skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not what rent-seeking means. They're adding value, not manipulating public policy, no regulatory, capture, etc.

I think what you're trying to say is that they're charging more than you think they should. That's not what rent-seeking means.

These apps are providing value and doing so under a subscription model. If you don't think they provide sufficient value, there are almost always loads of competitors. Additionally, it makes no sense to sell a lot of software under a one-time fee. There are significant ongoing costs for support, maintenance, servers, etc. It makes as much sense as selling one-time fee access to the grocery store.
Now the incentive is to keep the customer happy so they continue to subscribe. This could mean more bug fixes and less dubious features.

Or you just keep the customer hostage using proprietary data formats and/or silos? Of course, this does not apply to every application (eg. Markdown editors), but it is a tried an tested strategy. And before you needed to incentivize paid upgrades, but with a subscription, it's 'keep paying or lose access to your data'.

And what if the company goes under? Previously, you could just keep running the software (heck, some companies are still running old VMS, DOS, and OS/2 software). Now, it's over once the license server that checks that you paid your subscription is down. Of course, some non-subscription software requires activation as well, but a lot of ISVs just use registration codes.
Given the Japanese are some of the finest engineers on the planet and that they've had a peaceful nuclear program for decades it's not a leap to think that somewhere the Japanese have the blue prints for sophisticated nuclear weapons ready to go in the event they needed to build them quickly.
I'm surprised there's so much effort to make faking plates by using black tape harder.

Let's assume somebody successfully does that. After the accident or whatever, they check the plate and it belongs to different kind of car. I would imagine there would be no more than 10 options of plates which could result in this one + black tape. And you find confirmation by checking if the car color and brand matches. It could actually be automated and should be easy even if there would be hundreds of possibilities.
> power with nukes sitting among prosperous nations not having nukes.

Briefly, then the Japanese will finish their crash program and also be a nuclear power.
I really appreciate it when people produce thoughtful looks at project failure like this. If I had Too Much Money, I'd definitely fund an annual prize for the best startup-ish project failure reports. There's no better source for information on advancing the state of the field, but so much is lost when companies just quietly shut down.
I don't agree. PHP was a quick shot to grab market share from Perl and other web development languages used at the time. While Rasmus may have developed it in good faith to bring easy web site programming to the masses, PHP is the single piece of software standing out for countless DDoS attacks making life difficult for web site owners of PHP and non-PHP web sites alike, and driving folks to centralized services such as CloudFlare.

PHP's original use case is dynamic HTML generation from HTML/SGML processing instructions embedded in otherwise static HTML. That's useful, but PHP's lack of HTML-aware template expansion and escaping mechanisms was and is bordering on the criminal IMHO.
Aw shucks.
That's some serious revisionism.

Bill Clinton's administration allowed NK to obtain nuclear weapons while supplying them with food and fuel. Their approach didn't work at all and is how we wound up in this state.

For the record not blaming the administration (Republican administration have done things equally or more stupid so not a partisan taking point, it's just they can't be excused for the dramatic failure on this because someone prefers Democrats). Likely it seemed the best course of action, they expected at least some compliance, but NK did not abide by it's agreements at all.

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron

<edit>
NK also made commitments to Putin to suspend the ICBM program in exchange for aid which they also violated. So again, Clinton is not the only one burnt by them. But saying the Clinton administration's approach was a success is not right. It was very much an unsuccess.
> The US has 6800 nuclear weapons, and it seems that people are getting worried about a country who may not have one single functioning weapon. That's of course if we want to just play this about the numbers.

It's not about a single nuclear weapon, it's about the lasting impact it may have. 9/11 only cost 4000 lives, and look at its impact -- Iraq and Afghanistan wars, terrorism policies. Now think about what'd happen if a war breaks out in the Korea Peninsula. It'd have devastating effect to South Korea, and possibly Japan. It would definitely disrupt the global economy. It may trigger a war with China and Russia.

> NK does not really care about bombing the US, they just want the US to stay out of NK.

NK does care about SK. US cannot unilaterally withdraw the troop. It is obliged to provide military support to Japan and SK

Also, the very presence of the US played no small part in helping both countries to become world economy powers after the devastating WW2 and the Korea war.

If all parties are really interested about reunification, they would agree to something like a roadmap in which the US will gradually reduce its military presence, NK open their market, and an eventual election. The thing is, nobody at the table wants that, not to mention such agreements are historically futile. Think about Vietnam 1954 and 1973 agreements.
That doesn't explain the success of Japan, which has few natural resources.

Nor does it explain the collapse of Ukrainian agriculture under farm collectivization, the resurgence under the NEP, and the collapse again under collectivization.

