skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true and not limited to paid apps either. Twitter spent over $700 million on research and development in 2016. They made a loss of over $450 million.

To be fair, their R&D doesn't exclusively pay for an improved 140 character text box. It also goes towards staying attractive for advertisers and trying new ideas.

But still, the gap between the rather modest progress that Twitter is making on any front and their enormous costs (not just on R&D) is striking.
I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring.

Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in derivatives and other instruments to make profit. Whenever possible, risk outside core competencies is outsourced. This is good for the company as then it can focus on the core business and make money.

Off-shoring is bad in the sense that jobs are lost in the local economy. But, this is again similar to having a factory in China as opposed to San Francisco. It brings in more expertise at a reduced cost. Off-shoring helps make things cheaper in the end. For example, as your insurance company uses off-shore consultants to make their software, it is cheaper directly translating to lower insurance premiums. the same for many other products.

While I understand that software is a different beast to build unlike toys or other products. Once built, the normal theories of economics still apply.
I remember the animals from my children's book just as well as the humans
> WW1: they've joined to make money, then imposed HUGE debts on who lost it

> WW2: they've caused it, they've fucked with Europe with the debt from WW2 so much, then outright lied to find a reason to fight.

What a simplistic worldview and lack of knowledge. What an embarrassment. And I'm someone who thinks every president since Kennedy should have been tried for war crime and (presumably) hanged[1]. Please educate yourself on these subjects before spouting any more nonsense.

[1] Just kidding America. You don't hang a president, that would be most inappropriate. You execute them by firing squad.
Hey, you're welcome on my lawn any time.

Some years ago I went on an editing binge on Wikipedia, finding a bunch of templates that "misused" the phrase "due to" and changed them to "because of". As we all know, you must get this right:

"The flight delay was due to bad weather."

vs.

"The flight was delayed because of bad weather."

but never:

"The flight was delayed due to bad weather."

The next day, someone reverted all my changes and asked, "Mike, have you looked at a dictionary lately?"

Oops.

In that moment I was enlightened: I realized I could care less.

I even leave out the Oxford comma as often as I use it. In fact I leave out a lot of commas I used to put in.

But there is one case where the Oxford comma is still necessary. If you leave it out of this joke it ruins it:

"There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache expiration, and off by one errors."
>"To sum up, we have the following take-aways. Science, as a part of culture, is in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential roots." (Elbakyan, ibid, translated)

From the transcription, https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript-an....

The video is awful, long preamble, translators that talk to and over each other; the transcript is much better here.
+10 for telegram
Could someone explain what Sci-Hub has to do with the common ownership of the means of production? The presentation didn't even attempt to explain this from what I gathered.

To me, Sci-Hub sounds a lot more like anarchism than anything (property is theft and so on..)
what matters is why Iraq was invaded.

Not in this thread, perhaps.
Facebook owns whatsapp and can change the encryption keys at will without the conversation owners knowing.
I really wonder how common this trivial faking of license plates is. The UK have printed plates that can be easily faked and seem to be doing well.

The FE font is still hidious even years after it was introduced.
Ok, how many more? Communism is estimated to have killed about 100 million people in the 20th century. How many deaths do you attribute to "capitalism"?
Sun did that a few years back, Oracle only has to reevaluate what was added since they acquired Sun ...
PHP CI with Jenkins and Docker
I read my contracts. I make a risk assessment. I weigh it against likelihood.

I rarely question clients contracts unless they fuck with the payment terms, or unless they impose unreasonable work guarantees. Almost nothing else matters in a contract.

If the contract is unreasonable I don't hestitate to say "this bit isn't practical". If they don't agree to adjust to fair and reasonable terms I drop the client/contract.

I really hate working for companies who impose exploitative terms because they hold the more powerful position in the relationship. I'd rather tell em to go elsewhere.
It took nature four billion years to invent humans, who are actually - if we're honest - pretty terrible as an example of workable AGI.

In fact what nature invented was a persistent colony organism with external memory.

Wild solo humans are only a little smarter than wolves individually, but being able to share and externalise invention and learning created a massive advantage.

Humans are successful because although only a tiny minority of individuals are any good at invention, the fact that information persists and is shared means the entire population benefits.

The problem for AI is modelling the learning and invention process. Classifiers and recognisers are getting better, but they're not really learning in the human sense, which is a combination of abstraction, mimicry, and occasional invention.

