skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much does Google Cloud spend on marketing and sales of its services, how much business do they lose from companies who believe that Google could shut down their services in a few years? How much would they have spent on maintaining this service?

I can tell you, from my experience at mid-market size non-tech clients looking to move to the cloud, that Google's reputation for shutting down services is known and is a negative. AWS' reputation for leaving services alive is also known, and is a positive.

When companies buy software, they don't want to have to worry about the future- they just want it to work.

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was a big driving force for IBM's success. "No one ever got fired for choosing AWS" seems to be true these days.

If you want that phrase to be "No one ever got fired for choosing Google Cloud"- you probably shouldn't deprecate services like that. I wonder if anyone got fired for choosing Google Cloud, after Google shuts down one of their services?
Pre-the internet,

It was slow, and like learning chess with your sibling.

You didn't know how much you didn't know.
It is worth noting that Scott Alexander is an MD who is currently finishing his residency.
Agent Ransack is another good one.
I think these are great to read and hope more open source projects follows suit:

1. It allows people to understand where the project is heading (including pace)

2. It acts as sub-project discovery and usually uncovers areas that otherwise likely had been overseen

3. It serves as recruitment; links to each subproject and its members - letting users quickly get engaged should they want to.
A 2.4MB image is bit overkill, isn't it?
New York Is Proposing a “Textalyzer” Law to Deter Distracted Driving
I do agree there are situations in which a non-compete could have value not only to a particular employer, but to the overall economy.

The problems are:

1) Even in those situations, does the societal value outweigh the harm to the employees who suffer under the weight of the non-compete?

2) Even if the answer to #1 is yes, is there a way to narrowly craft law that allows non-competes in that very narrow situation without the collateral damage of other employers foisting non-competes on employees in non-analogous situations?

On #2, my guess is the answer is no. We have bright-line rules for good reason - because without them, it is easy for an employer to get around them. They are a blunt instrument, but they work. A lot of labor laws are like this.

And remember, the situation you were concerned about - the small startup vs. big company situation where the startup cannot enforce its trade secret rights because of costs of enforcement - would end up being turned into an analogous situation in the employee vs. big employer context if we allowed more non-competes to be enforceable. Maybe the employee's legal position would be correct, but try going up against a big employer in a legal battle to fend off enforcement of such rights.

Maybe instead of playing around with rules around non-competes, we should be focusing on providing a greater ability for small companies to enforce IP laws? For example, better attorney-fee shifting provisions?
Ask HN: Why does Hacker news have these ports open
I'm just wondering why these other ports would be open? Should I be connecting to HN in a better way? Here is the summary
https://www.shodan.io/host/104.20.43.44
You might be right about C++/Rust but I hear constant complaints from C#, Java, and Go devs about JS. It feels like about half of them would jump ship immediately given another choice. The truth is that even with all the advancements JS has made the tooling and features are still years behind some other mainstream languages.

The transpilers don't work that great and don't produce standard bytecode, in this regard WASM will be a game changer.
Llvm has a web assembly backend
In Rust, you'd generally use functions that return iterators or Tokio's streams for Linq-style tasks. Check out the "Complex Queries" example on http://diesel.rs for an example of what a Linq-like library looks like in Rust.
> I think one of the problems facing specifically Walmart is that their multi-decade long negative sentiment at the corporate and personal lives of the executives among social progressives that are strong among the "millennial" demographic in the US undermines a lot of the innovation that the company does.

Nah, that's limited to upper middle class millennial who can afford to "buy local" and buy fair-trade coffee. If you walk into any Walmart in the country you'll see a lot of millennials shopping there because it's cheaper (and in a lot of places its essentially the only store in town).
I know you can't walk to NSA HQ and demand to see everything that they have in TS but Snwoden and Manning case showed that stuff isn't that compartmentalized
It'd be helpful if HN headlines for such news, where law & enforcement varies a lot, mentioned the jurisdictions involved.

This is in the UK.
American Health Care System Has Good Results and High Expenses
Ohio School Suspends 7th Grader for Liking Instagram Photo of Toy Gun
>"The "without worry" part is maybe being optimistic. There have been a couple of previous hacker news discussions on the problem of counterfeit goods being sold by Amazon."

Part of this also is that Amazon has very generous return policies. I feel pretty sure that if whatever I buy is generally bad, I can return it. In fact, I have a highly neurotic friend who returns thing constantly to Amazon and is generally able to do so.

