skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, basically, this was a complete and total bust:

In June, the FCC said sellers had initially sought $86.4
billion for 126 megahertz of television airwaves taken from
broadcasters to be sold for wireless use.

Many analysts had expected broadcasters to earn
substantially more in the auction, with some forecasting in
2016 $30 billion in proceeds.

This is the spectrum that would have been used for the "tv whitespace" wireless (except now you could do it amazingly better with clear spectrum)

I guess the analysts don't realize that a lot of these guys don't need tons more spectrum, they just want to prevent others from using it.

Don't worry though, our FCC chief is on it:
"FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the closing of bidding is a "major milestone," adding the spectrum will boost wireless service."

No idea how, since even with the fcc rules around use, they'll do pretty much nothing.

Hey, you know what also would have boosted it?
Having the people who actually gave a crap, and were trying to make wireless available to everyone by using this, do it. Or worse, we'll see wonderful devices that only work with specific carriers.

To be fair though, congress literally forced them to auction it after massive lobbying from telcos and isps. I'm sure though, that those same congressman will not remember to ask why the hell the auction did so badly if they needed the spectrum so much.

This spectrum all would have been better off in the hands of people trying to actually boost our economy, and it would have been worth a lot more in 20b to help free people from the iron grip of broadband non-competition.
Related is William Gibson's idea of "the Jackpot", or a "multicausal appocalypse", where a large catastrophe is caused not by a single major factor but by several smaller ones accumulating and interacting over time. Gibson talks about it in https://vimeo.com/116132074.

If this is the kind of thing you find interesting, you should also read How Complex Systems Fail (http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...).
Was any of this allocated to unlicensed/consumer usage? There's a serious shortage of uncrowded public spectrum in cities, and a few good channels for 802.11something would do a lot more good than giving the same spectrum to a cell phone carrier.
> ... will only decrease wealth inequality since the ones who own homes are generally wealthy.

I beg to differ. Wealthy will be fine because they have diversified assets. The ones truly hurt would be people in their 30's, who have just started putting down roots (first home, family etc) and would have invested a chunk of their savings in the downpayment. So wealth inequality might reduce a bit between top 20% and bottom 20%. But it will increase between 1% and the rest.

> ...nothing is destroyed by the lowering of housing values besides speculative worth.

Household balance sheets for middle-class, whose main asset is their homes, are destroyed. Now suddenly you are left with, say, a mortgage of 400K vs a house worth only 250K.

> ... help income equality along with leveling the gap a bit ...

Nope - the boomers would still fare better since their mortgages should have been paid off by now (generally), and they have a decent rich safety net. Ones screwed are genX and genY as I explained above.
Yet on geek kingdom, bad Microsoft pushing W10 telemetry on us, but Google is cool and doesn't do no evil.
So let's say you go through the hoops to use this app. Then you'd immediately break that trust, while still in the relationship, by recording the videos?
Dude, Vanguard is not available in Europe. THAT'S THE PROBLEM!
Yes, exactly.

This scared the [expletive] out of me until I read it and saw it was mostly theoretical, as I just purchased a home in the Boston area.

I think as you say the main issue (or challenge) here is that it would be a monumental change in perception, and that the perception itself is not insubstantial. In other words, people value homes because homes, land, neighborhoods, cities, and general living arrangements are valuable; not simply because they expect the monetary value to go up. Regulation of that system therefore might be an uphill battle against reality.

In addition, I've had many great conversations with friends in my generation (millennials and whatever the heck children of the mid-80's are called) and the consensus is that we don't actually think of owning a home as an investment much anymore. It's risky, it's unknown whether the value will go up or down in the short or long term, it's costly in a different way (time, energy, maintenance, stress), and it's more about control of your living situation and quality-of-life than anything.

In other words, me and my generation are buying homes if and only if we want to own a home, not because we're bent on investing in our future with property. We understand, for the most part, that you need a diverse strategy for investment and the home isn't by any means a sure bet.
Why teaching and learning code is hard. (It's not because coding is hard.)
Checkout the session on APFS at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/701/
> it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

At first (especially some years ago when the catalogue was much smaller) this used to annoy me. But Spotify has made a lot of progress in side-stepping the issue.

The Discover Weekly playlist of recommended music in particular was a great invention. It doesn't matter that much if artist X's latest album is not on Spotify, as long as they can find some other music that satisfies what people are looking for. Some techno with no vocals to code to, something chill in the evenings, like a personally curated radio, not a perfect on-demand player.

Focusing more on recommending music instead of having people search for music means that they get away with missing some artists - and they can take the cost of licensing deals into account when picking the recommended songs.
> I can't even say the word Lisp without cementing my reputation as a crazy lunatic who thinks Lisp is the Answer to Everything. So I keep my mouth shut (mostly) and watch helplessly as millions of tax dollars get wasted.