IMO there's no chance of AGI developing until there's a persistent, transferable, abstracted model generated as an output from classifier systems and other learning machines which is a symbolic - not just a statistical - summary of the learning.
I'd attribute those to mistakes in central planning (attempting to industrialize agrarian societies without securing the food supply) and to the usual death toll of authoritarian regimes (rounding up dissidents etc.).

Is it possible to work towards Communism without falling into those two traps? I have no idea. But if someone can give good reasons why their proposal would be different, I'm willing to hear them out.
The most important thing is not mentioned by the author or by the deep maths thinking he critiques. It is understanding when and how to apply a model, how to evaluate your results for robustness, how to interpret what it's saying. These things can be taught/learned by solving problems along with a master, even if that master is represented by a really good book, without a deep understanding of the math.

In short, to _apply_ machine learning tools, you need a good understanding of _applied_ machine learning, which is not a small subject area, but is very approachable for most.
> is way too big to discuss here.

Can you point to an article or blog post pointing out the bad decisions?

> If anything there is A LOT of aggression any time somebody says anything 'unwelcome' about systemd.

The downvotes came when you stated your age, "believe I know what I am talking about" instead of listing arguments and calling the parent poster 'kid'.
It's when they are trying to get rid of you (of your salary).
The issue is not Elsevir making too much money but that the current science publishing regime imposes a too high tax in terms of money, organizational overhead and excluding too many from quality information for decisions, education and furtherance of true progress. These externalities to Elesvier and similar are a huge burden on the society.

The science publishing business is not in that position due to skill, value add or investment but due to laws that grant monopolies on content for an extended period of time. Copyright on scientific discourse is not an underpinning of modern civilization. It is thus a valid consideration to change these artificial protections of their business.
Eric schlossers Command and Control provide accounts of many 'close calls' in the US nuclear program

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
From TFA: "...neural networks – a form of artificial intelligence..."

Have computer scientists switched to marketing or am I missing something?
I see it now, thanks for the correction.
I'm not aware of any advocation of death in communist literature. Can you provide some citations?
> To me, Sci-Hub sounds a lot more like anarchism than anything

The more I see people pushing the idea of communism lately, the bigger overlap with anarchism I see. Even explicitly mentioned. Maybe people are ok with that.
For me, the determining factor is whether it costs the vendor something to provide the service. Running a server? Fair. An app that runs on my hardware? Not fair. Updates? Requires development effort, so totally fair. etc.
It really grinds my gears when an honest question is downvoted here in HN of all places.
Communism is an anarchist ideology, and though some forms of anarchism stand opposed to it (such as Stirner's egoist anarchism) they are all in some sense against property; Communism isn't only the common ownership of MoP, rather, the Communists contend that this follows naturally from the abolition of private property, not such that everything becomes everyone's property, but that it becomes the property of nobody. Marx once said (I paraphrase) that the theory of Communism can be summed up in one sentence: the abolition of private property. Engels also said that just as the slave frees himself by abolishing the human aspect of private property, so does the proletarian by abolishing private property in general.
It's really not[1]. The most important thing is to know who's sitting on the other side of the table. As a lawyer I've been asked to negotiate dozens of these contracts. And been sued on exactly one.

The irony? The one sued on was one the tightest and my client was 100% in the right. But the other guy was an asshole and we hoped the airtight contract would protect us.

We settled and paid him a non-trivial sum.

Have seen it repeatedly in situations short of lawsuits where the two sides are of markedly different sizes. The smaller party can negotiate whatever they want and then the big party will still proceed to do what they want and as long as there is still more business going on (sue them and lose the rest of the work).

[1] Of course there are exceptions: the most important of them is stipulations that will actually cost you money. That is, the business terms. Then there are terms that can cost you reputation and non-compete clauses that make you lose other work. There are terms you want to watch out for, but my experience discussed above is that it's not the contract that gets you sued, it's the asshole on the other side that you decided to do business with.
Oracle is filled up with developers' tears, it's goal is to never dry out, they won't do it.
A communist government is intended to be a dictatorship. In that sense, no different from a fascist government. Dictatorship of the proletariat is a myth of course simply because of human nature. It never happens. It cannot be otherwise. And someone will run the show - invariably an alpha male like Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, Castro, the list is long. http://www.conservapedia.com/List_of_dictators.
Surviving the Titanic: Data Visualization with Tableau
A major issue with this is that incomes are different in different places.

Maybe to someone in Silicon Valley spending a hundred to two hundred bucks a month on a bunch of apps is reasonable, but to a student that has less than 50 bucks left after rent and groceries (and might need to buy new clothes sometimes, too), this is ridiculous.