As to counterfeits. for the consumer, this only matters if the quality is unacceptable (which reviews and returns take care of - at for me). For copyright holders, it's problem but that's what courts are made for.
Apple releases iOS 10.3.2, watchOS 3.2.2, tvOS 10.2.1, and macOS 10.12.5
Osquery
The good part of this is that I prefer using Linux for these things anyways and the instability of windows has forced both our government clients and our office to focus half our efforts into supporting Linux correctly.
Compiled languages can have REPLs too. Common Lisp and Haskell come to mind.
I suppose it's the difference between the computational model presented by the language verses the computational model presented by the computer. A combination of how many components require some runtime environment to exist and how many disparate language features there are.
Not an intuitive definition of simple for sure, but this is in the context of a system's programming language.
In terms of just plain simple, I'd say scheme or just lambda calculus even takes the cake.
I think this is disingenuous. AWS keeps something running forever, that's true, but in what state?

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121711

(We were well aware of this thread, and others like it, internally)

Something that exists, but has absolutely no investment and unknown support is probably not a great thing. Given that EC2's recent outage was because they hadn't restarted their services in a long time[1], what problems exist here? I think that Google probably should have a SUPER long deprecation policy (24 months feels right), but a year isn't terrible - and I'd rather explicitly get a statement like this than the zombie services elsewhere.

Disclosure: I used to work at AMZN and am highly biased.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
I hope we don't move in that direction. It would be a waste of perfectly fine CPU cycles and memory. Admittedly natively built modules pose a tooling challenge but we've been doing that for decades. WebAssembly could serve as a cross-platform fallback.
That is very different than pulling it away from existing users.
Please provide references for these claims:

operate without enough oversight

This is your opinion. FISA Court exists for a reason, and is there to protect the rights of Americans.

frequently flaunt the law (and ignore the constitution)

No idea how you're getting to this assumption, unless you're taking clickbait at face value. There have been contested judgements regarding the legal justification for metadata collection. That hardly constitutes "ignoring the constitution." I'm also curious as to your claim of frequency.

eroding the rights of the people they're supposedly serving

NSA cannot collect information about American citizens, only FBI can. I believe NSA can only be involved with a specific warrant issued in response to an imminent or direct threat, but even then, I think it has to be FBI.

The military is completely different

This is the point I'm trying to make to you: NSA is the military. One more time. NSA is the military. Excuse the gross oversimplification, but NSA provides intelligence to other branches of the military so that they can function in the most informed way possible.

If you "can't possibly fault the soldiers" who are "on the ground" and "generally following orders," I'm going to assume that you are someone that supports keeping US soldiers as safe as possible. Yet, you seem to delight in the notion that the NSA would be shut down for a week, which would directly endanger those lives. How would you rectify this?
There is a building in Dallas called Museum Tower that has a reflective glare that effectively destroyed a popular piece at a near by museum.
- Make the UI consistent

- Stop using abbreviations everywhere (at least in the French version)

- Add structure and semantics to content (not just some blank text fields where people type arbitrary descriptions)

- Improve classification using image recognition and mechanical turks

- Make an open API available

- Get rid of sub-domains

- Add trust/reputation mechanisms
They have seen a ton of movies. (One of the few perks of that job). They certainly have opinions on them. And while they might not align with my opinions, I can calibrate for that. But "expertise" or no, they hold information I don't have - how did they experience the movie. They likely have seen it. I haven't. Talking to them increases the amount of information available to me.

I can't calibrate for the averaged-together soup of opinions on online forums. Because everything is average, nothing matters.
It seems like the idea is if you want to disable it for yourself, go ahead. Don't disable them for someone who isn't a technical person. IMO They should introduce a way to auto-approve only security updates, like its possible with WSUS. Maybe a cloud based WSUS for consumers?
Area bombing was largely ineffective and German production increased during the heaviest periods. In the view of many, it was a crime committed by a vindictive group of criminals. Area bombing has some well documented cases of slowing down the fall of nazis (hindering troop advances, taking away a lot of war production resources etc) but little evidence of speeding up the end.

Edit: good book on the subject https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/201...
> you could just turn plugins off or install an extension to force you to click to load Flash content. You can't do that with JavaScript, so maybe WASM will bring that part of the old days back too.

NoScript?
For a time before web search was good enough, there was the practice of downloading the whole mailing list archive so you could grep it.
NSA has dual roles, not only spying on others but also protecting U.S. resources. This creates this tension between keeping exploits secret or informing vendors and others. For a long time, security researchers like Bruce Schneier have advocated for splitting the NSA up, essentially one for offense and one for defense.
People say this, but the evidence from the UK Cancer Drugs Fund (a pot of money used to pay for expensive, new, not yet approved by NICE meds) tells us that the drugs "had no meaningful benefit" and are fantastically expensive.

http://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2097
I'm in Chicago, hence the plethora of Wright buildings I've been able to visit. (Plus I went to school in Wisconsin)

The Marin Civic Center looks super familiar, I guess is probably because I've seen Gattaca 3 or 4 times. I'll definitely check it out if I'm ever in the area.

