swift. (I still don't love Swift, though.)
No, independently these moves are inconsequential. But the trajectory is clear, and reason to worry.
That's easy, it's to make better marketing materials.

"Dear [first name]," flows better than "Dear [opaque string],".
Who uses RavenDB in production? How does it scale over a cluster? I have seen this project pop-up multiple times but I feel something less known like ArangoDB or OrientDB is more used/mature than RavenDB. Is it so? I won't even consider using it until it makes it's way to Linux .NET core or Mono.
Any guesses on the value of the "google.com" with the Cyrillic G? I'd say $1MM.
> US federal government has virtually no control over the US media industry

They may not have any control de jure, but the government (federal or otherwise) has de facto gained a lot of control by threatening the media's "access". Yes, this should be an empty threat that the media shouldn't submit to so easily, but in practice it has been extremely effective in keeping some topics off the news.
I've done it. I have a throwaway facebook account that doesn't seem to connect to any of my normal points of contact (say for free offers where you have to share something on fb). Not that facebook couldn't figure out who I am (say via IP), but they just don't actively do that or at least expose that to end users.
IG-88? He had enough personality to go rogue and become a bounty hunter, and is canonical.
To claim Samantha was the founder of Open Bionics does a massive disservice to the CEO, Joel, who is the guy that actually came up with the concept (before Sam joined as a "bizdev" person). It's Joel who had been making bionic hands since his teens, and who spoke at the Hacker News London conference about his work.

But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...
http://www.femalefounderstories.com/danielle-morrill.html

> While I was growing up, my dad worked on startups in the financial services industry.

> Eventually my dad started his own company and I worked for him from age 13 to 19.

>I was extremely rebellious at this point and, despite scoring a 1390 on the SAT and a high GPA, I didn't apply to any colleges at all.

Not exactly an underdog story. Almost nobody on the planet get this type of deal. Forget about jumping in with startup founders, I don't think most people know one in real life.
hbcondo714 is correct, nothing every actually touches your website. Its send with the measurement protocol, which allows you to POST data straight to GA.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
i can grant you all of that, but i still have little idea how long it would take to resurrect the parts of the supply chain which have been moved to China (and left to rot in various places outside of China).

maybe it's better to focus the question on a single region: how long would it take to resurrect the manufacturing component of SV's economy to the level it was at 25 years ago?

a year or two? five years? a decade? what would the time scale be?
Marten is a great product (in real life the Marten is a major predator or the Raven :-) and built on a solid foundation in Postgres. RavenDB has a lot of gotchas at scale, and is one of the big reasons the OctopusDeploy team moved away from it.

https://octopus.com/blog/3.0-switching-to-sql
Haven't been to HMV in about 5 years, but all the point-of-sale computers ran DOS at the Montreal locations I'd been too.

Went to a local bookstore recently, seemed they were running a DOS app too.

So unless they are emulating (a distinct possibility), they can use FreeDOS to run natively.

And if not for enterprise-sake, then just for fun :P
Things I hate about Git (2012)
With respect to Python 3, I think it /is/ in fact a similar but different language.

Primarily my focus is not on small annoying easily covered things (a print() function is better than a print keyword), but on more systemic changes like it's decision to make a unicode str the default type of string for the language.

I would like to see a new version of Python (maybe 4?) that centers around basic, commonly atomic, types and arrays of those types. This would prevent the issue of Python 3 either mangling input strings or choking as it tries to digest legacy input that isn't in the anticipated encoding (at the cost of not making the mess larger). It would not-modify data that is being passed through the language UNLESS requested as an operation or as an output filter (implicit operation). Traditional UNIX like 8 bit clean handling is why UTF-8 is a super set of ASCII (code-points above 0x7f undefined/locally specific); UTF-8 was able to define an in-situ character sync method and was still compatible with existing files, and programs that did not enforce a specific encoding on the data stream.
for running firmware updates for some (older) devices
> The extent of user application backwards-compatibility is impressive, with only Windows 10 removing 16-bit application support (boo)

It's still supported on the 32-bit versions of win10! It has never been supported on a 64-bit version of windows though.
I think another example was by joelonsoftware, where when MS moved to win 95, they actually ran popular software looking for bugs, and found the SimCity would use-after-free (which, before 95 wouldn't crash), so they modified their OS to leave that memory cell intact even after free.
Yep. it works well. https://wiki.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/TimeBased
One in a million happens quite often if you're processing something like ~100k requests a second.
"I'm just doing my job" is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to "I'm just doing it for money."