It’s a similar issue with the completely ridiculously priced smartphones. Android often loves breaking their APIs, so you need to test the new releases on a physical phone before they’re public. Google now dropped the Nexus phones, so that means you need a Google Pixel. The cheapest Google Pixel is 900$ in Germany. How the hell am I supposed to pay for that? Or is App Development now supposed to only be a thing for big businesses?
Words mean whatever the people want them to mean.
Just pick whatever word you want. That's how language evolves.
Likely to reduce overall efficiency.
Telegram server is not open source right?
Why you assume such technology would be on display or general public knowledge?

I'm sure there is tons of technology we regular civilians have no idea of, and its actually a good strategy.
Yes, this is a constant sourse of amazement for me too! The chrome team at google is well over 1000 people. (The opensource code base now has over 800 committers). The initial release had 100 committers[1], so probably about as many man hours have gone into google chrome in the last year than were put into the project in its first ~5 years of existence or something. In the last year just shy of 1.5 million non-blank lines of code[2] have been added to the browser, which is more code than was in the whole browser when it was first launched, webkit included.

But what does all that new code do?? I'd challenge anyone who's not a developer to name a single new feature added to chrome in the last year. I'm a web developer and I struggle to name more than 5 changes.

Its easy to pick on chrome because the numbers are mostly-public. But the same is probably true of facebook.com, ms office and all sorts of other big company products. As features compound, the marginal value of each additional line of code added becomes vanishingly small. (All the really useful features have already been added, and project iteration gets much slower in big projects).

There are thousands of engineers working on facebook.com. If they all quietly left and were never replaced, how long do you think it would take before anyone in the public would notice? 6 months? 1 year? Longer?

And if thats the case, what a waste of that huge pool of talent. If you could leave your job without any of your users noticing or caring, what a waste of your education and your potential. Quit and start that company you've always been dreaming about starting. Go do literally anything of substance.

[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/contributors/summary
[2] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...
Seems like a great idea.

I'd love to have been educated re: the importance of history, and the following topics: the lead-up to WW2, Communist Russia, the formation of Israel, the formation of the EU, NATO, and UN, the world banking system, the last 100 years of Middle-Eastern conflict and perhaps the American Civil War. I now consider these some of the most relevant historical events to the current Dutch political situation and also to most other Western countries, but I never learnt about them in high school (which is from 12-18 here, I did the variant that prepars you for university).

What we need to achieve that is a realization in the counter-culture that education is important and that what people considered counter-culture in the 70's, 80's and 90's has been coopted by now, or perhaps has been "controlled opposition" from the start. Conservatism and protecting the people of your country from international realpolitik is the real counter-culture now. I think Switzerland and Poland got a lot of this right.
> Israel hasn't annexed any land since 1967.

Except for the settlements, which are annexations in all but name.
At the expense of citizens.

I disagree. An economy is not a zero sum game and adding people to it, especially people ready, able and willing to start working now is a benefit. Compare with children of indigents, who take up to twenty years to start being a benefit to other citizens. Twenty years! If the problem is people being drains on society without contributing, there's the place to start looking.

So illegal immigrants, criminals if you will, would do worse.

I understand the evidence indicates that's not the case.

Would you at least agree that not every illegal immigrant has a desire to become a contributing part of the county they are entering?

I would, yes. I can only go on the general trends; the general trend is that immigrants are willing to take risks and work hard to make better lives for themselves, wanting the opportunity to live and work within the civil society they're moving to, and illegal immigrants are too. All we have is general trends; there will always be individuals who buck those trends.

As an aside, to me you seem very fixated on the idea of "crime" being a bad thing. Perhaps this is a difference we have. For you, me accepting this crime is slippery slope; crime is crime, accept one, you'll accept the next. For me, there's no slippery slope; just because something is crime doesn't actually mean it's bad or damaging, and if a person's crime is wanting to work hard and contribute to society, building a better life for themselves, that crime is less likely to lead to crimes that cause actual damage.
The US caused WW2? I'm genuinely intrigued to know what reading of history can justify that statement.
"When you continually interrupt me during meetings, I don’t get a chance to voice my opinion, and I feel marginalized."

This sounds like such an unnatural and weird thing to say. How about next time someone interrupts you, you say "Excuse me, let me finish"? What's the problem with this approach?
Ha, it's like capitalism come to the home: means of production (of clean dishes) being removed from the common man to afford greater profits to the capitalists; seize back the means of production (the dishwasher)!