I'd highly recommend the tours at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and the one at the Johnson and Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine Wisconsin if you ever get the opportunity. The J&J is largely a long marketing pitch for the Johnson family, but the buildings are fascinating. Taliesin is a lot more academic, and I learned a lot on that tour.

Taliesin West is probably more accessible to SV, and I'd assume the tour is quite good.
Go, at least, is far simpler as a language than Rust, and the implementation (compiler) is less complex overall, especially if you count LLVM on Rust's side. I suppose that Go programs exhibit more complex behavior at runtime due to the GC and green threads and stuff, but it's a huge stretch to call Go more complicated overall.

On the other hand, I'd argue that Rust makes up for the complexity with performance, power (ability to express more complex programs in less code), and safety (not just memory safety, which Go also mostly guarantees, but the ability to leverage the type checker to verify code correctness in general). C++, on the other hand, is more complex (due to all the legacy drift), yet equal in performance, less safe, and less powerful in most respects (there are some things C++ can do that Rust can't, but more things for which the opposite applies).
That is what the Assembly view of the compiler is for.

Also your complaint can be applied to C as well.

Given how optimizing compilers work, and the amount of UB being exploited, the language stoping being simple long time ago.
>if you want to be healthy, remove unnatural things from your body (sugar, medicines, sitting too much, etc),

?? What is "natural"? How do you define "natural"? Is there a single point in human evolution that you call "done" and emulating that discrete point is natural, and anything before or after is 'unnatural'?

I always struggle to understand "natural" woo because it is, at its core, an undefined and meaningless word with absolutely no scientific or medical relevance.

>and only undergo surgery, go to the hospital, or take medicine in very serious cases where the harm of not doing something outweighs the potential complications.

So, basic modern medicine? If your general doctor is recommending unnecessary medications or not doing cost/benefit for you, then medicine isn't broken, your doctor is.

>Especially since hearing more about more about how the American health system is not exactly incentivized to always look out for the best interest of the patient, I'm inclined to agree with him.

Why on earth would you conflate the profit motives of healthcare middlemen to imply that the science behind medicine isn't credible?

This is a shockingly ignorant statement openly peddling ludditeism and implicitly denouncing science in favor of the pitiful naturalism fallacy.

Really surprised to see such irrationalism on this forum.
Losing your job because your employer couldn't afford to stay in business is better?
It's not the overall objective but that's exactly the objective of a lot of people rooting for it. Think of how many people would be pissed off if they said "we're gonna try to replace javascript". Google did that with Dart and everyone gave them the finger... sunk cost fallacy.

Better to develop something for "performance" that just happens to be able to replace JS as a side benefit. Makes it a lot easier to swallow
The fact that programs are shipped as machine code bytes has plagued computing since the beginning. Security issues and backwards compatibility shackles abound in this model.

The obvious solution to these sort of problems problems is to send programs in some intermediate or high level form, with compilers for local CPUs being part of the loading process. While some successful environments have already done this (notably OS/400, and the ever-up-and-coming Mill CPU), there's just still too much momentum in the popular OSes for the "simpler" binary model.
Also an individual or couple can rent a studio apartment for about $500 in many cities, and of course people can and do share larger apartments.
"By carving out an operational piece of the company as a platform, they could future-proof the company against inefficiency and technological stagnation."

This sums it up for me. The computing platform is the foundation of Amazon's survival. Get that right and then make it unassailable, and world domination is inevitable. In some ways, Microsoft used the same approach by separating the operating system from applications and letting each application compete on it's own. They quickly found ways to team those applications for advantage.

Amazon has the computing platform dominance, the consumer behavior data at massive scale, the delivery platform (they're buying ships?), ... they're not just after Retail, but anything that touches customer experience. FedEx is in the cross-hairs...
That is exactly who I compare him to.
So the fact that that is a scheduler and a garbage collector in go means that by your definition even the simplest go program has a large complexity cost?
Bye SMSGH, Hello Hubtel
Thoughts on Regulating ICOs
A bit off topic but since it's mentioned in the article: how does the unlimited free static hosting compare with netlify's offering?
It's a shame Bash used 'select' as an elaborate menu built-in - it'd be quite neat to name the binary that (and drop the quotes). The you could just type the query right into your prompt!
Laptops are my concern.

In fact, with my MBP sitting on the tray when someone declines, the top gets caught where the tray fits into. I have seen my screen bend slightly when someone reclines quickly. I expect to get a laptop destroyed that way at some point.

Even when I do recline (not often), I do it slowly so if the person behind me is using their laptop, they're not surprised.
Porcelain is a big part of it.