Nor does it explain the repeated and uniform failure of collective agriculture to feed the population.

It does not explain the very different arcs of the free market northern and slave based southern economies from 1800 to 1865. See Cabot's "The Civil War" for a description.

Nor does it explain the general impoverishment of the South American economy.
And they generally do, in 6 months or so.
CargoMate Technologies | Front-end JavaScript Engineer | London | Onsite, Full-time, £25K-£65K + 0.25-2% Equity, www.cargomate.co.uk

CargoMate Technologies brings innovative efficiency to the container shipping industry.

We’re developing a range of applications and technologies to record, monitor and analyse container ship cargo operations (i.e. the process of moving containers on and off a ship in port), to ensure ships depart early and consume less fuel on voyage. Our long-term goal is to bring the widespread adoption of autonomous technologies to merchant ships.
Voyages by ship are legally classed as ‘adventures’. We see CargoMate as an adventure too; driven by passionate problem solvers who are resilient when faced with a storm. We reach our destination by working as one crew.

We are backed by one of the UK’s most successful tech accelerators, Entrepreneur First.
We care about our craft and it’s important to us that you do as well. We’re looking for someone who’s willing to learn on the job, as well as teach others. You write code that you’re proud of as you know you and your team members will be the ones maintaining and adding new features to it.

You’ll work on a customer facing React.js website as well as an Android only React Native app. You don’t have to know our whole tech stack but it’s important that you’re willing to learn.
You’ll collaborate closely with the CTO as we turn our proof of concept into an MVP ready for production. You’ll build new features, do code reviews, mentor future team members as well as have mentors around you.

We keep up to date with the latest tech but know that bleeding edge usually puts you in an unstable spot. Our projects are written in Javascript, React.js, React Native and all use ES6.
For this role, Javascript skills and culture fit are more important than a formal education. We don’t do whiteboard interviews or ask you how many golf balls fit in a 747. You will get to show that you know what you’re doing by coding on your own machine as part of the interview process.

We see coding as a way of communication, it’s therefore important that you have excellent communication skills as well as fluency in written and spoken English.
Our intention is to enable remote working and flexible working hours as soon as we can. As this is one of our first hires, we need you full-time on-site in our offices in central Richmond upon Thames.

crew@cargomate.co.uk
Interestingly, with Microsoft, it's like a weird mixed bag as if they haven't made up their mind yet. They do kinda want to sell you stuff, but they also want some of your data, but not the same data that Google wants, and they may or may not have a good plan on what to do with that data.
> Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun?

Red Hat (if they could have afforded it) would have been an awesome home for Solaris/Sun.
Sanitization. Remove all things that shouldn't be there. I recall the cleaning of the code - things where developers got a bit... salty - for the Mozilla open source project. Stuff that people really didn't want others to see.

Copyright. That intern who worked at SGI or NetApp who (un)knowingly reused some of a project they had on their laptop at their new place of employment that was actually software owned by their old place of employment. Scrubbing that or getting proper (open source) licensing for that bit, along with all the legal headaches that entails. Remember that we're talking about code that has been around since effectively 1982 with Sun UNIX 0.7 (or SunOS 4 as Solaris 1.x in 1991).

Licensed from other. I recall that various parts of non-Sun operating systems had licensing for parts of NFS. It wouldn't be surprising to find that parts of Solaris had licensing from other companies too. Including code directly licensed likely wouldn't be compatible with the license from the other company. Removing the licensed code to make it linkable is an option, but a time consuming one that diminishes the value of the overall project ("what do you mean I need a license from HP for something that DEC wrote?")

Your patents. Some open source projects have patent clauses with them. Sure, you can do the stuff to license those patents under the terms of the open source license... or chose one that doesn't have them. The former isn't at all in the interest of Oracle; the later is "Here's some BSD code... we don't know what patents are in there, but if you use them we will sue you."

Other patents (part 1). Surprise! In open sourcing the software, it is discovered that some intern reused the methods learned at another company in part of the product that has made its way to today. Now you've got the lawyers looking for blood for a decade of royalties.

Other patents (part 2) Recognizing that NetApp didn't want ZFS to be open source and there were some cross licensing aspects with Oracle with the ZFS settlement... they'd probably have something to say about it. There's probably some WAFL patents in it now.

Competitors. There are things in Solaris that would help competitors to Oracle products. Yes, open sourcing with a copy left license would mean that those competitors would be more challenged to use the software, but its out there.

Parteners. There are things in Solaris that help partners. Open sourcing Solaris, while providing good will to the community reduces the leveraging power with the partners for good deals. Some of those partners may also be interested in parts of Solaris not being open source.