Vive la Revolution!
There is an ideology called anarcho-capitalism and it is definitely not against property. If there is any debate over whether anarcho-capitalism is a form of anarchism—it holds that there should be no State, and I think that means it qualifies.
That's an interesting point, but I doubt it's much worse than it is today if at all. Poor poeple can be in trouble when their car or washing machine gives up the ghost.

So they buy a new one on credit. The monthly instalments are quite similar to a subscription model. I'm not sure which one is more expensive.
If you're interested in 64-bit time you may want to checkout this OpenBSD presentation.

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon_2013_time_t/index....
... and a new energy source, the combustion engine.
I really like 1Password's old model for a user point of view; they asked money for every new major version of 1Password, but old version bug fixes were free. This way, if you needed the new features or newer OS support, you could pay for the new major version (same as buying a new suit) or you could use the old version if it was fine for you. This model is fair, but still generates more income for the developers from loyal users who upgrade.
I should have been more specific (will edit in a sec), the question was aimed at the benefit for the decision makers. NK leadership is going down if they launch a nuclear strike, independent of how the counterstrike is done (so their show of strength etc. is of limited importance). But SK/US leadership has to consider nuclear retaliation if they attack NK, in which case it becomes a bad decision in the eyes of their voters, even if they ultimately remove NK leadership.

[edit] tl;dr: Having the weapons is an advantage for NK's leaders. Using them is their end.
True, but you lose the instant recognition of differences (which come to think of it might be a good thing).
No they would realize that, but they would also realize that you actually have to be able to enforce that legal claim. Neither China, nor any other entity in the world can enforce it.
How much time and $ would it cost to register your tokens as a security? Would it be possible without any financial history? I remember Lending Club was able to have them registered and offer securities with their peer to peer loans to unaccredited investors.
If profit motive (aka greed) wasn't the primary driver of Western Capitalism ...
What was cool about Solaris for old-timers? In particular, are there things that compare well against modern BSDs?

My vague memories of it are that the userland showed signs of legacy (/usr/ucb), and I could never get the tools I needed installed. But that was a consequence of the setting I was working in, not Solaris.

It would be particularly interesting to hear from fans of STREAMS or other kernel features.
Exactly this. I have seen hundreds of systems built by experienced gray beard Unix admins, which have been steady as rocks, some lasting 15+ years without ever a peep of trouble. however I have seen many "new" boxes built by "devops", which can't survive a single upgrade cycle. If left alone for more than a few weeks, usually eat themselves and cause an outage.
On one hand, am a little thankful of the devops box, it will be crashed long before it gets compromised due to neglect.
Having worked for and worked with the major licensed software vendors (Oracle, SAP, MS, etc), I echo that Oracle is by far the worst of the bunch.
They both reduce institutional knowlage. This tends to be extremely detrimental in the long term.

Outsourcing software is like burning all the design documentation for hardware your having someone else build. Even something as well known as injection molding tends to work vastly better if you have experienced staff as part of the design process. And software is worse than that because the design process is part of development, so outsourcing means you don't even understand the problem space.
I was hoping this would include an efficient H 265 decoder written in Haskell. That would have been neat.
You are of course correct.

I usually forget to include anarcho-capitalism for the simple reason that it does not exist in my consciousness as an anarchist idea as you note. Sometimes to avoid the ambiguity, I use "social anarchism" to refer to those espoused by the original anarchists and most organised anarchists today.

The reason why anarcho-capitalism is not regarded as anarchistic is because of its nature as being what the Socialists regard as hierarchical and its institutions as non-voluntary by espousing a hierarchy seen in the class distinction, that is, one class owns the property, the other does not. This, to them, is a power relationship, and one which cannot be justified. The social anarchists are against unjutsified authority, not authority in general. Parapharasing Bakunin, in the matter of shoes I defer to the authority of the bootmaker, not because he is more powerful, but because it's my choice.

To me it is clear that the mere abolition of the state is insufficient for human liberation, we must also stop the material conditions which manifest the state from coming into existence, that is, ownership of property, from which the state can derive its power most easily through the collection of tax or rent.
> Yeah, I don't know if there's ever going to be a portable way to enforceably "disallow" the sharing of state between threads in C++.

Not sharing state at all means that you cannot even do message passing other than through sockets or something like this. At some point you have to share at least a message queue to be able to go from thread A to thread B.
On land they de facto already control since 1967, they also haven't expanded settlements outside of Area C (they demolish "illegal" settlements in Area B all the time), which according to the Oslo accords is under Israeli control.
Do you really know how to program or you just copy-paste stuff?
Mobile App Wall of Shame: SMS Touch