I've been there too, only in the commercial world watching corporate profit be wasted. It's really disheartening to see the computing world re-invent S-expressions badly (first as XML, then as JSON) and reinvent Lisp badly (e.g. JavaScript). Lisp really is awesome, and it really is the best language of which I'm aware, if for no other reason that if one wants to do enough programming in the language, then one can implement any other language, seamlessly.
It depends. I would give technically skilled users whatever they are productive in. I see plenty of users who would never get past sorting and filtering. Libre office calc is at least as four as excel for that
Most encryption systems are vulnerable to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, yet we still use them because they still vastly reduce the chance that your message will be leaked.

Similarly, this app reduces the chances that one of the parties will be victimized by their ex. That's still useful, even though imperfect.
You mean, rate of inflation being higher than rate of house price increases? Sounds good in theory, but how do you pull it off in practice in a somewhat free market like US?
Your coworker must be a masochist, because replacing email by constant meetings doesn't sound like much of a fantasy to me.
Any book recommendations that go more in-depth on this that you're aware?
They don't have to initially dominate. They just have to outlast the other stores.
What a rubbish article - there was no experiment - it's a right wing parable misrepresenting reality.

> That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich

As if that was even a thing.
Ok, I got that. So here's a suggestion for a simple but very effective addendum:

- do not store on your laptop / cellphone what you no longer need

- make sure you protect your back-ups as well as you protect your originals

- don't type in credentials while under camera observation
It is but it is more work than using fertilizers.
I'm just about to start this book. It's loaded up on the Kindle right now ready to go having aborted 'Man in the High Castle' about a third of the way through.

As a big fan of Alastair's work I'm hoping for a good read to get over the last failure!
Revocation was something I did consider, but I am just using a users password hash as the token key, that way when the user changes his password, all previous tokens are invalidated.
Agreed, that was very strange. Right click "Copy video link". Leads me to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy5m091fOTU
That's what the regulators told Coase when he proposed auctions.

The problem with this argument is that it presumes spectrum would be allocated productively (or "fairly") in the absence of an auction. But that historically wasn't the case, and isn't the case with any number of other scarce resources doled out by governments.

Even among good-faith claimants, there is competition, obstinacy, incompetence, and waste; those things are fundamental to all of enterprise. That's true of auction winners as well, of course, but at least we're (a) getting revenue for the resource, and (b) forcing people to put their money where their mouth is: you don't write a 9-10-figure check without having at least some earthly clue of how you'll put the thing you bought to use.
"In April 2014, studies confirmed the presence of radioactive tuna off the coasts of the pacific U.S.[228] Researchers carried out tests on 26 albacore tuna caught prior to the 2011 power plant disaster and those caught after. However, the amount of radioactivity is less than that found naturally in a single banana.[229][230]

As of June 2016, dispersed nuclear fallout and associated radiation contamination continue to pollute the environment. Tilman Ruff, a professor at the University of Melbourne, stated that every day 300 tons of contaminated water leak from the crippled nuclear plant.[231] The Reconstruction Agency states that 174,000 people have been unable to return to their homes. Ecological diversity has decreased and malformations have been found in trees, birds, and mammals.[231]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
G play services sucks phone battery
How to keep your plumbing bills low
34 states + DC have laws against revenge porn: https://www.cybercivilrights.org/revenge-porn-laws/
Yes, it's largely dead. Killed by the same economics that are killing most writing niches. It's either a paid advertisement, the writer never went, or it's sensational to the point of misrepresenting the subject (so you'll think the author is awesome and subscribe to email updates).

There's a handful of valuable sources left.
roadsandkingdoms.com is one good one.
How to get a brand new bathroom cheap
I actually agree that my accounts team would be more productive with Excel. But for the other 99% of users?
Good luck to them then
Lies Startup Founders Tell You
This is the auction to consolidate television broadcasts, to free up some UHF space for other uses. Here's some background beyond what the article says. If anyone has a summary / picture of exactly what frequencies become available and what their bandwidth is, I'd love to see it.

The FCC's page for the auction. Includes a nifty dashboard view of the bidding. https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/fcc-initiatives/incentive-auct...

The Wikipedia article has some of the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_reallocation#Broadcas...
I believe you in this specific case, but how do you devise a rule for this that works in the general case, or a rule that determines when we should switch to the "let Google or companies it blesses" special case from that general case?
The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself.

Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.
>Is the software world broken now? No, it's not.