So... nope. There are lots of legal issues and many business reasons to keep it closed source.

Consider also that this is development from March 2010 (first release under Oracle closed source - prior to that it was CDDL) until October 2015 (the last release) and the amount of value that has been added compared to the amount of effort for the above.
So Chicken Scheme uses a transpiler and not a compiler? What about Nim?

I don't think that's s sufficient definition when these fully capable languages call their tools that output C code "compilers."

Honestly, the article's definition with levels of abstraction seems reasonable. The languages I mentioned are high-level and C operates at a lower level of abstraction, therefore they use compilers.
Looks like they stopped keeping the repo updated with the blog posts: https://developer.ibm.com/clouddataservices/2016/12/06/7-dat...
Why can't you just share screen and use an already familiar editor instead of this gimmick?
All you've said is true, but ignores the fact that many of these companies have large ongoing expenses to keep the old versions valuable. Servers, support, dev time for those bug fixes, etc.
When this came up in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922419 it was in the context that cars and other items being bought now have expected lifetimes beyond 2038.
The followup article has much more useful detail: https://www.theengineroom.org/panic-button-lessons-learned/
The article fails to mention Amazon, which does still have plenty of non-outsourced blue collar jobs. I doubt there is a lot of the kind of upward mobility at amazon for them that there was for the Kodak janitor in the 80s, though.
I thought about this a while ago, it would be nice if you could have all code stored as the AST and the formatting handled on ingestion/export.

It would finally settle the formatting arguments and all the tooling would be able to leverage each others projects.

Even PHP has an internal AST representation these days.
Hello from WV. (Northern panhandle here) Most of my family were steel mill folks but before the mills took off they were miners. Coal and mining (in general) are hell on the body.
Do you know where I could find that kind of data?
I saw this article mentions John Sonmez (Simple Programmer). While I liked his book "Soft Skills", some of the videos are just so far beyond what you would expect from a "programming" channel that I just had to unsubscribe.

Examples (actual video titles, believe it or not):

[1] "Prostitutes: Healthy, or a crutch?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcA4_jiRr74

[2] "I wear these shirts to show off my muscles"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9c5bOuHUtY

[3] "Porn, masturbation and dating apps"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5SMBPCxltY

There's some good content, sure, but these types of videos make it hard for me to take him seriously.
whoops, hahaha, meant "Cradle to Cradle" here.
I hope systemd doesn't taint us all for more intelligent init systems. RC scripts do have their drawbacks.

If I were choosing a "most interesting alternative to systemd and classic init" award, it'd go to GNU Shepherd which is the init system of GUIX as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guix_System_Distribution

All the talk about BSD and launchd has me thinking Shepherd might be on to something. Launchd is XMLed up from here to Sunday, whereas Shepherd can have all the benefits of Scheme's S-EXPRs being tree structures while also having a great scripting language (Scheme) at your disposal.
Thanks! I've never heard of them, will get in touch!
I presume it's more of a western thing.
Because users are the product you sell.
Yeah, before that quite a few Koreans migrated from the South to the North, as the north was doing better initially.
You shouldn't freak out over being "behind" in life. But you shouldn't be complacent either. If you start acting on it today, in 6 months you no longer be behind. So don't beat yourself up over where you are today. But do step up and move forward.

This will matter much more later in life, when the reasons for being behind aren't laziness, but other life events. Accidents, injuries, getting derailed if you have children and go without sleep for what feels like 5 years. The normal trials and tribulations of life that everyone goes through. And then when they are over, having to get back on track. Getting in the habit of just stepping up, dusting yourself off, and getting going again is a good habit to make as soon as possible.
Does that mean that a "compiler" which outputs the WebAssembly text format, relying on other tools to convert that to the WASM binary format, is a transpiler?
Because I live in a country that was under Communism for almost 90 years and actually experienced how bad it is first-hand.
Yes, especially people as a collective rather than individuals.
You might watch his technical assessment of threats. There was enough there I paused for a few moments, even if he is mostly selling books and trying to keep a commission seat.

I tend to agree there isn't an excuse not to harden some of our infrastructure against this type of attack.
>Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

That is the outsourced companies causing inequality. They are the ones paying people terribly, not the company contracting with the outsourcing companies.

This article wants to blame major companies for inequality while conveniently ignoring the existence of the outsourcing companies which are the ones setting the pay for these employees. Stop doing that, raise the minimum wage and benefits that outsourcing companies must pay their employees/contractors, and fix the bloody problem at its source.
Just in case, previous NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/asia/beijing-bike-s...