I never understand why most people do not realize this and treat one as sacrosanct and an automatic moral dodge but the other as totally morally bankrupt even when people aren't being harmed.
That's what the marketing department may believe, but in reality that's super creepy. Let's not pretend that I'm on a friendly first-name basis with corporations, or that in reality I'm anything more than an autogenerated numeric ID in a database as far as the corporation is concerned. Furthermore, nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort. And why does any company think that their marketing correspondence is welcome in the first place?
Depends on whether one's utility function definition, includes the nostalgia parameter
You either emailed him and he uploaded a contact list, or he had a tracking pixel in an email.
The whole affair was a real shitshow. Blowing everything and everyone up is good bureaucratic response when your boss has a habit of strangling people.
What sounds are the Bose good and bad at filtering out? In my office I am driven mad by things like one guy's thunderous typing and another guy who slams his mouse around his desk and generally rattles and clonks things around a lot.

I'm curious as to whether Bose would help as I gather noise-cancelling works better for steadyish background noise than sudden transient noises.
Yeah, the same applies to many of the falsehoods in this list. Some of them you have to get right; some of them you can probably ignore without causing practical problems.
Ahh, an OS which never had vendor lock-in, and had multiple independent vendors.

That dream died with Windows.
Then you have a broken compiler.
This is demonstrably untrue, I have read many articles showing collaboration between major news outlets and the US government. I think wikileaks mentioned it too. Specifically John Podesta saying something along the lines of "lets ask one of our friendlies at AP to plant a story".
Even if all the wikileaks and other reports were untrue, this isnt a conspiracy theory, the US media needs collaboration from the US government if it wants to get invited to white house press conferences, be called upon in them etc.
Revoking media access to the US government is very much in the power of the US government.
You are being very naive to think that the US government has zero control over the media. The US government regularly talks with silicon valley companies, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg had a few meetings discussing how to combat fake news aka suppress articles from rt.com and breitbart.
Not just that, it is public knowledge that facebook and google are part of the prism program that gives direct access to their data to the US government.
So in light of all that, your tone is quite inappropiate because it is in fact you who speaks out of ignorance.
He's not saying ethics trumps engineering. He was saying that in other careers, ethics are not as critically important as they are in engineering.
Sure, any language can have hard to understand parts or things that aren't designed the best way. But C is pretty old language. Creators of programming languages learned quite a lot since it was made, so they can avoid repeating known mistakes and can use newer design ideas. I.e. the quality of new languages can improve since they stand on the shoulders of giants.
If you look at long-running, successful projects, they don't do this.

One example is the original V8 dev team that went off to create Dart (AIUI). Nobody followed them and V8 got replacement developers. (But perhaps that was a particularly egregious case.)
That part of the story wasn't in the podcast :/

Still, I'm glad to see a non-conformist on this list :)
Windows 95 came with a way to configure shortcuts so that they would reboot back into DOS, just to run the program, and resume after you quit.

I call that going the extra mile.

I remember the shuffling you had to do to make enough extended memory or expanded memory (depending on the program) available. It was no small feat to be backwards compatible with programs interacting more or less directly with the BIOS and with custom routines for individual makes of add-in cards. Successfully shifting that whole ecosystem to a fully protected mode, preemptive environment over the course of 6 years or so (from 95's first release to XP) was probably the most impressive software migration we've ever seen.
CAR and CDR are also good names because they are part of the Lisp tradition. Also due to this tradition, they have a clear meaning in the context of Lisp. If the "new Lisp" keeps conses (and some may argue that if it doesn't, it shouldn't really fall under "a Lisp"...), perhaps it should also keep these names.