Thank you so much. This is such a reasonable overview compared to all the FUD about the software world being broken overnight.
> Yet somehow, we continue to see PostgreSQL beating Mongo, Rethink, and other trendy "NoSQL" upstarts at performance, one of the primary advantages they're supposed to have over it.

Yeah, pg will beat the pants off of pretty much any NOSQL DB on a single node, but what happens when you need master-master replication of sharded data in each datacenter as well as between datacenters?

Sure, denormalize and enforce data integrity at the application layer, shard the data, use queues for data updates to ensure every data-center gets all the data (eventually), and so on.

Now you're essentially treating the RDBMS as an eventually consistent NOSQL data store, horizontal scaling within a DC is still going to be annoying once you can't scale the shards vertically anymore, interruptions of network connectivity (or just increased latency) between DCs create huge headaches, and the (right) NOSQL DBs will beat the pants off of it for an equivalent hardware or hosting budget.

That said, NOSQL datastores solve problems that your startup will only encounter once you achieve product-market fit and enter a hypergrowth phase. Your MVP does not need an eventually-consistent distributed NOSQL backend, dammit.

Heck, your MVP may not even need PostGres or MySQL either. Just use SQLite, back up your server, and redeploy on pg only when (if) you start getting some traction.
Can you say a bit more about what you mean by "it's very dangerous with the amounts of noise"?
I agree with the consensus here that the marketing angle is delicate and may need work, but these is genius and the landing page is very nicely done.

The image of the two phones on top of each other is illustrative and just a little bit suggestive, which is clever and tasteful IMO.

Good job.
I doubt very much google really cares about Play Music sales, it likely only has it because it wants to offer comparable services to apple in order that they don't switch away from android. By far and away Googles most important revenue stream is advertising, youtube fits into the advertising model far better than Play.

Ultimately a generation of kids are growing up right now who use Youtube as their primary source of entertainment and for whom downloading an mp3 is likely to seem archaic. I doubt they're going to switch to Spotify so long as google can figure out offline play for audio (which I've no doubt they can)
Using the line/column information in Python's ast objects, you can sort of, almost recreate the concrete syntax, and I've tried to do so in my toy project https://github.com/Mortal/fstrings which converts old %-style formatting to the new Python 3.6 f-string syntax. It's not feature complete, but it mostly works.
Something someone is willing to pay you money for is fairly simple. (It's not all-encompassing, of course.)
No, no one ever considers a Facebook, LinkedIn, et al, suggestion started because the other party uploaded their contacts. It's only and always because their app spied on you, they hacked into your email, etc.
It doesn't take more bandwidth to transfer unsorted than sorted data, and the memory cost will presumably be the same for sorting on the server as on the client.
Filtering should always happen in the database for the sake of bandwidth and performance, but this doesn't apply to sorting the resultset since sorting doesn't change the amount of data.

(Unless the sorting is an intermediate step before further filtering, in which case the advice obviously does not apply.)
I am the author of this system. I've started writing technical blogs detailing exactly what this system is doing: https://medium.com/@stevehiehn/signals-sorcery-a63c6feb4419#...
I rather have proprietary formats on my hard disk, than open formats stored on someone's else computer.
300 tons is 80,000 gallons. The ocean is 187,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. And, it's not "less than a banana"; it's less than one twentieth of a banana.

We carpet bombed the oceans with nuclear weapons in the 1950s, which created tritium levels we can still track regionally today. Nobody thinks it's a great thing that Fukushima happened, but the water thing is probably not in the top 5 concerns.
Not this again.
People do not own the value of a dollar, just the dollar's IOU. If you have a house, you do not own the value of the house, you own the house. ——The values of your dollars and your houses depend on valuations by the rest of society, and you do not own that, and thus the value of your dollars and houses cannot be stolen. In fact per the Constitution, the government has thr exclusive right to choose the number if dollars to produce, and we investors made a prediction that the government's money creation policies would continue a certain way. In the case where the government produces more money than we had predicted doesn't make us victims of theft, just poor investors.

As a matter of policy, there are multiple stakeholders: those owning debt want deflation, those born without wealth want inflation so that there are enough dollars in circulation to match the growth in population.
"The UNIX culture never seemed to be much welcoming to the demoscene culture"

I'm not so sure it's that so much as the demoscene is not interested in Linux. I've tried to drum up interest on pouet in creating demos for Linux, and no one seemed interested, and some were even hostile to the idea.
I think it's more likely that Android represents a negligible share of their users than some kind of intentional malice.
> * Optional completely offline geo location service via an on-phone database which often preserves battery and even works when no internet access is available. Online backends using e.g. Mozilla Location Service are also available

Sounds really cool!