On other news, this summer, August, Mobike started being deployed in Florence and Milan, Italy:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-07/26/content_302...

it is too early/too few bikes are in service yet, next test will be London:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/indyventure/mobik...

but I bet we'll soon see if Europeans will be more polite than the Chinese ...

Manchester, UK, seems like having the same issues:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/manche...

In any case the Chinese problems must be large enough to have the Government intervene:

https://phys.org/news/2017-08-china-issues-bike-sharing-guid...
People have mentioned a few here, but I'd say that Haskell's current ecosystem is much more directed towards building infrastructure than user-facing apps. Indeed, most popular Haskell programs are command-line utilities rather than "applications" in the modern sense. Most companies that use Haskell also use it to make robust infrastructure rather than, say, user-facing apps or webpages.

I think it's hard to find many modern applications (I.e. some software package with a UI) made in anything outside of a few choice languages like JS, C++, C#, or Swift.
Added! I'm interested in great introductory JavaScript tutorials. I'm sure you're aware that there's a big demand for that since JS is eating the world...
"Regret is just a horrible attempt at time travel that ends with you feeling like crap."

What a great analogy!
Absolutely correct. Thanks for writing - I'm ready to travel back there for real weather.
As you said, your friend will probably win. That means the contract already predicts the situation.

That's the point somebody was making about avoiding assholes. There is nothing you can do to avoid that risk. He will sue anyway. Your best hope is avoiding them. And each extra bit of protection you add into your contract will make you look slightly more similar to an asshole, so you'd better keep it to the probable risks.
I think in both cases, it's just the market. There is a demand for engineers which is more than for janitors, and with more limited supply. Everything else is just moving money from one pocket into another, it doesn't have economic significance.
Subscriptions have always been coupled with price increases, so when people object to them, it's hard to know whether it's the price increase they're objecting to. Would you object to a subscription of 49 cents a year, for example, instead of a few dollars one-time?

I conducted a Twitter poll, where I asked people to choose between a $2 upfront payment, and a dollar a year, assuming that in both cases, they lose interest in the app and uninstall it after two years. I mentioned that with a subscription, any new features added will be available at no additional charge, but with the upfront payment, it will be an in-app purchase. Four people responded, and all four chose the subscription.

BTW, to people insisting on an upfront payment, would you be okay if:

1) A new feature got added to the app the day after you bought it, and you're asked to pay again to use that feature? After all, you didn't pay for that feature.

2) A new version of the app got released the day after you bought it, and it's listed as a separate app, requiring a second purchase? After all, you didn't pay for those features.

3) The app you bought has a particular feature, like a low-light mode in a camera app. The developer improves the feature, but brands it as a separate feature in order to charge you again, like calling it LowLight+. (This is different from (2) because in that scenario, the camera app didn't have any low light mode when you bought it.)

4) An OS update makes the app crash, or annoying to use, and the fix is listed as a separate app, requiring a separate payment. After all, you didn't pay for it.

5) After you buy the app, the developer abandons it and chooses to invest time in creating a new app since that will bring in more money. Would you be okay with it?

Upfront payment seems fine instinctually, but when you get into the details, there are many problems.
This is very interesting, and not something that many have given much thought to (including me). It suggests that Capitalism is a more effective path to freedom than Democracy, over the long term. Perhaps this bodes well for China.
XKCD related to the topic: https://www.xkcd.com/1860/
"It's just the market" is such a lazy reply. Did entrepreneurs not like making money back then? Or did they realize that a healthy society was just as important as healthy companies?
Agreed. I think IBM would have fixed the licensing issues that kept ZFS off Linux and would have kept Solaris Open Source, perhaps with a better license. It's tragic that Sun went to Oracle and not IBM.
Eh.. that's like saying "Can't blame me for cruelty to animals, the people I buy the meat from treat the animals cruelly; not me."
Case a: you're expecting to do ongoing business, do well, and both benefit. wrangling contract is not good for you, beyond a basic level. Make sure you're on the same page, and hooray.

Case b: This is a one-time deal, they have no reason to care. be more careful.

I am in no way an expert, but looking at the incentives the other side of the negotiating table is surely more important (and way cheaper and quicker) than lawyering up a contract?
Know yourself by Hair shades
In a case where it just crashes, that's probably a reasonable tradeoff.

What really bothers me though, is that you might actually store incorrect data somewhere. That could have hugely negative implications for the business.
Sure, but then in your example, you're using PHP just to transpose data. Why?
There is way less bandwidth involved since the amount of data transferred for a shared coding exercise does not surpass the data (pixels) involved in screen sharing.

Helps with remote interviews/candidates with slow connections.