Baking stones are designed to balance specific heat and conduction so that you don't just end up with a burnt crust on a ball of raw dough.

I couldn't get the recipe to load -- is the loaf put into a hot pan, or is the pan heated with the dough? In the latter case the whole cooking process is slowed down to allow the dough to rise a bit extra before it starts cooking.
Yeah you're not getting the point here. I am trying to show you problem with your thinking about the system, and you think as if I don't know enough to make an ignorant point when it doesn't even look like you read my comment fully.
Flying in a reclined seat is pure torture to me.
NSA's role could include protecting the nation's citizens or whatever other role the US government decides to assign to NSA, but it currently does not.

In addition to it's main role of collection of foreign intelligence data (which includes breaking encryption and finding/making vulnerabilities), it does have a secondary mission of protecting US government systems. Hopefully that does mean that they have ensured that US gov't systems have been patched against those vulnerabilities. For example, Microsoft patching the SMB vulnerability (including for WinXP) before it was made public was likely done after a report from NSA, and would be consistent with such a goal. Having "private" custom patches that would get installed in sensitive gov't systems but not made available to general public would also match this goal.

However, the relationship of NSA and the main victims of WannaCry are at best neutral. For example, it seems reasonable that NSA should want companies like Spain's Telefonica to stay vulnerable to various exploits - their mission explicitly includes obtaining intelligence from (among other sources) foreign telecommunications operators, so if they had the ability to protect Telefonica, then doing so would go against the mission given to NSA by the congress.
My question would be how could you bake into the original cost the cost of long term support when you have no idea how long one might use it? Windows XP was only end of life after 14 years. Some people STILL use it. I doubt the $139 price 14 years ago was expected to cover more than 5 years of use.
Would $5/month forever make more sense?
Every time a topic like this comes up I always wonder what bizarro version of Windows I'm running because I've never experienced my personal machine rebooting at an inopportune moment, never seen ads, never seen it install software without my consent, never had an update cause my machine to become unstable.

I'm going all the way back to Windows 7 here.

The only machines that are terrible to use are those I use at work because they are laden with all sorts of corporate security crap that you can't escape and bring otherwise decent hardware to it's knees.

Of course, the evidence that Windows Updates are problematic seems overwhelming but I do wonder if this is a case where the complainant numbers seem large simply because the install base is so massive.
Java applets were far too ahead of their time. Now that we actually have the bandwidth and computing power to support Applets they would be far superior than the Frankenstein of CSS, JS, and HTML we have now.
I love the optimism but that's not what happens when IT services get outsourced to tender. The process is almost exactly the same. MOD, NHS, Schools, Councils, you name it.

Firstly, tender bids have prerequisites on their bidders. You need to be on the "preferred provider" list. Security checked. Higher-level security vetted. DBS. Etc. This is the sort of stuff that stops small local companies getting in.

That means lack of competition and that means —as well as the price being 10-20× that in the natural market— that vendors have all the power when it comes to detail negotiation. They spec out the cheapest, easiest option for them, not what's best for the customer.

If the customer (a lowly NHS trust or CCG) turns around and says "no Linux, no sale" they'll offer a [much] higher price for the open system, or just say no. All three vendors that responded do the same. Windows remains.

This will only be solved when CCGs start working together and start in-housing some of this development work. But it's still apparently better to spunk £50M over HP for some dodgy tablets that don't work than hiring a team of (eg) 40 developers for 10 years. That sort of developer time, working on site, you could actually start to fix things.

But now I'm being optimistic. A Tory government in-house something when their mates own shares in HP? Not likely.
if there were exactly one point source of radiation it would matter, but there isn't. You have to integrate the cumulative radiation from all the points on the surface. The number of points in a subtended angle goes up as the square of the distance from the bread, and each points' contribution is the inverse square of that distance. This is true uniformly over any subtended arc, so the shape can't matter either. The result only depends on the emissivity of the material.
another article bullshitting, yeah, coz no one is doing it already... great!
Women Who Design
Are you talking about the telemetry stuff? Because that's a loaded way to describe it.
Maybe so. But I recently was shopping for a piece of furniture at Target. Great price, not available in store. So I went to check out and it told me allow 7-10 days for shipping. I then typed the product into Amazon and found the same product for 30 dollars more. But it would arrive tomorrow.

So I bought it from Amazon.
I'm very interested in the possibility of using a WASM VM as a unit of process isolation in an operating system. I actually kind of like Babel-compiled JavaScript, so I'm not as interested in WASM as a way to "get away from JavaScript", but the VM-based containerization possibilities (maybe with hardware-assist) are very cool.

Looks like Docker/Unikernel Systems actually has plans to build something like this: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/tree/master/projects/mi...