> * The often unavoidable Push notifications via Google Cloud Messaging while only sending minimal identifying data

Can you elaborate, please?
Does capitalism work. A real world experiment. Answer: no.
The story behind OS X's built-in graphing calculator
I'm using styles in Writer in the same way as I do in Word.
It's not hard to believe. It's one of many, many things Spotify has done to indicate how little they care about their users. Here are a few more, arranged somewhat chronologically:

* Forcing mandatory Facebook logins, only to walk them back

* Releasing a "version 1.0" of their desktop app with no
CTRL-F support and dozens of missing features

* Breaking people's hardware with bugs that made hundreds of unnecessary reads and writes to drives, denying the issue existed until pressed to fix it

* Silently removing basic features from their apps, or pushing UI updates that make said features harder to use
How to finance really big longterm projects?
Take for example a space elevator or a similar mega structure. Obviously companys dont have the financial breath to finance such a endeavor- states are to unstable too- so what type of organisation would be able to shoulder such a feat?
I doubt that organic food is "expensive", except in comparison; 'non-organic' is very cheap. Industrial agriculture works very well, with some quality tradeoffs.
> Apart from shuttering stores and stalling expansion plans, the company is continuing to focus on 365 by Whole Foods, a two-year-old division aimed at launching stores for “value-conscious” consumers.

Without a doubt, generic organics is where we are going.

I don't often shop at Whole Foods because I can't get my whole list there for a reasonable price compared to buying mostly a mix of organic and Simple Truth at Kroger. It's not worth making a separate trip just for a few things. If WF zoned in on this space more that could change things.
I really think most of this comes down to the number one principle of good software development is "Keep it simple stupid"

Simple, concrete, un-abstracted code is easy to get to right, easy to read, and easy to change.
Ye ole anecdote to the rescue. Ignoring the point of the article.
Yet we've put a bunch of 2.4 GHz spectrum out there with essentially "here you go, please channel hop, use up to those dBm" and it certainly has been a vastly, vastly more productive use than any single one of those carrier spectrum auctions.

And why did that happen? They probably figured it was worthless to auction given the attenuation. So if something nets minus dollars in your auction scheme but trillions of economic value, hey, I think we're still waiting for some data to come in on this thesis.
Cool I didn't know this was a common pattern. I recently saw the same approach implemented in scala.meta [1] - it allows you to view the code as both parsed tokens with all syntax intact as well as more abstracted ASTs which only carry semantic meaning. Someone even built a code formatter called scalafmt[2] like the author mentions.

Its a really cool approach because I think we need to pay much more attention to making more/better structured data from the compiler available to tools.

[1] http://scalameta.org/tutorial/
[2] https://github.com/olafurpg/scalafmt
Email itself, as with how Google is with Gmail and Inbox,which has reminders and interactive messages (Trello, Slack, etc.), the ability to use Google Drive for large attachments, and send money to friends.

If Gmail had a publishing platform, sort of like MailChimp, in which partners from large sites could use to gather analytics and craft messages with embedded content beyond the limits of typical messages. You could:

- reset your password with a click of a button and have it generated and stored by Google.

- chop up lengthy newsletters to contain only the content that you need.

- Convert threads with other Gmail users into chats, with threaded messaging.

This could reduce traffic to their site, though, making it less sticky. And it would work ideally in Chrome, unfortunately.
Pretty simplistic because obviously this is an extreme case to average all scores. But if you took 10% of the top score and added to the bottom scores it's more like a tax and the people at the top probably don't mind as much. I think when it comes to things like universal basic income, the idea to pay people directly implies that there is a base level of money that results in people being somewhat satisfied. But in reality I don't think it would ever. In Seattle where I live, some homeless people live in tents below the freeway near downtown because that is the only place they can afford within the area they want to be at. So if they had a basic income that allowed them to afford a house 30 miles from downtown would they live there? Good chance some would but some would not. Basically socialism only works if people think they are getting a good deal. That's how most people feel in countries like Sweden. They feel like they have a really nice country and really nice doctors and schools and services. The taxes are high on the rich but even the rich are not complaining too much. I think capitalism is a good way to motivate people but it's kind of like a game theory thing.. Basically you have to come up with a way to benefit the group in order to help yourself. The lone rich guy might actually not be rich for long if the mob comes and takes it away.

The discussion about the middle class disappearing I think is code for "jobs that used to pay really well for doing not that hard of jobs are going away".. Like in an era when robots can move pallets back and forth in a warehouse 24/7 should a forklift driver make $30/hr? The basic point is that jobs that are easy to replace either with a robot, a foreign worker, or less people we should expect there will be less of them. So training our workforce needs to be tailored to suit that reality.
Yuck. I'm sorry you went through that.